DSOC 7001 - [Historical Sociology of Modernity]

(HA-AG, KCM-AG)

Spring. Next offered 2018-2019. 3 credits. Student option grading.

Enrollment limited to: graduate students.

F. Makki.

The idea of modernity, as a postulated relationship between social change and institutional form, and as a conceptual schema for making sense of large-scale social transformations, constitutes the primary object of inquiry of classical social theory. Conceived as a uniquely European phenomenon that spread to the rest of the world through the impact of colonial empires and the world market, it also supplies the normative frameworks for many contemporary theories of development. This conception of modernity, and the meta-theories that legitimate it, has been the subject of increasingly heated scholarly controversy. In this course, we explore some of the critical debates that animate this field of historical sociology, alternating our focus between contrasting studies of the institutional dynamics of modernity and critical reflections on how these studies are shaped by the adoption of particular epistemologies.

Outcome 1: Discuss the critical debates regarding the idea of modernity.