K Sanderson
Biographic Data
| ID | 15213 |
|---|---|
| NAME | K Sanderson |
| GIVEN NAMES | K |
| FAMILY NAME | Sanderson |
| SIGNATURE | SANDERSON K |
| AFFILIATIONS | Indiana University of Pennsylvania |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-4097-0496 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 58 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 87 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 58 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1977 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2022 |
| H-INDEX | 5 |
Book Reviewers and Their Victims: A Reply to Ambasciano
The article offers a rebuttal to Ambasciano’s commentary on my book Religious Evolution and the Axial Age (Sanderson 2018) included in this same issue of the Journal of Cognitive Historiography. Ambasciano gets much of my overall argument right, but on many specifics misunderstands or misrepresents me and others. One of his most consequential misrepresentations is his charge that I offer a kind of panadaptationism. I am an adaptationist, but cert…
Edward Westermarck
The first sociobiologist was not Edward O. Wilson but, rather, the Finnish sociologist Edward Westermarck. Far ahead of his time, at the turn of the 20th century, Westermarck presented Darwinian natural selectionist theories of numerous social phenomena, especially marriage and family practices across a wide range of societies and the evolution of moral emotions. Westermarck was revered in his time, and yet despite his brilliance and extraordinar…
Westermarck, Edward (1862–1939)
Edward Westermarck was a Finnish sociologist who taught at both the University of Helsinki and the London School of Economics. A major sociologist in the first third of the twentieth century, he was even better known and more widely read than Durkheim. His first important work was The History of Human Marriage , published in 1891. It was revised several times, the final edition appearing in 1922. His other major work was The Origin and Developmen…
Democracy
Genuinely democratic governments have flourished only in the past two centuries – and mostly within the past century. The four main characteristics of the most fully developed democracies are parliamentary or congressional bodies with a power base that is independent of presidents or prime ministers; the regular, free, and fair election of government officials, with the entire adult population having the right to vote; the responsibility of other…
Conflict Sociology: A Sociological Classic Updated
Modern Societies: A Comparative Perspective
Sociological Worlds: Comparative and Historical Readings on Society
Rethinking Sociological Theory: Introducing and Explaining a Scientific Theoretical Sociology
Stephen K. Sanderson s latest book recaptures a scientific theoretical sociology, one whose fundamental aim is the formulation of real theories that can be empirically tested. Sanderson reviews the major theoretical traditions within contemporary sociology, explicating their key principles, critically evaluating these principles and their applications, and showcasing exemplars. He judges each tradition by asking whether it has generated falsifiab…
The Israeli Kibbutzim and the Westermarck Hypothesis: Does Early Association Dampen Sexual Passion? A Comment on Shor and Simchai
Alive and well . . . or just alive? Rejoinder to Chase-Dunn and Lawrence
Chase-Dunn and Lawrence respond to a critique of world-systems analysis (WSA) made in 2005. In reply I suggest that WSA does in fact excessively privilege exogenous over endogenous factors; exaggerates the extent to which a core-periphery hierarchy is based on exploitation; fails to give due consideration to recent efforts showing that foreign investment promotes development in non-core societies; and is unduly optimistic about the possibilities …
Testing the Protestant Ethic Thesis with Quantitative Historical Data: A Research Note
Rejoinder #2 to Chase-Dunn and Lawrence’s Rejoinder #2
Chase-Dunn and Lawrence’s rejoinder to my rejoinder resorts to special pleading to defend WSA. They accept my argument that colonialism was not responsible for current underdevelopment in sub-Saharan Africa but contend that the slave trade was responsible. Empirical analyses show this not to be the case. They argue that Communist projects were not entirely negative because they brought peasants into the modern world. In fact, Communist projects d…
The Evolution of Religious Behavior in Its Socioecological Contexts
Adaptation, evolution, and religion
Neo-Darwinian theories of religion include both nonadaptationist and adaptationist versions. Nonadaptationist versions contend that the mental architecture of the brain is wired for religious thinking but that religious concepts have piggybacked on other cognitive adaptations, especially those for agency detection. Religious concepts are not evolved biological adaptations but rather by-products of more general cognitive structures that are adapta…
The Evolutionary Forms of the Religious Life: A Cross-Cultural, Quantitative Analysis
