Iván Szelényi opens his Yale course Foundations of Modern Social Theory (SOCY 151) with a survey of the thinkers students will spend the semester on: Hobbes, Locke, Montesquieu, Rousseau, Adam Smith, J.S. Mill, Marx, Nietzsche, Freud, Weber, and Durkheim. He moves through each in turn, sketching their biographies, major works, and central arguments, from Hobbes as troublemaker to what he calls the two Adam Smiths and Nietzsche as the first post-modern theorist. Freud, Weber, and Durkheim get a brisker joint treatment near the end. Szelényi frames the whole enterprise as interdisciplinary, treating social theory as a conversation across philosophy, economics, and political thought rather than a single discipline's history. The lecture is essentially a roadmap, setting up the questions and figures the rest of the course will dig into rather than analyzing any one thinker deeply.