German sociologist Alfred Vierkandt is hardly remembered today. This may seem surprising. Several prominent sociologists from the German-speaking countries contributed to the Handwörterbuch der Soziologie (1931), which Vierkandt edited and published. However, Vierkandt did not interact with any of them significantly, and this publication brought no recognition of the importance of his sociological oeuvre in Germany, the United States, or elsewhere. His key notion of the social group found no acknowledgment among other contemporary or later sociologists, even though several of (...) them used this notion and discussed social groups in their own writings. Moreover, those who paid close attention to his writings, like Abel and Hochstim, evaluated them quite critically. Both before and after World War II, Vierkandt remained a solitary and relatively unknown author. (shrink)

This book provides a compact and up-to-date presentation of Jürgen Habermas’ oeuvre, with particular reference to his theory of communicative action. Segre explores Habermas’ themes of the rationalization of the life-world and its consequences on the social, cultural, and personality systems. This book also overviews the reception of Habermas’ work.

This article deals with Kurt Wolff’s interpretation of Karl Mannheim, with reference to his writings on social planning. Wolff’s interpretation is presented and discussed in the context provided by other interpreters of Mannheim. They have, generally speaking, given scant attention to the late works by Mannheim, and rather focused on Ideology and Utopia, Mannheim’s most celebrated work. Interpreters who have considered these writings on planning have been mostly or entirely critical of them, objecting to their vagueness and inadequacy as a (...) project of social reform, and the unsatisfactory conceptualization of the élites. These objections have been raised by several interpreters of different ideological persuasions, from the Marxist thinkers Adorno and Lukacs to the conservative T.S. Eliot. Wolff’s interpretation stands out in that it pays less attention to the social and political contents of Mannheim’s reform project, but brings into light its psychological background; namely, the deep anguish Mannheim experienced because of the widespread tendencies to the formation of a mass society, prone to the forces of irrationalism and authoritarianism. A perusal of Mannheim’s works on planning bears out Wolff’s interpretation. (shrink)

This essay concerns itself with a detailed presentation of the contents of two works on the construction of reality in society. One is Berger and Luckmann’s well-known book ; the other is the somewhat less known book on the same subject by Holzner. These works deal with the social construction of shared symbolic and cognitive universes of meaning, and partake of the same theoretical sources, namely, Symbolic Interactionism and Schutz’s phenomenological sociology. They differ in their theoretical pursuits, however. Berger and (...) Luckmann deal with what is necessary for the construction of a shared symbolic world, as society is endowed with both an objective and a subjective reality. Holzner is more interested in the social distribution and control of reality construction, and in the different types of reality constructs. (shrink)

This article focuses on the sociological field of stratification theory and research in Weimar Germany, and pursues the following objectives: (1) to offer for consideration some of the most significant theoretical and empirical essays bearing on stratification that were produced in the German-speaking world during the Weimar period; (2) to classify their authors according to cultural, ideological and epistemological orientations; (3) to account by means of this classification for their propensity to conduct empirical research; and (4) to discuss the reasons (...) for their interest in social stratification, their interpretations of the research findings, their reception of Marx and Weber, and their differential success in finding an audience among other scholars. (shrink)