Americans Thinking America : Elements of American Social Thought (Hardcover)

1. Social Theory and American Culture

• The long tradition of American exceptionalism
• The Civil War and the settlement of American culture
• The post-war era and the rise of Progressivism
• The World Wars and the American rediscovery of Europe
• The Short American Century, 1941-1946, and Europe’s empirical turn
• The End of the Modern World-System, 1968-1991, & the European vision
• Globalization and the collapse of the integrating social whole

    2.     American Pragmatisms

• William James: experience and the social self
• Pragmatist social theory today
• Charles Sanders Peirce: semiotics and the unity of the ego
• The Progressive Era: John Dewey and Jane Addams
• George Herbert Mead: mind, self and society
• Herbert Blumer: Symbolic Interactionism
• Pragmatism’s limits and prospects: Habermas and Rorty

1. Structures, Functions, and Cultures

• Talcott Parsons: The Structure of Social Action
• The Social System: Parsons and the AGIL Paradigm
• Robert K. Merton: social theory and social structures
• Jeffrey C. Alexander: theoretical logic and cultural sociology

1. The Interaction Order

• Conformity and American character: David Riesman & Erik Erikson
• Erving Goffman: impression management & the interaction order
• Ethnomethodologies: Aaron Cicourel and Harold Garfinkel

1. Variations on the Theory of Power and Knowledge

• C. Wright Mills: power as knowledge of structures
• Alvin W. Gouldner: the culture of critical discourse
• Herbert Marcuse: and the critique of mass culture
• Dorothy Smith and Nancy Hartsock: power and the feminist standpoint
• Donna Haraway & Patricia Hill Collins: the fractured matrix of power

1. Social Movements, States and the Modern World-system

• Charles Tilly: contentious social movements
• Theda Skocpol: States and Social Movements
• Immanuel Wallerstein and the end of the modern world-system

1. The New Global Millennium and the analytic limits of the social

• Manuel Castells, The Network Society
• Ghosts of the Past: Eduard Said, Gloria Anzaldua, Gayatri Spivak
• Alice Goffman and the new ethnographies
• Paul Krugman and the American vision of the economic future

1. Conclusion: Decline and the future of American theory