Social Theory Quotes

“On the way from mythology to logistics thought has lost the element of self-reflection and today machinery disables men even as it nurtures them.”
― Theodor Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment: Philosophical Fragments

“Bullshit jobs proliferate today in large part because of the peculiar nature of managerial feudalism that has come to dominate wealthy economiesーbut to an increasing degree, all economies. They cause misery because human happiness is always caught up in a sense of having effects on the world; a feeling which most people, when they speak of their work, express through a language of social value. Yet at the same time they are aware that the greater the social value produced by a job, the less one is likely to be paid to do it.”
― David Graeber, Bullshit Jobs: A Theory

“Sie wissen das nicht, aber sie tun es.”
― Karl Marx

“The Pages of Gup, now that they had talked through everything so fully, fought hard, remained united, support each other when required to do so, and in general looked like a force with a common purpose. All those arguments and debates, all that openness, had created powerful bonds of friendship between them.”
― Salman Rushdie, Haroun and the Sea of Stories

“Marxism is the science of the laws governing the development of nature and society, the science of the revolution of the oppressed and exploited masses, the science of the victory of socialism in all countries, the science of building communist society.”
― Joseph V. Stalin

“We, on the other hand, were inspired by God. He led us to a science whose truth we ruthlessly set forth. If I have succeeded in presenting the problems of this science exhaustively and in showing how it differs in its various aspects and characteristics from all other crafts, this is due to divine guidance. If, on the other hand, I have omitted some point, or if the problems have got confused with something else, the task of correcting remains for the discerning critic, but the merit is mine since I cleared and marked the way.

God guides with His light whom He will.”
― Ibn Khaldun , مقدمة ابن خلدون

“I did not deny the fact that there was a distinction between the right and the left in the National Assembly. What I denied was that there was an eternal left, the same in various historical circumstances, inspired by the same values, united by the same aspirations.”
― Raymond Aron, Memoirs: Fifty Years of Political Reflection

“Social dynamic theory is philosophy, not politics. There can't be only one correct answer, or there would only be one book." Sharon L Reddy, Worldcon, 1995.”
― Sharon L. Reddy

“The widely mis-interpreted 1998 'meltdown' of East Asia was a financial symptom of the renewed reality: In fact, it was the first round the world recession again to begin in East Asia and spread from there to the West, instead of vice versa. That marked the beginnings of the return back 360 degrees around the world of the world economic center to Asia where it had always been before those two eighty-year period of temporary Western ascendance. The stock market crash in Hong Kong and the devaluation of the Thai baht and the Indonesian rupia took only 80 seconds to make themselves felt in the London City and on New York's Wall Street. How much of a cultural lag do we still need for popular perception and social theory to catch up with global reality?”
― André Gunder Frank

“The question of the religious significance of that change of emphasis, and of the validity of the intellectual processes by which Luther reached his conclusions, is one for theologians. Its effects on social theory were staggering. Since salvation is bestowed by the operation of grace in the heart and by that alone, the whole fabric of organized religion, which had mediated between the individual soul and its Maker--divinely commissioned hierarchy, systematized activities, corporate institutions--drops away, as the blasphemous trivialities of a religion of works. The medieval conception of the social order, which had regarded it as a highly articulated organism of members contributing in their different degrees to a spiritual purpose, was shattered and differences which had been distinctions within a larger unity were now set in irreconcilable antagonism to each other. Grace no longer completed nature: it was the antithesis of it. Man’s actions as a member of society were no longer the extension of his life as a child of God; they were its negation. Secular interests ceased to possess, even remotely, a religious significance; they might compete with religion, but they could not enrich it. Detailed rules of conduct-- a Christian casuistry--are needless or objectionable; the Christian has a sufficient guide in the Bible and in his own conscience. In one sense, the distinction between the secular and the religious life vanished. Monasticism was, so to speak, secularized; all men sood henceforward on the same footing towards God; and that advance, which contead the germ of all subsequent revolutions, was so enormous that all else seems insignificant. In another sense, the distinction became more profound than ever before. For, though all might be sanctified, it was their inner life alone which could partake of sanctification. The world was divided into good and evil, light and darkness, spirit and matter. The division between them was absolute; no human effort could span the chasm.”
― RH Tawney

“The strands in this moment were complex, and the formula which associates the Reformation with the rise of economic individualism is no complete explanation. Systems prepare their own overthrow by a preliminary process of petrification. The traditional social philosophy was static, in the sense that it assumed a body of class relations sharply defined by custom and law, and little affected by the ebb and flow of economic movements. Its weakness in the face of novel forces was as obvious as the strain put upon it by the revolt against the source of ecclesiastical jurisprudence, the partial discredit of the canon law and of the ecclesiastical discipline, and the rise of a political science equipped from the arsenals of antiquity.”
― RH Tawney

“Our standard of progress was conceived for a different era with different problems. Our statistics no longer capture the shape of our economy. And this has consequences. Every era needs its own figures. In the eighteenth century, they concerned the size of the harvest. In the nineteenth century, the radius of the rail network, the number of factories, and the volume of coal mining. And in the twentieth century, industrial mass production within the boundaries of the nation-state.
But today it's no longer possible to express our prosperity in simple dollars, pounds, or euros. From healthcare to education, from journalism to finance, we're all still fixated on 'efficiency' and 'gains,' as though society were nothing but one big production line. But it's precisely in a service-based economy that simple quantitative targets fail... It's time for a new set of figures.”
― Rutger Bregman, Utopia for Realists: How We Can Build the Ideal World

“One of the recurring themes in the history of colonial repression is the way in which the threat of real or imagined violence towards white women became a symbol [...] European women's "sexual fear" appears to arise in special circumstances of unequal power structures at times of particular political pressure: when the dominant power group perceives itself as threatened and vulnerable. Protecting the virtue of white women was the pretext for instituting draconian measures against indigenous populations [...] the actual level of rape and sexual assault bore no relation to the hysteria that the subject aroused, White women provided a symbol of the most vulnerable property known to white man, and it was to be protected from the ever-encroaching black man at all costs.”
― Vron Ware, Beyond the Pale: White Women, Racism, and History

“European women's "sexual fear" appears to arise in special circumstances of unequal power structures at times of particular political pressure: when the dominant power group perceives itself as threatened and vulnerable. Protecting the virtue of white women was the pretext for instituting draconian measures against indigenous populations [...] the actual level of rape and sexual assault bore no relation to the hysteria that the subject aroused.”
― Vron Ware, Beyond the Pale: White Women, Racism, and History

“The point is that you brand a commodity, a commodity that is designed to be bought and sold. This is the central point of this book. They hyper-nationalism is just one more tactic by those seeking to sell a nation to make it into a saleable commodity, since such hyper-nationalists are easily convinced of simpleminded images of their nation.”
― Trevor

“Crises are, in a way, democracy-free zones-gaps in politics as usual when the need for consent and consensus do not seem to apply.”
― Naomi Klein, The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism

“The Paris press, on the whole, has welcomed the creation of these armed [french civilian] groups with reserve. Fascist militias, they've been called. Yes; but on the individual level, on the plane of human rights, what is fascism if not colonialism when rooted in a traditionally colonialist country?”
― Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth

“Sociology suffers from a certain problem: any social knowledge it produces gets fed back into the system, which is thereby changed. This means that sociology is always describing the social field the way it was before sociology described it.”
― Jason Ānanda Josephson Storm, Metamodernism: The Future of Theory