The True, the Good and the Beautiful: Structures of Social and Political Thought

Speaker: Professor John Levi Martin, University of Chicago
Series: Sociology Seminar Series

Abstract:

Beneath, or perhaps on top of, the structures that social thinkers use to expound there ideas there are generating master-structures, or architectonics, that give coherence and expanse to their thought. It is fascinating to find homologies between structures that social thinkers make to explain human action, and the constitutional structures that political thinkers develop to channel action. I point to three such homologies turning on the US constitution, the German Weimar constitution, and the (stalled) European Union constitution, and trace out how different attitudes towards the division of powers have been related to understandings of divisions between and within persons in social thought.

Speaker biography:

John Levi Martin is the Florence Borchert Bartling Professor of Sociology at the University of Chicago and the editor of the American Journal of Sociology. He is the author of The True, the Good and the Beautiful: On the Rise and Fall and Rise of an Architectonic for Action, as well as Social Structures, The Explanation of Social Action, and other books and articles on politics, theory, methods and statistics.