What Social Theory Can Learn from Hans Gerth and C. Wright Mills’s Character and Social Structure: The Psychology of Social Institutions

Abstract

I emphasize the usefulness of American sociology that follows the pragmatic structural-functionalism of the 1930’s, heavily influenced by the Chicago School of Sociology, by doing a major critique of Hans Gerth and C. Wright Mills, Character and Social Structure: The Psychology of Social Institutions, emphasizing its holistic and pragmatic qualities, as well as its relation to the work of Max Weber. I then follow up with a critique of French and German social theory, based to a large extent on Louis Dumont, Essays on Individualism: Modern Ideology in Anthropological Perspective. I suggest the usefulness of supplementing what I consider to be their unpragmatic tendencies, particularly with their approaches to the relation between social structure and self-fulfillment, and here I consider the work of Jűrgen Habermas to be only a partial corrective.