London School of
Economics and Political Science (LSE)
Modules
56
Comparative social structures and institutions
Prerequisite
– 10 Introduction to sociology
The topics to be
covered will include:
The origins of
empires: Nature of agrarian societies and ‘Asiatic’
mode of production. Hydraulic society and ‘Oriental Despotism’;
critique. Military/political theories of agrarian states; critique.
Stability and
change in agrarian states: Agrarian empires as monolithic despotisms;
critique. Types of agrarian state; role of elites. Types and causes
of social change in agrarian states.
City-states and
democracy: Nature and types of pre-industrial cities and city-states.
Commerce and literacy in the rise of city-state democracy. City-states
and slavery: Athens, Rome and medieval Italy.
Slavery, ancient
and modern: Definitions and types of slavery and serfdom; ‘stage’
theories. Ancient slavery and city-states; critique of slave systems
as class systems. Pre-requisite for democracy? Plantation slavery in
the Americas; economics and culture of New World slave systems; role
of capitalism.
Caste in India:
Ideology and Varna and pollution; role of religion. Land-owning
and Brahmin power; role of dominant castes. Culturalist and structuralist
approaches. Jati and the jajmani system; the ‘anthropological’
approach. Caste, modernisation and political change.
Caste and race:
Indian ‘caste system’ and other ‘caste situations’;
Burakumin, Jews and others. The ‘caste-race’ analogy in
the American South before 1954. The ‘plural society’ thesis
of ethnic and race relations.
Ethnicity in
pre-modern societies: Race and ethnicity; primordialist and instrumentalist
perspectives. The social and political significance of ethnic identity
in pre-modern eras. The ‘ethnic revival’ today; critique
of ‘modernist’ theories.
The rise of nations:
‘Ethnic’ nations and states; problems of definition.
Nations: ‘modern’ or perennial’? Nationalism in antiquity?
Routes of nation-formation; role of the state and ethnicity; Western
origins of the nation-state?
The transition from
feudalism to capitalism, the role of the Protestant ethic.
Revolutions and
political modernisation.
The distinctive
characteristics of industrial society with particular reference
to the family, stratification, secularisation and the distribution of
political power.
Capitalist and
Socialist societies compared, their supposed convergence. The emergence
of post-industrial society. Implications of collapse of socialism.
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