SO427 - week 2

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These are my notes from January 16 for SO427 at the London School of Economics for the 2017-2018 school year. I took this module as part of the one-year Inequalities and Social Science MSc program.

The usual disclaimer: all notes are my personal impressions and do not necessarily reflect the view of the lecturer.


Adorno 1

I received my offer for this class ~2 hours before the seminar was scheduled to start, while I was still at home, so I had to speed through the readings which, I must say, is not really a good idea for anything written by Adorno. I finished the last few pages of the second reading on the train. Accordingly, my notes aren’t so great (mostly just quotes). I shudder to imagine what Adorno would think of that.

(Note: although it’s a 3-hour seminar, with no scheduled demarcation between “lecture” and “seminar”, the first half of the seminar consisted of the prof delivering a quasi-lecture (no slides) summarising the readings, with only a bit of class discussion, so I’ve split my notes up accordingly into the standard Lecture and Seminar sections.)

Readings

Society

From 1969. An essay on the concept of ‘society’, building on Durkheim and Weber. There’s a summary of it here.

Some good quotes and notes I thought worth saving (I need to get these into Bookmarker ASAP)

Is Marx obsolete?

Originally delivered in 1968 as a conference presentation titled “Late Capitalism or Industrial Society?” (PDF). My notes are pretty scattered and I would recommend reading the original if you want the full Adorno experience in any case.

Lecture

Introduction

Adorno and Marx

On social mediation and the Holocaust

On rationarlity

On sociology

Seminar

A discussion of the readings. The second (Is Marx obsolete?) is the more straightforward one; the first, though less clear, is probably more important to the field of sociology.

Society

Is Marx obsolete?