Conceptual Structure And Social Change
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Conceptual Structure and Social Change
Author: Sara Schatz
language: en
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA
Release Date: 2002-09-30
Sociopolitical changes are often associated with ideological shifts at the individual and mass level. The study of how sociopolitical and ideological change interrelate has been the subject of debate for decades. Here, however, the authors develop and defend a new theory that treats ideologies as complex cognitive systems that are internally articulated around prioritized principles and values. Focusing on the transition to democracy in Latin America, the book examines the changes in mass beliefs that accompany democratization in an effort to offer a more sophisticated theory of the relationship between belief, ideology, and action in social change. Ultimately, the authors argue for a cognitive-based model that can account for how social actors come to define democracy in current contexts. Taking democratization as a case study, ^IConceptual Structure and Social Change^R focuses on third-wave transitions to democracy of the 1990s because they are evidence of very complex ideological changes and alignments. Using comparative survey data as a tool to track ideological shifts, several ideological uniformities are identified, such as the rise of a unified opposition, the paradoxical support of the masses to the authoritarian party in power, and the ideological shifts and strategies used by ruling and opposition elites to gain mass support. Viewing these changes as the mechanics of ideological systems in flux paves the way for a general theory of ideological change.
Ethical Theory and Social Change
John Dewey was unique among American philosophers in his insistence that the events, the social structure, the beliefs and attitudes of a period, its models of science and human history, all have some constitutive role in its philosophical theory. This belief is amply demonstrated in Dewey's own writings. Dewey and James H. Tufts' Ethics was first published in 1908 with a revised edition appearing in 1932. Dewey's part in the latter was wholly rewritten, and in effect constituted a new work, showing that Dewey did not believe ethical beliefs were eternal and unchanging. In Ethical Theory and Social Change, Abraham Edel provides a comparative analysis of the two editions to show how Dewey conceived ethics as part of an ongoing culture, not intelligible if isolated.The years between the two editions of Dewey and Tufts' Ethics were momentous in America and across the world. In 1908 industrialism was in high gear, putting greater pressure on social institutions and raising expectations of technological progress and extended democratic growth. By 1932, the devastation of World War I, economic depression, and the rise of totalitarianisms of the left and right had shattered that earlier optimism. The shift toward secular philosophy and new perspectives in research and method in the social sciences was challenging established universalizing views of morality with perceptions of fundamental moral conflict and the threat of relativism in their resolution.Dewey, is an ideal case for comparing changes in ethical theory over a quarter century. Unlike many philosophers he appreciated change and many of his basic ideas are geared to the problem of human control over change. Moreover he is concerned with the relation of theory and practice, and much of his work in metaphysics and epistemology is devoted to discovering the role that doctrines in these fields play and how they reflect the movement of social life. He is constantly concerned with ethics, with the history of ethics, and with the presuppositions of ethical theories that are studied in the social sciences and applied in the normative disciplines of politics, education, and law.Dewey's project of comparison in ethics reveals how theory is crystallized in the processes of the growth of knowledge in all fields and the human vicissitudes of history. Ethical Theory and Social Change will be of interest to philosophers, sociologists, and intellectual historians.
The Concept of Social Change (Routledge Revivals)
Anthony Smith's important work on the concept of social change, first published in 1973, puts forward the paradigm of historical change as an alternative to the functionalist theory of evolutionary change. He shows that, in attempting to provide a theory of social change, functionalism reveals itself as a species of 'frozen' evolutionism. Functionalism, he argues, is unable to cope with the mechanisms of historical transitions or account for novelty and emergence; it confuses classification of variations with explanation of processes; and its endogenous view of change prevents it from coming to grips with the real events and transformations of the historical record. In his assessment of functionalism, Dr Smith traces its explanatory failures in its accounts of the developments of civilisation, modernisation and revolution. He concludes that the study of 'evolution' is largely irrelevant to the investigation of social change. He proposes instead an exogenous paradigm of social change, which places the study of contingent historical events at its centre.