KENYON COLLEGE
OLOF PALME HOUSE
COURSE DESCRIPTION
This course examines 20th-century European and American social theory with an emphasis on their historical and philosophical roots. The theories considered are: (1) structural-functionalism (Parsons and Merton); (2) neo-positivism (Carnap, Ayer, and Popper); (3) critical theory (Horkheimer, Adorno, Marcuse, and Habermas); (4) cultural hermeneutics (Dilthey, Heidegger, and Gadamer); (5) phenomenology (Husserl, Schutz, and Berger and Luckmann); (6) symbolic interactionism (Mead); (7) neo-Freudianism (Fromm and Lasch); and (8) and post-modernist theory (Foucault and Derrida).