THEORIES
... all our knowledge results from questions, which is
another way of saying that question-asking is our most important intellectual
tool. I would go so far as to say that the answers we carry about
in our heads are largely meaningless unless we know the questions which
produced them. ... What, for example, are the sorts of questions that obstruct
the mind, or free it, in the study of history? How are these questions
different from those one might ask of a mathematical proof, or a literary
work, or a biological theory? ... What students need to know are the rules
of discourse which comprise the subject, and among the most central of such
rules are those which govern what is and what is not a legitimate question.
Neither the life of an individual nor the history of a society can be understood without understanding both. Yet men do not usually define the troubles they endure in terms of historical change and institutional contradiction. ... The sociological imagination enables its possessor to understand the larger historical scene in terms of its meaning for the inner life and the external career of a variety of individuals. ... The first fruit of this imagination--and the first lesson of the social science that embodies it--is the idea that the individual can understand his own experience and gauge his own fate only by locating himself within this period, that he can know his own chances in life only by becoming aware of those of all individuals in his circumstances. ...We have come to know that every individual lives, from one generation to the next, in some society; that he lives out a biography, and that he lives it out within some historical sequence (The Sociological Imagination, 1959:3-10).
A
definition is no proof.
--William Pinkney, American diplomat (1764-1822)
A theory is more impressive the greater the simplicity of its premises, the more different the kinds of things it relates and the more extended its range of applicability.
--Albert Einstein, 1949
According
to Karl Popper (Logik der Forschung, 1935: p.26), Theory is "the net
which we throw out in order to catch the world--to rationalize, explain, and
dominate it." Through history, sociological theory arose out of attempts to
make sense of times of dramatic social change. As Hans Gerth and C. Wright
Mills observed in Character and Social Structure
(Harbinger Books, 1964:xiii), "Problems of the nature of
human nature are raised most urgently when the life-routines of a society
are disturbed, when men are alienated from their social roles in such a way
as to open themselves up for new insight." Consider the historical contexts
spawning the theoretical insights below:
Want to see what theories sociologists are currently cooking up? Below is a sampling of sociological journals.
