Karl Jaspers

In the following essay I will attempt to give a brief explanation of the historical and social contexts from which sociology developed and then an explanation of three sociological concepts namely, Socialisation, Social Stratification, and Social Order and a further explanation of three sociological theories namely Functionalism, Marxism and Social Action Theory and and how it applies itself to individuals and society on a micro level and a macro level. Sociology has its roots deeply…

In the 1970s, Louis Althusser wrote Ideology and the State Apparatuses as a way to explain how social systems form people by using the idea of ideology. Althusser was a French Marxist who was interested in the idea of structuralism. Through this, Althusser attempts to answer his central thesis of how people are constructed by ideology by addressing two separate theses. The first is based on the idea that “the object… is represented in the imaginary form of ideology” while the second focuses on…

‘Modernity’, namely, the societal transformations brought by the industrial and political revolutions that started in the eighteenth century in Europe, has been theorised by a number of analytics as leading to the emergence of sociology. Following the social evolutions of the ‘Great Transformation’ that happened in Europe, as Gurminder K. Bhambra explains in the beginning of her article Sociology and Postcolonialism: Another ‘Missing Revolution’ (2007), the birth sociology was seen as an attempt…

In the novel, Gulliver’s Travels, Jonathan Swift expresses his ideas about politics, society, and the presumed self-righteousness of human society. The effects of social darwinism are profound and are evident within the characters in the story. Throughout the story, the desire to rise to a higher social standard is the driving motive behind the character’s actions. A main theme of the novel is how an individual can become distorted by their own thirst to climb up the social hierarchy. In her…

Marx outlined four components of alienation; (I) alienation from the product of labour; (ii) alienation from productive activity; (iii) alienation from the human species; and, (iv) alienation from fellow human beings. Alienation from products…. Productive activity, or the work process, is another aspect of alienation. It is traditionally highly hierarchised, routinised, segmented and seemingly meaningless. However in the very machinery and processes created by Modernity he saw a means of human…

The critical Marxist perspective struggles to understand the art in advertising because it recognizes the monumental impact that capitalism has. The artist or designer is selling their creativity; which is being driven by profit. Creativity is a product that can now be purchased by corporations in order to generate more profit. Capitalism exploits human talents and uses them secure and drive profits. These creative ads are made for consumers. Drawing back on our definition of capitalism and how…

In The Communist Manifesto, Marx and Friedrich Engels use historical examples dating back to the middle ages to illustrate the idea that the politics of society are controlled by those in power, those with the means of production. It is made clear in the prose that the economists believe this theory to be historically and socially universal as the first chapter of the Manifesto begins, “The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggle”(Marx 246). Whereas Aristotle…

perspective; however, education is seen as a social construct used to keep the lower classes suppressed and under control of the upper class. In The German Ideology, Karl Marx states “The ruling class will give its ideas the form of universality and represent them as the only rational universally valid ones.” In this quotation Karl Marx is stating that the ruling class comes up with its own ideologies and teaches those to the lower class as fact. This is very significant to the Marxist ideology…

America is known as the land of opportunity. In the past as well as the present, immigrants have traveled to this country with dreams of fulfilling their own goals – home ownership, raising a family, or having a good career, for example. This view of America, however, may be more fiction than fact. In The Jungle, written by Upton Sinclair, views are established of an America completely opposite of the views of the incoming foreigners and even the citizens already living in the country. Upton…

for her" and "rather… made himself nothing by taking the very way of a worker." It is to Him that we locate our definitive articulation of administration, power, and force. It is to that style of initiative that every one of the pressure vanishes. Karl Marx did not take that into…