Foundations of sociology. A physical defeat has never marked the end of a nation / Ibn Khaldun ; Mankind have always wandered or settled, agreed or quarreled, in troops and companies / Adam Ferguson ; Science can be used to build a better world / Auguste Comte ; The Declaration of Independence bears no relation to half the human race / Harriet Martineau ; The fall of the bourgeoisie and the victory of the proletariat are equally inevitable / Karl Marx ; Gemeinschaft and Gesellschaft / Ferdinand Tönnies ; Society, like the human body, has interrelated parts, needs, and functions / Émile Durkheim ; The iron cage of rationality / Max Weber ; Many personal troubles must be understood in terms of public issues / Charles Wright Mills ; Pay to the most commonplace activities the attention accorded extraordinary events / Harold Garfinkel ; Where there is power there is resistance / Michel Foucault ; Gender is a kind of imitation for which there is no original / Judith Butler
Social inequalities. I broadly accuse the bourgeoisie of social murder / Friedrich Engels ; The problem of the 20th century is the problem of the color line / W.E.B. DuBois ; The poor are excluded from the ordinary living patterns, customs, and activities of life / Peter Townsend ; There ain't no black in the Union Jack / Paul Gilroy ; A sense of one's place / Pierre Bourdieu ; The Orient is the stage on which the whole East is confined / Edward Said ; The ghetto is where the black people live / Elijah Anderson ; The tools of freedom become the sources of indignity / Richard Sennett ; Men's interest in patriarchy is condensed in hegemonic masculinity / R.W. Connell ; White women have been complicit in this imperialist, white-supremacist capitalist patriarchy / bell hooks ; The concept of "patriarch" is indispensable for an analysis of gender inequality / Sylvia Walby
Modern living. Strangers are not really conceived as individuals, but as strangers of a particular type / Georg Simmel ; The freedom to remake our cities and ourselves / Henri Lefebvre ; There must be eyes on the street / Jane Jacobs ; Only communication can communicate / Niklas Luhmann ; Society should articulate what is good / Amitai Etzioni ; McDonaldization affects virtually every aspect of society / George Ritzer ; The bonds of our communities have withered / Robert D. Putnam ; Disneyization replaces mundane blandness with spectacular experiences / Alan Bryman ; Living in a loft is like living in a showcase / Sharon Zukin
Living in a global world. Abandon all hope of totality, you who enter the world of fluid modernity / Zygmunt Bauman ; The modern world-system / Immanuel Wallerstein ; Global issues, local perspective / Roland Robertson ; Climate change is a back-of-the-mind issue / Anthony Gidens ; No social justice without global cognitive justice / Boaventura de Sousa Santos ; The unleashing of productive capacity by the power of the mind / Manuel Castells ; We are living in a world that is beyond controllability / Ulrich Beck ; It sometimes seems as if the whole world is on the move / John Urry ; Nations can be imagined and constructed with relatively little historical straw / David McCrone ; Global cities are strategic sites for new types of operations / Saskia Sassen ; Different societies appropriate the materials of modernity differently / Arjun Appadurai ; Processes of change have altered the relations between peoples and communities / David Held
Culture and identity. The "I" and the "me" / G.H. Mead ; The challenge of modernity is to live without illusions and without becoming disillusioned / Antonio Gramsci ; The civilizing process is constantly moving "forward" / Norbert Elias ; Mass culture reinforces political repression / Herbert Marcuse ; The danger of the future is that men may become robots / Erich Fromm ; Culture is ordinary / Raymond Williams ; Stigma refers to an attribute that is deeply discrediting / Erving Goffman ; We live in a world where there is more and more information, and less and less meaning / Jean Baudrillard ; Modern identities are being decentered / Stuart Hall ; All communities are imagined / Benedict Anderson ; Throughout the world, culture has been doggedly pushing itself center stage / Jeffrey Alexander
Work and consumerism. Conspicuous consumption of valuable goods is a means of reputability to the gentleman of leisure / Thorstein Veblen ; The Puritan wanted to work in a calling; we are forced to do so / Max Weber ; Technology, like art, is a soaring exercise of the human imagination / Daniel Bell ; The more sophisticated machines become, the less skill the worker has / Harry Braverman ; Automation increases the worker's control over his work process / Robert Blauner ; The Romantic ethic promotes the spirit of consumerism / Colin Campbell ; In processing people, the product is a state of mind / Arlie Russell Hochschild ; Spontaneous consent combines with coercion / Michael Burawoy ; Things make us just as much as we make things / Daniel Miller ; Feminization has had only a modest impact on reducing gender inequalities / Teri Lynn Caraway
The role of institutions. Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature / Karl Marx ; The iron law of oligarchy / Robert Michels ; Healthy people need no bureaucracy to mate, give birth, and die / Ivan Illich ; Some commit crimes because they are responding to a social situation / Robert K. Merton ; Total institutions strip people of their support systems and their sense of self / Erving Goffman ; Government is the right disposition of things / Michel Foucault ; Religion has lost its plausibility and social significance / Bryan Wilson ; Our identity and behavior are determined by how we are described and classified / Howard S. Becker ; Economic crisis is immediately transformed into social crisis / Jürgen Habermas ; Schooling has been at once something done to the poor and for the poor / Samuel Bowles and Herbert Gintis ; Societies are subject, every now and then, to periods of moral panic / Stanley Cohen ; The time of the tribes / Michel Maffesoli ; How working-class kids get working-class jobs / Paul Willis
Families and intimacies. Differences between the sexes are cultural creations / Margaret Mead ; Families are factories that produce human personalities / Talcott Parsons ; Western man has become a confessing animal / Michel Foucault ; Heterosexuality must be recognized and studied as an institution / Adrienne Rich ; Western family arrangements are diverse, fluid, and unresolved / Judith Stacey ; The marriage contract is a work contract / Christine Delphy ; Housework is directly opposed to self-actualization / Ann Oakley ; When love finally wins it has to face all kinds of defeat / Ulrich Beck and Elisabeth Beck-Gernsheim ; Sexuality is as much about beliefs and ideologies as about the physical body / Jeffrey Weeks ; Queer theory questions the very grounds of identity / Steven Seidman.
