The Concept of the Social in Uniting the Humanities and Social Sciences

Michael E. Brown is Professor in the Department of Sociology and Anthropology at Northeastern University and former Professor of Sociology at Queens College and the Graduate School of the City University of New York. He is author of The Historiography of Communism, Collective Behavior (with Amy Goldman) and The Production of Society as well as New Studies in the Politics and Culture of U.S. Communism, which he co-edited with Randy Martin, Frank Rosengarten and George Snedeker.

Introduction: What Is Human about Human Affairs?    I SocialIty: The Problem of Definition    1 The Urgency of Defining the Social  2 Society as a Basic Fact  3 Dependence and Autonomy  4 The Certainty of the Social as the Basic Fact  5 The Sociality of Agency  6 Models, Theory, and Theorizing  7 Theorizing  8 Historicism and Its Alternative  9 Social Facts, Situations, and Moral Stakes   II Social Action    10 Can “the Social” Be a Proper Object of Theory?  11 Further Problems in Theorizing the Social  12 Social Action as Action  13 The Self of the Actor  14 Self and Situation  15 Self and Agency  16 Social Action Reconsidered   III Subjects and Situations    17 Overview  18 Causes of Failure in the Social Sciences  19 Objects and Their Subjects  20 The Positive Sense of “Situation”  21 Practices, Situations, and Inter-subjectivity  22 Criticism, Inter-subjectivity, and Collective Enunciation  23 Criticism and Human Affairs  24 Collective Enunciation  25 Subjectivity and Objectivity  26 Summary, Reprise, and Transition   Acknowledgments Notes References Index