ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on the theorists whose work has the greatest application to cultural criticism. Sociology is the study of groups and institutions and the role they play in various aspects of our societies. The classical sociologists of the nineteenth century were interested in everything from suicide to the role of Calvinism in capitalism, from how people relate to one another to the roles social institutions play in our everyday lives. For human beings, society is a primary reality, not just the sum of individual activities, not the contingent manifestations of Mind; and if one wishes to study human behavior, one must grant that there is a social reality. In short, sociology, linguistics, and psychoanalytic psychology are possible only when one takes meanings which are attached to and which differentiate objects and actions in society as a primary reality, as facts to be explained and since meanings are a social product, explanation must be carried out in social terms.
