Society - Ancient Views Of Society: East And West, Early Modern Views Of Society, Society: Consensus And Conflict
past archaic concept
The concept of society is in transition due to globalization and the knowledge associated with it. Today's views of society are not altogether new, however. Rather, they are engaged with the rediscovery of the worlds of antiquity. Since the 1970s, scholars have reached to the past to explain mainstay concepts such as society. In this manner, ancient Eastern ideas flood into the current Western perspectives on society. The turn to the archaic East also heightens awareness of the West's own archaic past. Thus the concept of society metamorphoses while it embraces a living past.
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The Chinese philosophical coupling of yin-yang was an organizing principle that connected the heavens to earth and established all worldly changes. Political decision making relied on proper timing: the right season, the right pitch of the pipes,
the right state of mind. The balance of space and time was the key to harmony in the Chinese dynasties to come. In highly stratified and patriarchal soc…
When the Jesuits brought knowledge of their explorations into China back to Europe, an organic view of society as a compendium of functioning interdependent parts started to take shape. Although this was a bare shadow of China's sophisticated civilization, it led to a Western idea of a body politic, with the state as the head, the church as the heart, and economy and other social systems as…
Views of modern Western society tend to fall into two camps: consensus and conflict. Consensus views beginning with the economist Max Weber (1864–1920) and continuing into the structural functionalism of the American sociologist Talcott Parsons (1902–1979) describe society as a complex combination of static and dynamic systems. Weber identified society as a system of potential harmon…
Given the present trend toward global communications, more attention has focused on the origins of concepts of society, especially in the works of pioneering scholars in the relations between East and West. The philosopher Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz (1646–1716) did not simply rehearse Christian views of Chinese society. Like Giambattista Vico (1668–1744), Leibniz was impressed with th…
John O'Neill, who has made a significant impact on social sciences and humanities since the 1970s, develops Vico's ideas into a new phenomenological view of society. O'Neill recognizes Vico's call to enter language and thereby "renew" society through every word: "Thus etymology is the music of Vico's wild sociology inviting us to hear our beg…
Coser, Lewis. Masters of Sociological Thought: Ideas in Historical and Social Context. 2nd ed. New York: Harcourt, Brace Jovanovich, 1977. Dallmayr, Fred R. Beyond Orientalism: Essays on Cross-Cultural Encounter. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1996. Jung, Hwa Yol, ed. Comparative Political Culture in the Age of Globalization: An Introductory Anthology. Lanham, Md.: Lexington Books, 20…
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