A history of social thought.

Author(s):  
Emory S. Bogardus
Keyword(s):  
Author(s):  
Durba Mitra

During the colonial period in India, European scholars, British officials, and elite Indian intellectuals—philologists, administrators, doctors, ethnologists, sociologists, and social critics—deployed ideas about sexuality to understand modern Indian society. This book shows how deviant female sexuality, particularly the concept of the prostitute, became foundational to this knowledge project and became the primary way to think and write about Indian society. The book reveals that deviant female sexuality was critical to debates about social progress and exclusion, caste domination, marriage, widowhood and inheritance, women's performance, the trafficking of girls, abortion and infanticide, industrial and domestic labor, indentured servitude, and ideologies about the dangers of Muslim sexuality. British authorities and Indian intellectuals used the concept of the prostitute to argue for the dramatic reorganization of modern Indian society around Hindu monogamy. The book demonstrates how the intellectual history of modern social thought is based in a dangerous civilizational logic built on the control and erasure of women's sexuality. This logic continues to hold sway in present-day South Asia and the postcolonial world. Reframing the prostitute as a concept, the book overturns long-established notions of how to write the history of modern social thought in colonial India, and opens up new approaches for the global history of sexuality.


2017 ◽  
Vol 61 (4) ◽  
pp. 169-188
Author(s):  
Radomir Miński

Robert Michels (1876–1936) considered himself to be a disillusioned socialist, who, under the influence of elitism, rejected democracy and moved into the fascist camp. As a figure in sociology he is associated solely with the “iron law of oligarchy.” In Poland, it is a little-known fact that in Western social thought he is viewed as a socially engaged sociologist—a “genuine” researcher gifted with sociological imagination and a passion for scholarship. The aim of the author is to present Michels as a scholar in many areas: feminist issues, local patriotism in the context of national citizenship, phenomena of a general sociological nature, the history of Italy, and social movements. Furthermore, the author illustrates the German writer Timm Genett’s thesis that Michels should also be valued as a pioneer in the study of social movements, which he consistently examined in his analyses of organizations, systematically investigating the degeneration of social movements and the shifting of organizational aims.


1972 ◽  
Vol 1 (4) ◽  
pp. 357-385 ◽  
Author(s):  
Anthony Giddens
Keyword(s):  

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