HYM4870

Social theory and social history

Proposed to be offered next in 2000

Graeme Davison and Ian Mylchreest

8 or 12 points -One 2-hour seminar per week -Second semester -Clayton

Objectives Students successfully completing this subject should have gained a critical understanding of the main social theories influencing historical writing in the twentieth century, have made a detailed study of an individual historian or group of historians and reflected on the application of their ideas to current historical work, including their own.

Synopsis An examination of recent debates about the relationship between social theory and social history focusing on selected writers and texts including Marx, Weber, Bloch, Braudel, E P Thompson, Michel Foucault and representative feminist and ethnographic historians.

Assessment (8 points) Research essay (4000 words): 60% -Take-home examination (2000 words): 40%
Assessment (12 points) Research essay (4000 words): 40% -Essay (3000 words): 30% -Take-home examination (2000 words): 30%

Prescribed texts

Bloch M Feudal society RKP, 1961
Braudel F Capitalism and material life 1400-1800 Harper, 1973
Burke P History and social theory Polity, 1992
de Tocqueville A Democracy in America Penguin, 1969
Isaac R The transformation of Virginia 1740-1790 U North Carolina P, 1982
Marx K The eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Napoleon Moscow Publishing House, 1975
Rabinow P (ed.) The Foucault reader Penguin, 1984
Smith-Rosenberg C Disorderly conduct: Visions of gender in Victorian America OUP, 1985
Thompson E P The making of the English working class Penguin, 1963
Weber M The Protestant ethic and the spirit of capitalism Allen and Unwin, 1958

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