Previous cross-cultural studies of religion's evolution that employed Swanson's High Gods measure are plagued by methodological difficulties, especially the lack of proper statistical controls. Here, we attempted to rectify this, using the Standard Cross-Cultural Sample to test five hypotheses employing multivariate statistical techniques. Results provided weak support for Swanson's Sovereign Groups hypothesis concerning High Gods and also limite…
Hobhouse, L. T. (1864–1929)
Leonard Trelawney Hobhouse was born in 1864 in Cornwall, England. His father was rector of the local parish church, and his grandfather had been a distinguished barrister and public servant (Owen 1974). Educated at Corpus Christi College, Oxford, he became a tutor there in 1887. In 1907 he became the first person to hold the Martin White Chair of Sociology at the University of London. In addition to his academic career, Hobhouse spent time as a j…
Evolutionary sociology
Evolutionary sociology is the name given originally by Alexandra Maryanski to encompass two kinds of evolutionary perspectives in the field of sociology: the application of such Darwinian approaches as sociobiology and evolutionary psychology to understand the biological foundations of human society, and the description and explanation of long‐term social evolution
Sexual Practices
Sexual practices have varied widely across time and space. In the broadest terms, societies are either sex‐positive or sex‐negative , with the majority the former (Bullough 1976). The Trobriand Islanders of Melanesia were described by Malinowski as unusually sexually permissive. Sex life may begin for young boys as early as age 10 and for young girls as early as age 6. Polynesian societies were also renowned for their high levels of sexual permis…
Darwin, Charles (1809–1882)
Charles Robert Darwin was an English naturalist most famous for having developed one of the greatest theories of all time, the theory of evolution by natural selection. After finishing his degree at Cambridge in 1831, Darwin signed on as a naturalist aboard the HMS Beagle , a ship that would sail along both coasts of South America with the purpose of measuring the coastline. His five years aboard the Beagle played a tremendous role in the develop…
Conflict Theory
The term “conflict theory” came into wide use in sociology during the 1960s, when it was seen as an alternative to and rival of functionalism. Initially, the term seemed merely to identify a more politically neutral Marxian perspective, but for some it meant something much broader. The strongest contemporary advocate of conflict theory is Randall Collins. For him, conflict theory includes not only Marx and the Marxists, but also Weber and a numbe…
Science, Proof, and Law
Science seeks to describe, explain, and predict features of the natural and social worlds. Scientists try to develop theories or explanations of phenomena by means of producing bodies of empirical evidence that play a major role in determining whether theories are accepted, modified, or rejected. In general, scientists seek theories that are logically consistent, empirically testable, well supported by available empirical evidence (and not too se…
I>Bell Curve, the(Herrnstein and Murray)
Herrnstein and Murray's The Bell Curve (1994) is one of the most controversial and widely debated works of social science in the second half of the twentieth century. Almost instantly upon publication, the book set off a firestorm that took years to die down. What were the authors saying that was so incendiary? Their main arguments can be summarized approximately as follows. The US has increasingly evolved into a society stratified along the line…
Macrosociology: Four Modern Theorists
Evolutionary Theorizing
Gerhard Lenski and the Evolutionists
At age 81, Gerhard Lenski is one of sociology's most distinguished senior scholars. Lenski's latest book is a capstone work, a grand summary of his thinking over a period of more than four decades. Part I of the book is a very good overview of Lenski's evolutionary approach. It discusses his major epistemological and methodological assumptions, his assessment of human nature and its role in social life, his evolutionary classification of human hi…
World-Systems Analysis after Thirty Years: Should it Rest in Peace
World-systems analysis has had a major impact on the social sciences over the past three decades. Although originally developed within sociology, its influence has not only been extensive in that field, but has spread to such fields as anthropology and political science as well. This article attempts a new critical assessment of the world-systems paradigm. Its major accomplishments are seen as sixfold: its insistence on understanding the modern w…
The Evolutionary Forms of the Religious Life: A Cross-Cultural, Quantitative Analysis
Previous cross-cultural studies of religion's evolution that employed Swanson's High Gods measure are plagued by methodological difficulties, especially the lack of proper statistical controls. Here, we attempted to rectify this, using the Standard Cross-Cultural Sample to test five hypotheses employing multivariate statistical techniques. Results provided weak support for Swanson's Sovereign Groups hypothesis concerning High Gods and also limite…
