This survey of sexual practices in the United States has been combed by the media for items of interest to the public: monogamous sex is much more widespread in this country than has been thought; infidelity is less frequent than presumed; vaginal intercourse is the defining experience of heterosexual behavior; watching one's partner undress is stimulating to many people; married couples have more sex than single people (unmarried, cohabiting couples have the most sex of all); the majority of couples experience sex twice a week to several times a month; 2.8% of men identify themselves as homosexual and 1.4% of women do so, but a higher percentage of people consider a same-gender experience to have some appeal; 75% of men always experience orgasm compared with 28.6% of women, but more nearly equal numbers of men and women declare themselves satisfied with their sexual experiences. The book is, in fact, a

The Social Organization of Sexuality: Sexual Practices in the United States

Why Men Rebel was first published in 1970 on the heels of a decade of political violence and protest not only in remote corners of Africa and Southeast Asia, but also at home in the United States. Forty years later, the world is riveted on uprisings in the Middle East, and the United States has been overtaken by a focus on international terrorism and a fascination with citizen movements at home and abroad. Do the arguments of 1970 apply today? Why Men Rebel lends new insight into contemporary challenges of transnational recruitment and organization, multimedia mobilization, and terrorism.

Why Men Rebel

1. The Purpose of this Book 2. Intentionality 3. Collective Intentionality and the Assignment of Function 4. Language as Bilogical and Social 5. The General Theory of Institutions and Institutional Facts: Language and Social Reality 6. Free Will, Rationality and Institutional Facts 7. Deontic, Background, Political and Other

Making the Social World: The Structure of Human Civilization

This review discusses North American and European research from the sociology of valuation and evaluation (SVE), a research topic that has attracted considerable attention in recent years. The goal is to bring various bodies of work into conversation with one another in order to stimulate more cumulative theory building. This is accomplished by focusing on (a) subprocesses such as categorization and legitimation, (b) the conditions that sustain heterarchies, and (c) valuation and evaluative practices. The article reviews these literatures and provides directions for a future research agenda.

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Toward a Comparative Sociology of Valuation and Evaluation

Some sociologists have recently argued that a major aim of sociological inquiry is to identify the mechanisms by which cause and effect relationships in the social world come about. This article ar...

A Pragmatist Theory of Social Mechanisms

The histories of all modern scientific and intellectual fields are marked by dynamism. Yet, despite a welter of case study data, sociologists of ideas have been slow to develop general theories for...

A General Theory of Scientific/Intellectual Movements:

This essay challenges those strains of contemporary social theory that regard romantic/ sexual intimacy as a premier site of detraditionalization in the late modern era. Striking changes have occurred in intimacy and family life over the last half-century, but the notion of detraditionalization as currently formulated does not capture them very well. With the goal of achieving a more refined understanding, the article proposes a distinction between “regulative” and “meaning-constitutive” traditions. The former involve threats of exclusion from various moral communities; the latter involve linguistic and cultural frameworks within which sense is made of the world. Focusing on the U.S. case and marshaling various kinds of empirical evidence, the article argues that while the regulative tradition of what it terms lifelong, internally stratified marriage has declined in strength in recent years, the image of the form of couplehood inscribed in this regulative tradition continues to function as a hegemonic ide...

The Detraditionalization of Intimacy Reconsidered

Durkheim's Philosophy Lectures: On the Immortality of the Soul

While appreciative of Searle's contributions, this commentary questions whether the core insights of The Construction of Social Reality advance all that much beyond the position staked out more than a century ago by Emile Durkheim. Durkheim, to be sure, was no analytic philosopher, but both Durkheim and Searle recognize the existence of something like collective representations, view a key feature of such representations as being that of imposing new statuses, powers, and meanings on objects, and accept that social institutions are composed of individual actors who act on the basis of this collective imposition of status functions. For this reason, some of the criticisms that may be levelled against Durkheim's approach to social ontology – for example, that it ignores situations where collective representations are intrinsically coercive in nature – may also apply to Searle.

http://journals.sagepub.com/doi/pdf/10.1177/1463499606061734

Comment on Searle

Moving back and forth between the history of philosophy and the contributions of philosophers in his own day, Durkheim takes up topics as diverse as philosophical psychology, logic, ethics, and metaphysics, and seeks to articulate a unified philosophical position Remarkably, in these lectures, given more than a decade before the publication of his groundbreaking book, The Division of Labour in Society (1893), the 'social realism' that is so characteristic of his later work - where he insists, famously, that social facts cannot be reduced to psychological or economic ones, and that such facts constrain human action in important ways - is totally absent in these early lectures For this reason, they will be of special interest to students of the history of the social sciences, for they shed important light on the course of Durkheim's intellectual development

Neil Gross

Papers

A General Theory of Scientific/Intellectual Movements:

The Detraditionalization of Intimacy Reconsidered

Durkheim's Philosophy Lectures: On the Immortality of the Soul

Comment on Searle

Durkheim's Philosophy Lectures: Notes from the Lycée de Sens Course, 1883–1884