CLASSICAL 

SOCIAL THEORY

SOCIOLOGY 7715

Fall 2024

Units: 3.0

Mondays | 3:00pm to 5:30pm

Location: McGuinn Hall 415

JOSH SEIM

Boston College 

This is a graduate-level course on "classical social theory." Learning the arguments made by some of sociology's most popular theorists is an important goal, and it’s one that we’ll seriously pursue. However, we’ll also read works historically excluded from courses like this in an effort to question and broaden our understandings of “theory,” “theorist,” “the canon,” and more. I ultimately hope that you end this course with increased confidence in your ability to consume, critique, and craft social theory.

We will focus on six theorists: Karl Marx (with Friedrich Engels), Émile Durkheim, Max Weber, W.E.B. Du Bois, Simone de Beauvoir, and Anna Julia Cooper. We’ll put these theorists in conversation with one another, and this will give us a chance to lay the groundwork for discussing some enduring topics in sociology: capitalism, white supremacy, patriarchy, culture, state, and more.[1] 

Professors who teach theory classes like this one are forever vulnerable to an easy student critique that we might call the “omitted theorist bias.” It tends to go something like this: “How can we seriously learn theory without reading (insert any popular theorist)?” There are certainly some big names missing from this syllabus (e.g., Georg Simmel, Ida B. Wells, and Charlotte Perkins Gilman). This seems to be an unsolvable problem since we can’t read everything, and we want to sufficiently engage the texts we do read. Nevertheless, we’ll attempt to alleviate this issue with “excluded theorist” projects. You’ll be tasked with reading and writing about an unassigned theorist of your choice.

This course adopts a “cartographical approach” to teaching and learning social theory.[2] We’ll rely heavily on “theory maps,” which are visuospatial representations of dense written works. In simpler terms, you will use, critique, and make diagrams. Theory maps won’t replace the important tasks of reading, writing, or discussion, but they are essential tools in this class.

[1] I didn’t reinvent the wheel. This syllabus is inspired by a two-semester “History of Social Theory” course taught by Michael Burawoy at the University of California, Berkeley. The particular version I assisted in 2013-2014 included many of the same readings by Marx and Engels, Durkheim, Weber, and Beauvoir. However, Burawoy also included readings by Adam Smith and Vladimir Lenin, and he did not include works by Du Bois or Cooper. 

[2] Estefan, Michel and Josh Seim (equal authors). 2022. “Teaching Social Theory as Cartography: Toward a Pedagogy of Radical Accessibility.” Teaching Sociology (online first).