Foundations of Modern Social Theory
Yale's Open Courses lecture series traces the development of social thought from the seventeenth century through the 1920s, built around the twice-weekly lectures Professor Iván Szelényi delivered at Yale College in Fall 2009. The course reads Hobbes, Locke, Rousseau, and Montesquieu on the origins of political and social order, then moves through Adam Smith's account of commercial society before turning to the three thinkers usually credited with founding sociology as a discipline: Marx, Weber, and Durkheim. Each lecture situates a text within its intellectual and historical context and asks how its concepts and methods still shape contemporary social analysis. Full video lectures are freely available along with the syllabus, and the course requires no textbook purchase to follow along, though transcripts and companion readings are provided for those working through the material independently.