Sociological imagination allows one to understand the relationship between personal experiences and wider social forces. It involves thinking beyond everyday routines to analyze broader social issues and forces. Social movements aim to create social change around specific political or social issues and are closely tied to democratic systems. The public sphere is a space where individuals can freely discuss issues and influence politics. Functionalism views society as a system of interconnected parts that work together to maintain society.

1. The term sociological imagination was coined by the American sociologist C. Wright Mills in 1959 to describe the type of insight offered by the discipline of sociology.
C. Wright Mills defined sociological imagination as "the vivid awareness of the relationship between personal experience and the wider society.“
Sociological Imagination: The application of imaginative thought to the asking and answering of sociological questions. Someone using the sociological imagination "thinks himself away" from the familiar routines of daily life.
Sociological Imagination

2. Social movements are a type of collective action which is goal oriented. They are large, sometimes informal, groupings of individuals or organizations which focus on specific political or social issues. In other words, they carry out, resist or undo a social change.
Social movements have been and continued to be closely connected with democratic political systems.
Social movements

3. The public sphere is an area in social life where individuals can come together to freely discuss and identify societal problems, and through that discussion influence political action.
It is "a discursive space in which individuals and groups congregate to discuss matters of mutual interest and, where possible, to reach a common judgment.” The public sphere can be seen as "a theater in modern societies in which political participation is enacted through the medium of talk” and "a realm of social life in which public opinion can be formed".
Public Sphere

4. Romanticism was an artistic, literary, and intellectual movement that originated in Europe toward the end of the 18th century and in most areas was at its peak in the approximate period from 1800 to 1850. Partly a reaction to the Industrial Revolution, it was also a revolt against the aristocratic social and political norms of the Age of Enlightenment and a reaction against the scientific rationalization of nature.
Romanticism

5. It was embodied most strongly in the visual arts, music, and literature, but had a major impact on historiography, education and the natural sciences. Its effect on politics was considerable and complex; while for much of the peak Romantic period it was associated with liberalism and radicalism, its long-term effect on the growth of nationalism was probably more significant.

6. The publication in 1798 of Lyrical Ballads, with many of the finest poems by Wordsworth and Coleridge, is often held to mark the start of the movement. The majority of the poems were by Wordsworth, and many dealt with the lives of the poor in his native Lake District, or the poet's feelings about nature, which were to be more fully developed in his long poem The Prelude, never published in his lifetime.
Romantic thinkers hated imitation and decorum.

7. Kant, in his work “Critique of Judgment” has quoted that taste is a faculty for judging an object in reference to the Imagination’s free conformity to law. Now if in the judgment of taste, the Imagination must be considered in its freedom, it is in the first place not regarded as reproductive, as it is subject to the laws of association, but as productive and spontaneous (as the author of arbitrary forms of possible intuition).
Imagination should be free from all constraints.

8. Rousseau distrusted the aristocrats not out of a thirst for change but because he believed they were betraying decent traditional values. He opposed the theater which was Voltaire's lifeblood, shunned the aristocracy which Voltaire courted, and argued for something dangerously like democratic revolution. Whereas Voltaire argued that equality was impossible, Rousseau argued that inequality was not only unnatural, but that--when taken too far--it made decent government impossible.
Voltaire vs Rousseau

9. Whereas Voltaire charmed with his wit, Rousseau ponderously insisted on his correctness, even while contradicting himself. Whereas Voltaire insisted on the supremacy of the intellect, Rousseau emphasized the emotions, becoming a contributor to both the Enlightenment and its successor, romanticism. And whereas Voltaire endlessly repeated the same handful of core Enlightenment notions, Rousseau sparked off original thoughts in all directions: ideas about education, the family, government, the arts, and whatever else attracted his attention.

10. Jürgen Habermas - born 18 June 1929 is a German sociologist and philosopher in the tradition of critical theory and pragmatism. He is perhaps best known for his theory of communicative action and the public sphere.

