SOC 400 Twentieth Century Social Theory

In this course we will be chronologically exploring some of the key thinkers in continental European social philosophy & social theory and placing them in their socio-historical context. In the first half of the term we will trace the origins & backgrounds of European social philosophy in the thought of such philosophers as Kant, Hegel, Marx, Nietzsche, Freud and Heidegger. We will move on to an assessment of how the cataclysms of the First & Second World Wars affected European social thinkers (Walter Benjamin, Theodor Adorno, Max Horkheimer, Herbert Marcuse, Hannah Arendt), considering the shift in European social thought from a German to a French axis in the postwar period, and the attempts to deconstruct, revise, and even supersede Enlightenment accounts of rationality, autonomy, and society. In this second half we will be considering the works of the following thinkers: Jacques Lacan, Luis Althusser, Michel Foucault, Gilles Deleuze, Félix Guattari, Jacques Derrida, Maurice Blanchot, Jean-Luc Nancy, Jean Baudrillard, Jurgen Habermas, Niklas Luhmann, Zygmunt Bauman and Judith Butler. (Along the way, other supplemental theorists will be discussed, such as Max Weber, Karl Popper, Isaiah Berlin, Charles Taylor, Peter Sloterdijk, Slavoj Zizek, just to name a few.)