This course provides a foundation in the central ideas of social theory. This field is broad and one single course is not enough to cover all aspects and approaches. Instead, we will only focus on some of them. Accordingly, the goals of this course are:

1. to introduce students to central classical and contemporary works, theories, and traditions in social theory, including those of Marx, Durkheim, Weber, Parsons, symbolic interactionism, social exchange theory, Giddens, Bourdieu, and Luhmann.

2. to examine, compare, and contrast the ways different classical and contemporary theorists approach several core problems in the discipline, including the nature of the social, the micro-macro link, and the debate over culture, structure and agency.

The course will focus on theory construction and evaluation. Theorist solutions to substantive questions imply specific assumptions on human actions and knowledge. Each of classical authors adopted a different perspective for theory development. We will study and compare those diverse ways of theorizing.