11. Antonio Gramsci was an Italian Marxist theoretician and politician. He was a founding member and one-time leader of the Communist Party of Italy. Gramsci is best known for his Theory of Cultural Hegemony, which describes how states use cultural institutions to maintain power in capitalist societies. The Prison Notebooks were a series of notebooks written by the Italian Marxist Antonio Gramsci.
Antonio Gramsci

12. The notions of purity and pollution are critical for defining and understanding caste hierarchy. According to these concepts, Brahmins hold the highest rank and Shudras the lowest in the caste hierarchy. The Varna System represents a social stratification which includes four varnas namely- Brahmans, Kshatriyas, Vaisyas and Shudras. The Shudras were allocated the lowest rank of social ladder and their responsibilities included service of the three Varnas. The superior castes tried to maintain their ceremonial purity
Caste –Purity & Pollutions

13. Social system is a central term in sociological systems theory. The term draws a line to ecosystem, biological organisms, psychical systems and technical systems. They all form the environment of social systems. Minimum requirements for a social system is interaction of at least two personal systems or two persons acting in their roles.
Functionalism sees society as a system; a set of interconnected parts which together form a whole. There is a relationship between all these parts and agents of socialization and together they all contribute to the maintenance of society as a whole.
Talcott Parsons viewed society as a system. He argued that any social system has four basic functional prerequisites: adaptation, goal attainment, integration and pattern maintenance. These can be seen as problems that society must solve if it is to survive. The function of any part of the social system is understood as its contribution to meeting the functional prerequisites.
Functionalism

14. Adaptation refers to the relationship between the system and its environment. In order to survive, social systems must have some degree of control over their environment. The economy is the institution primarily concerned with this function.
Goal attainment refers to the need for all societies to set goals towards which social activity is directed. Procedures for establishing goals and deciding on priorities between goals are institutionalized in the form of political systems.
Integration refers primarily to the ‘adjustment of conflict’. It is concerned with the coordination and mutual adjustment of the parts of the social system. When conflict does arise, it is settled by the judicial system and does not therefore lead to the disintegration of the social system.
Pattern maintenance refers to the ‘maintenance of the basic pattern of values, institutionalized in the society’. Institutions that perform this function include the family, the educational system and religion. In Parsons view ‘the values of society are rooted in religion’.

15. A main supporter of Functionalism is Emile Durkheim who believes that sociology is a science. He is a structuralist and positivist and thus disagrees with empathy, meanings and the social action theory.
Functionalists believe that sociological matters should be explained with scientific facts. This is otherwise known as Positivism. The founder of Positivism is Auguste Comte.

16. Hegelianism is the philosophy of G. W. F. Hegel which can be summed up by the dictum that "the rational alone is real", which means that all reality is capable of being expressed in rational categories. His goal was to reduce reality to a more synthetic unity within the system of absolute idealism.
Hegel – “The thing that appears before you may not be in its true form.”
Hegelianism

17. Positivism is the philosophy of science that information derived from logical and mathematical treatments and reports of sensory experience is the exclusive source of all authoritative knowledge, and that there is valid knowledge (truth) only in this derived knowledge. Verified data received from the senses are known as empirical evidence. Positivism holds that society, like the physical world, operates according to general laws. The modern sense of the approach was developed by the philosopher and founding sociologist Auguste Comte in the early 19th century.
Key persons – Auguste Comte, Henri de Saint-Simon, Simon Laplace, Émile Durkheim, John Locke
Positivism

18. At the turn of the 20th century the first wave of German sociologists, including Max Weber and Georg Simmel, rejected the doctrine of positivism, thus founding the anti-positivist tradition in sociology. Later anti- positivists and critical theorists have associated positivism with “scientism”; science as ideology. Later in his career, German theoretical physicist Werner Heisenberg, Nobel laureate for the creation of quantum mechanics, distanced himself from positivism saying that “If we omitted all that is unclear we would probably be left with completely uninteresting and trivial tautologies.”.
Anti-Positivism

19. Scientific temper is a way of life - an individual and social process of thinking and acting which uses a scientific method, which may include questioning, observing physical reality, testing, hypothesizing, analyzing, and communicating (not necessarily in that order).
Jawaharlal Nehru was one of the first people to use the term scientific temper and advocate the promotion of scientific temper. (The Discovery of India, 1946)
Scientific Temper

20. Man is a social animal. He lives in social groups in communities and in society. Human life and society almost go together. Man cannot live without society. Man is biologically and psychologically equipped to live in groups, in society. Society has become an essential condition for human life to arise and to continue.
The relationship between individual and society is ultimately one of the profound of all the problems of social philosophy. It is more philosophical rather than sociological because it involves the question of values.
Individual & Society

21. Man depends on society. It is in the society that an individual is surrounded and encompassed by culture, a societal force. It is in the society again that he has to conform to the norms, occupy statuses and become members of groups.
The question of the relationship between the individual and the society is the starting point of many discussions. It is closely connected with the question of the relationship of man and society. There is two main theories regarding the relationship of man and society .They are the social contract theory and the organismic theory.

