Americans Thinking America

Charles Lemert is University Professor and John C. Andrus Professor of Social Theory Emeritus at Wesleyan University, USA. He has written extensively on social theory, globalization, and culture. He is author of Globalization: An Introduction to the End of the Known World (Routledge, 2015), Why Niebuhr Matters (Yale University Press, 2011), Structural Lie: Small Clues to Global Things (Routledge, 2008), Thinking the Unthinkable: The Riddles of Classical Social Theories (Routledge, 2007), Postmodernism is Not What You Think: Why Globalization Threatens Modernity (Routledge, 2005) and Muhammad Ali: Trickster in the Culture of Irony (Polity Press, 2003).He is also co-author of Introduction to Contemporary Social Theory (Second Edition, Routledge, 2022) and Capitalism and Its Uncertain Future (Routledge, 2021), editor of Social Theory: The Multicultural, Global, and Classic Readings (Seventh Edition, Routledge, 2021) and co-editor of Globalization: A Reader (Routledge, 2010).

Part I: Americans Thinking America 1. What is Theory? How Can There Be a Theory of America? 2. Elements of American Social Theory? Part II: American Social and Natural Spaces, 1727-1861 3. First Fires of America’s Revolutionary Culture: Benjamin Franklin, Jonathan Edwards, Thomas Paine 4. America’s Revolutionary Culture Burns Bright: George Washington and Thomas Jefferson 5. Nation-State in the Making: James Madison and Alexander Hamilton 6. America Faces Its Fate: Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry Thoreau, Margaret Fuller Part III: Civil War and American Pragmatism, 1861-1917 and After 7. A Suffering Republic and its Culture: John Brown and Harriet Tubman 8. Balm for the Nation’s Wounds: Walt Whitman and Frederick Douglass 9. Abraham Lincoln’s Implicit Practical Social Theory and A New America 10. Suffering as the Seed of Pragmatism: Abraham Lincoln and Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr. 11. Pragmatism, The Hard Realities of Change: William James, Charles Saunders Pierce, John Dewey, George Herbert Mead, Richard Rorty, Cornel West Part IV: American Culture Tries to Explain its Disorder, 1919-1968 12. The Function of American Culture: Henry Adams, Talcott Parsons, Robert Merton 13. Interpreting Cultures: Robert Bellah, Clifford Geertz, George Marcus and Michael Fischer, Alvin W. Gouldner, Jeffrey Alexander 14. Excluded Cultures: W.E.B Du Bois, Zora Neale Hurston, Paula Gunn Allen, James Baldwin, Medgar Evers, Malcolm X, Martin Luther King Jr. 15. The Fungible Interaction Order: David Riesman, Erik Erikson, Edwin Lemert, Erving Goffman, Harold Garfinkel 16. Ethnographies and American Social Theory: Robert Park, W.E.B Du Bois, W. I. Thomas and Florian Znaniecki, Elliott Liebow, Carol Stack, William Julius Wilson 17. The New Ethnographers of Urban Disorder: AbdouMaliq Simone, Elijah Anderson, Waverly Duck, Victor Rios, Matthew Desmond, Nikki Jones, Alice Goffman 18. Power, Domination, and the World Revolution of 1968: Herbert Marcuse, Kwame Ture, Bob Moses, Fannie Lou Hammer, Ella Baker, Angela Davis Part V: Reprise Social Theories in America and the Six Elements Part VI: Identities and Differences in an Unsettled America, 1968 and Beyond 19. The Feminist Standpoint as Critical Theory: Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Dorothy Smith, Nancy Hartsock, Sandra Harding, bell hooks 20. Fractured Identities and Queer Analytics: Anna Julia Cooper, Patricia Hill Collins, Donna Haraway, Kimberlé Crenshaw Williams, Gloria Anzaldúa, Judith Butler 21. States, Social Movements, and Revolutions: The Roosevelts, Reinhold Niebuhr, Charles Tilly, Theda Skocpol, James Scott 22. Rethinking the World in the Unsettled 60s: W.W. Rostow, Daniel Bell, C. Wright Mills, Students for a Democratic Society 23. Global Structures and Exclusions: Immanuel Wallerstein, Saskia Sassen, David Harvey, Nancy Fraser Part VII: American Futures, 1542 and 1619 to When? 24. The TimeSpace of Traveling Theory: Edward Said, Sam Han, Trịnh Thị Minh Hà, Cabeza de Vaca, Black Elk, Phillis Wheatley, Gyatri Chakravorty Spivak, Howard Zinn, E.O. Wilson