Basic time/event/idea maps of social theory
| Period, LYMK: Landmarks and Thinkers1 | When | Related events, topics, issues |
|---|---|---|
| ~600 BCE | ||
| Antiquity – Renaissance At least an awareness that the Pre-Socratics, Plato, Aristotle, Augustine, Aquinas, etc. had some ideas about humans and human society. |
Classical Greece Founding of three religions Settling of central/northern Europe Middle ages/Feudalism/Renaissance/Enlightenment/Mercantilism |
|
| 1500 CE | ||
| Enlightenment Pre-Sociologists Recognition that “sociology” starts with the likes of Machiavelli - The Prince (1469–1527), Hobbes - Leviathan (1588–1679), Locke, Montesquieu, Rousseau, Smith, Hume, Condorcet. |
English Civil War Enclosure Movement European overseas exploration Harvard College founded 1636, Yale founded 1701, American/French Revolution, Steam Engine |
|
| 1800 CE | ||
| Ethnology societies founded in Paris, London, New York (1830s, 1840s) Marx Locate Marx in the 1840-1870 period. Communist Manifesto (1848) Darwin's Origin of the Species (1859) Broca (1859) "[anthropology is] the study of the human group, considered as a whole, in its details, and in relation to the rest of nature" Theodor Waitz, "The Anthropology of Primitive Peoples" (1859-1864) Capital later. |
Congress of Vienna/Napoleonic Wars Industrial Revolution Colonialism Revolutions of 1848 |
|
| 1875 CE | First sociology course in English taught at Yale by William Graham Sumner | |
| Mid/late 19th – Early 20th century classics American Anthropological Association (1902) Recognize intellectual revolution running from Darwin (1859) and Spencer to Durkheim, Weber, Simmel, Freud (c 1920) |
Railroads and Telegraph, First wave feminism, Dreyfus affair, World War I | |
| 1925 CE | ||
| Pre-WWII American Theory Chicago School, R Park, Thomas, Znaniecki |
Automobile, telephone, radio, World War II, Holocaust, Second wave feminism | |
| 1945 | ||
| Post-war Theory American: exchange, symbolic interaction, ethnomethodology, Parsons, Merton, Homans, Goffman, Garfinkel, European Critical Theory | Civil Rights, New Social Movements, Television, Anti-colonialism, nationalism, Sexual revolution, Cold War, Rise of welfare state, Third wave feminism | |
| 1980 | ||
| Contemporary Theories POMO, feminist, cultural studies, identity politics, post-colonialism, rational choice, convergence in social science, computational social science | Collapse of communism, New Social Movements "Coming Out All Over", globalization, Third way, 9/11 |