22. Durkheim says society confronts us as an objective fact. Society is external to ourselves. It encompasses our entire life. The institutions of society pattern our actions and even shape our expectations.
Peter Berger says it was there before we were born and it will be there after we are dead. Our lives are but episodes in its majestic march through time. In sum society is the walls of our imprisonment in history.

23. A primary group is typically a small social group whose members share close, personal, enduring relationships. These groups are marked by members' concern for one another, in shared activities and culture. Examples include family, childhood friends, and highly influential social groups. The concept of the primary group was introduced by Charles Cooley, a sociologist from the Chicago School of sociology, in his book Social Organization: A Study of the Larger Mind.
Primary Group

24. People in a secondary group interact on a less personal level than in a primary group, and their relationships are temporary rather than long lasting. Since secondary groups are established to perform functions, people’s roles are more interchangeable. Secondary groups are groups in which one exchanges explicit commodities, such as labor for wages, services for payments, etc. Examples of these would be employment, vendor-to-client relationships, etc.
Secondary Group

25. Material culture includes all of the physical objects that people create and give meaning to. Cars, clothing, schools, computers, and books would be examples. An object only becomes part of culture after meaning have been given to it. A rock in a field has no meaning until it is used as a tool or to build a fence.
Non-material culture consists of thoughts and behavior that people learn as part of the culture they live in. It includes politics, economics, language, rules, customs, family, religion or beliefs, values, and knowledge. Further considerations -A culture is the collective manifestation of human intellectual achievement, and relates to the accomplishments and attitudes of a people of a particular time.
Dimensions of Culture

26. A material culture places emphasis on objects, material accomplishments; the acquisition of material wealth; skill and productivity in arts and crafts; technology; fine buildings and displays of material prosperity.
A non-material culture values 'abstract/intangible' things more highly than objects, e.g. things such as ideas; the things of the mind; philosophy; metaphysics; 'spirituality'; values; beliefs; relationships between god and man; 'being', etc

27. Some of the important elements of social structure are discussed as under:
(1)Status: Social status is the position or rank of a person or group, within the society.
(2)Roles: “Concretely these are the relevant performances of their individual occupants. Functionally, they are contributions to collective goal attainment”. Role occupants are expected to fulfill their obligations to other people. For example, in family the husband has obligations towards his wife.
Elements of Social Structure

28. (3) Norms: According to H.M. Johnson, sub- groups and roles are governed by social norms. Some norms specify positive obligations. Some other norms specify the limit of permissible action.
(4)Values: Individuals or groups are found to be emotionally committed to values. These values help to integrate personality or a system of interaction.

29. Anthony Giddens is a British sociologist who is known for his theory of structuration and his holistic view of modern societies.
Giddens also stressed the importance of power, which is means to ends, and hence is directly involved in the actions of every person. Power, the transformative capacity of people to change the social and material world, is closely shaped by knowledge and space-time.
Space, Time, Power…

30. The word comes from the Greek, katēgoria, meaning "that which can be said, predicated, or publicly declared and asserted, about something." A category is an attribute, property, quality, or characteristic that can be predicated of a thing.
In Kant's philosophy, a category is a pure concept of the understanding. A Kantian category is a characteristic of the appearance of any object in general, before it has been experienced.
Judgment -class, caste, gender, language, religion etc.
Categorization

31. “Essential” is “something without which we cannot do” and “necessary” is “something which is important but we can do without it.
Essential vs Necessary

32. The Communist Manifesto – Karl Marx
Das Capital-Karl Marx
The Poverty of Philosophy-Karl Marx
War and Peace-Leo Tolstoy
Anna Karenina-Leo Tolstoy
Critique of Pure Reason-Immanuel Kant
Economy and Society-Max Weber
Suicide-Émile Durkheim
Division of Labor in Society-Émile Durkheim
ইতিহাসে সোোঁৱৰা ৬০০টা বছৰ-েববানন্দ ৰাজকুমাৰ
Early History of The Vaishnava Faith And Movement in Assam :Shankardeva And His Time -Dr. Maheshwar Neog
Anglo-Assamese Relations; 1771-1826- S.K.Bhuyan
অতিযাত্ৰী-তনৰুপমা বৰস াহাতি
The Second Sex- Simone de Beauvoir(1949)
Critique of Judgment-Immanuel Kant(1790)
The Adventures of the Black Girl in Her Search for God (and Some Lesser Tales)-George Bernard Shaw
Scientific Edge: The Indian Scientist from Vedic to Modern Times-Jayant Vishnu Narlikar(2003)
Scientific Temper-B.K.Patnaik
The System of Economic Contradictions, or The Philosophy of Poverty- Pierre-Joseph Proudhon
Economy and Society-Max Weber(1922)
Books and Authors