Theoretical and political perspectives of American sociologists in the 1990s
Fertility decline in the modern world and in the original demographic transition: Testing three theories with cross-national data
Adaptation, evolution, and religion
Neo-Darwinian theories of religion include both nonadaptationist and adaptationist versions. Nonadaptationist versions contend that the mental architecture of the brain is wired for religious thinking but that religious concepts have piggybacked on other cognitive adaptations, especially those for agency detection. Religious concepts are not evolved biological adaptations but rather by-products of more general cognitive structures that are adapta…
The neo-Weberian revolution: A theoretical balance sheet
Current theoretical and political perspectives of Western sociological theorists
Evolutionism and its Critics
Evolutionary theories have held a prominent place in the history of the social sciences. Although there are many kinds of evolutionary theories, the essential element that they hold in common is their assumption that history is more than just a series of particular and unique events. On the contrary, the evolutionist assumption is that history reveals a certain directionality in the sense that there are similar processes occurrin g at similar tim…
The Israeli Kibbutzim and the Westermarck Hypothesis: Does Early Association Dampen Sexual Passion? A Comment on Shor and Simchai
An Evolutionary Interpretation of Fertility Decline: New Evidence
Evolutionary Materialism: A Theoretical Strategy for the Study of Social Evolution
Existing approaches to the study of social evolution are insufficient for the task of explaining the full range of social evolution from the Neolithic Revolution down to the present day. Some anthropological approaches shed considerable light on the evolution of preindustrial and precapitalist societies but are less capable of explaining the evolution of the modern world. Sociological approaches usually have the opposite result: they shed light o…
Edward Westermarck
The first sociobiologist was not Edward O. Wilson but, rather, the Finnish sociologist Edward Westermarck. Far ahead of his time, at the turn of the 20th century, Westermarck presented Darwinian natural selectionist theories of numerous social phenomena, especially marriage and family practices across a wide range of societies and the evolution of moral emotions. Westermarck was revered in his time, and yet despite his brilliance and extraordinar…
Conflict Theory
The term “conflict theory” came into wide use in sociology during the 1960s, when it was seen as an alternative to and rival of functionalism. Initially, the term seemed merely to identify a more politically neutral Marxian perspective, but for some it meant something much broader. The strongest contemporary advocate of conflict theory is Randall Collins. For him, conflict theory includes not only Marx and the Marxists, but also Weber and a numbe…
Militarist, Marxian, and Non-Marxian Materialist Theories of Gender Inequality: A Cross-Cultural Test
This study tested three types of theories of gender inequality in preindustrial societies by using half the societies in the Standard Cross-Cultural Sample: militarist, Marxian, and non-Marxian materialist theories. The first phase of the research used simple cross-tabulations with chi-square as a test of significance and gamma as a measure of association. The results from this phase showed no support for militarist theories, some support for Mar…
Historic European Household Structures and the Capitalist World-Economy
This study approaches the history of household patterns in early modern Europe from the perspective of Wallersteinian world-system theory. It is shown that the European core during this time was characterized predominantly by simple nuclear households. By contrast, the European periphery and semiperiphery were far more likely to be characterized by complex households. We explain these relationships in terms of the mode of labor control predominat…
Good to Eat: Riddles of Food and Culture
Group Marriage: A Study of Contemporary Multilateral Marriage
Cannibals and Kings: The Origins of Cultures
The Provincialism of Introductory Sociology
This article addresses the provincialism of most introductory sociology courses in this country. It suggests that the striking lack of comparative and historicalfocus in the introductory course is peculiar given such recent trends as the growing reconvergence of sociology and anthropology and the recent rise of historical sociology, as well as the fact that European sociology is notable for its strong comparative and historical outlook. Several s…
Sociology of Marriage and the Family: Gender, Love, and Property
Good to Eat: Riddles of Food and Culture
What kind of ecologist was Braudel? A comment on Hudson
Krippendorf's Tribe
The neo-Weberian revolution: A theoretical balance sheet
An Introduction to the World-System Perspective
