Don Levine moves from the origins of systematic knowledge in
ancient Greece to the present day to present an account that is at
once a history of the social science enterprise and an introduction
to the cornerstone works of Western social thought.
"Visions" has three meanings, each of which corresponds to a part
of the book. In Part 1, Levine presents the ways previous
sociologists have rendered accounts of their discipline, as a
series of narratives--or "life stories"--that build upon each
other, generation to generation, a succession of efforts to
envisage a coherent past for the sake of a purposive present.
In Part 2, the heart of the book, Levine offers his own narrative,
reconnecting centuries of voices into a richly textured dialogue
among the varied strands of the sociological tradition: Hellenic,
British, French, German, Marxian, Italian, and American. Here, in a
tour de force of clarity and conciseness, he tracks the formation
of the sociological imagination through a series of conversations
across generations. From classic philosophy to pragmatism,
Aristotle to W. I. Thomas, Levine maps the web of visionary
statements--confrontations and oppositions--from which social
science has grown.
At the same time, this is much more than an expert synthesis of
social theory. Throughout each stage, Levine demonstrates social
knowledge has grown in response to three recurring questions: How
shall we live? What makes humans moral creatures? How do we
understand the world? He anchors the creation of social knowledge
to ethical foundations, and shows for the first time how
differences in those foundations disposed the shapers of modern
social science--among them, Marshall and Spencer, Comte and
Durkheim, Simmel and Weber, Marx and Mosca, Dewey and Park--to
proceed in vastly different ways.
In Part 3, Levine offers a vision of the contemporary scene,
setting the crisis of fragmentation in social sciences against the
fragmentation of experience and community. By reconstructing the
history of social thought as a series of fundamentally moral
engagements with common themes, he suggests new uses for
sociology's intellectual resources: not only as insight about the
nature of modernity, but also as a model of mutually respectful
communication in an increasingly fractious world.
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