33. Transcendental idealism is a doctrine founded by German philosopher Immanuel Kant in the 18th century. Kant's doctrine maintains that human experience of things is similar to the way they appear to us — implying a fundamentally subject-based component, rather than being an activity that directly (and therefore without any obvious causal link) comprehends the things as they are in and of themselves.
Transcendental idealism

34. The terms a priori ("from the earlier") and a posteriori ("from the later") are used in philosophy (epistemology) to distinguish two types of knowledge, justification, or argument.
A priori knowledge or justification is independent of experience (for example "All bachelors are unmarried"). Galen Strawson has stated that an a priori argument is one in which "you can see that it is true just lying on your couch. You don't have to get up off your couch and go outside and examine the way things are in the physical world. You don't have to do any science.“
A posteriori knowledge or justification is dependent on experience or empirical evidence (for example "Some bachelors I have met are very happy").
a priori vs a posteriori

35. Imagination can be classified as:
Voluntary -(the dream from the sleep, the daydream)
Involuntary -(the reproductive imagination, the creative imagination, the dream of perspective)

36. Domestic violence (closely related to domestic abuse, spousal abuse, battering, family violence and intimate partner violence) is a pattern of behavior which involves violence or other abuse by one person against another in a domestic context, such as in marriage or cohabitation. Intimate partner violence is domestic violence against a spouse or other intimate partner. Domestic violence can take place in heterosexual or same-sex relationships. Domestic violence can take a number of forms including physical, emotional, verbal, economic and sexual abuse, which can range from subtle, coercive forms to marital rape and to violent physical abuse that results in disfigurement or death. Globally, a wife or female partner is most commonly the victim of domestic violence, though the victim can also be the male partner, or both partners may engage in abusive or violent behavior, or the victim may act in self-defense or retaliation.
Domestic violence

37. Epistemology meaning "knowledge, understanding", and logos meaning "study of") is the branch of social science concerned with the nature and scope of knowledge and is also referred to as "theory of knowledge". It questions what knowledge is and how it can be acquired, and the extent to which knowledge pertinent to any given subject or entity can be acquired. Immanuel Kant
Epistemology

38. Auguste Comte
French;1798-1857
Karl Marx
German;1818-1883
Max Weber
German;1864-1920
Émile Durkheim
French;1858-1917
Bruno Bauer
Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel
Immanuel Kant
Saint Simon

39. Relationship between Concept and Theory

40. Interpretative sociology (verstehende Soziologie) is the study of society that concentrates on the meanings people associate to their social world. Interpretative sociology strives to show that reality is constructed by people themselves in their daily lives.
Verstehen roughly translates to "meaningful understanding" or putting yourself in the shoes of others to see things from their perspective.
Max Weber
Verstehen

41. Europe never had anything like a caste system. Descent mattered but was not decisive.
Holy men within Hinduism never had the sort of hierarchical organization possessed by the Christian Church. Also I don't think they ever overlapped into secular rule, which did happen with Europe.
Feudalism in India vs Feudalism in Europe

42. Relations of production is a concept frequently used by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels in their theory of historical materialism, and in Das Kapital. It is first explicitly used in Marx's published book The Poverty of Philosophy, although the concept is already defined in The German Ideology.
By "relations of production", Marx and Engels meant the sum total of social relationships that people must enter into, in order to survive, to produce and reproduce their means of life. As people must enter into these social relationships, i.e. because participation in them is not voluntary, the totality of these relationships constitute a relatively stable and permanent structure, the "economic structure".
Relations of production

43. The term "relations of production" is somewhat vague, for two main reasons:
1. The German word Verhältnis can mean "relation", "proportion", or "ratio". Thus, the relationships could be qualititative, quantitative or both. Which meaning applies, can only be established from the context.
2. The relations to which Marx refers can be social relationships, economic relationships, or technological relationships.