Social Evolutionism: A Critical History
Historic European Household Structures and the Capitalist World-Economy
This study approaches the history of household patterns in early modern Europe from the perspective of Wallersteinian world-system theory. It is shown that the European core during this time was characterized predominantly by simple nuclear households. By contrast, the European periphery and semiperiphery were far more likely to be characterized by complex households. We explain these relationships in terms of the mode of labor control predominat…
In Search of Human Nature: The Decline and Revival of Darwinism in American Social Thought. Carl N. Degler
Theoretical and political perspectives of American sociologists in the 1990s
Social Evolutionism: A Critical History
1. The Nature of Social Evolutionism 2. Classical Evolutionism 3. The Antievolutionary Reaction 4. Marxism as Evolutionism 5. The Evolutionary Revival 6. Sociological Neoevolutionism 7. Anthropological Evolutionism since 1960 8. Evolutionary Biology and Social Evolutionism 9. Contemporary Antievolutionism 10. Toward a Comprehensive Theory of Sociocultural Evolution References
Evolutionary Materialism: A Theoretical Strategy for the Study of Social Evolution
Existing approaches to the study of social evolution are insufficient for the task of explaining the full range of social evolution from the Neolithic Revolution down to the present day. Some anthropological approaches shed considerable light on the evolution of preindustrial and precapitalist societies but are less capable of explaining the evolution of the modern world. Sociological approaches usually have the opposite result: they shed light o…
The Sociology of Social Change
Preface. Part I: Concepts and Categories:. 1. Fundamental Concepts in the Study of Change. 2. Vicissitudes of the Idea of Progress. 3. Temporal Dimension of Society: Social Time. 4. Modalities of Historical Tradition. 5. Modernity and Beyond. 6. Globalization of Human Society. Part II: Three Grand Visions of History:. 7. Classical Evolutionism. 8. Neo--evolutionism. 9. Theories of Modernization: Old and New. 10. Theories of Historical Cycles. 11.…
The Future of W. Warren Wagar
In his fascinat ing book "A Short History of the Future," published in 1992, W. Warren Wagar lays out a futuristic vision of the world over the next two hundred years that draws extensively on Inunanuel Wallerstein' s world-system theory. In the year 2001 began the last of the great Kondratieff upswings of the capitalist world-economy. That economy had come to be increasingly dominated by a few giant corporations, so that by 2015 12 "megacorps" h…
How Societies Change
Cultures and Societies in a Changing World
Social Transformations: A General Theory of Historical Development
Chapter 1 Evolutionary Material: A General Theory of Historical Development Chapter 2 The Neolithic Revolution Chapter 3 The Origin of Civilization and the State Chapter 4 Agrarian States and their Evolutionary Dynamics Chapter 5 The Capitalist Revolution and the Beginnings of the Modern World Chapter 6 The Evolution of the Modern World, I: The Expanding and Evolving Modern World-System Chapter 7 The Evolution of the Modern World, II: The Emergen…
Evolutionism and its Critics
Evolutionary theories have held a prominent place in the history of the social sciences. Although there are many kinds of evolutionary theories, the essential element that they hold in common is their assumption that history is more than just a series of particular and unique events. On the contrary, the evolutionist assumption is that history reveals a certain directionality in the sense that there are similar processes occurrin g at similar tim…
Macrodynamics: Toward a Theory on the Organization of Human Populations
East and West in the Development of the Modern World-System
In recent years the notion of ‘Eurocentrism’ has become a major theme of modern scholarship, especially in the study of the historical development of the modern world. More and more scholars seem to be coming to the viewpoint that modern historical scholarship has been crippled by the bias of a Eurocentric perspective. Europeans have overstressed their own importance, it is claimed, and have failed to notice that the contributions of non-European…
Civilizations and World Systems: Studying World Historical Change
chapter 1 Introduction chapter 2 I. CIVILIZATIONAL APPROACHES chapter 3 S. Sanderson, Introduction chapter 4 M. Melko, The Nature of Civilizations chapter 5 D. Wilkinson, Central Civilization chapter 6 W. Eckhardt, A Dialectical Evolutionary Theory of Civilizations, Empires, and Wars chapter 7 II. WORLD SYSTEMS APPROACHES chapter 8 S. Sanderson, T. Hall, Introduction chapter 9 C. Chase-Dunn, T. Hall, Cross-World-System Comparisons chapter 10 B. G…
Current theoretical and political perspectives of Western sociological theorists
Sociology (46 works) · Philosophy (29 works) · Political science (28 works) · Epistemology (27 works) · Law (20 works) · Philosophy (19 works) · Social science (18 works) · History (14 works) · Law (11 works) · Politics (11 works)