This research will examine how major social theorists cast light on the experience of African Americans as described in books on the status of race relations in the U.S., by Andrew Hacker and Stephen and Abigail Thernstrom, respectively. The research will set forth the context for application of social theory to the two books and then discuss how theories of social structure can be employed to illuminate or explain certain assumptions and attitudes that inform each book.
It could be argued that there are as many definitions of social structure as there are commentators defining it, and the problem of definition and interpretation of observed conditions of human society (and of critique of such definition and interpretation) reaches back at least as far as Rousseau, who answers such earlier commentators as Aristotle and Hobbes (Rousseau, Inequality 39, 41, 53, et passim). In defining what he terms the social compact, Rousseau posits the ideal framework of a society organized according to his Social Contract. In Inequality, Rousseau makes a case against a social contract embedded with fundamental inequalities of experience within a given society.
There is no doubt that intellectual currents in Western philosophy and economics, notably the insights of Enlightenment thinkers such as Rousseau, influenced subsequent analysts. There is evidence of direct connection between Rousseau's declaration at the beginning of his Social Contract (141) that man is born free but everywhere is in chains, and the declaration at the end of the Manifesto that powerless workers of the world must unite because they have nothing to lose but their chains (Marx 46). Similarly, Rousseau's statement (Inequality 60) "The first person who, having enclosed a plot of land, took it into his head to say this is mine and found people simple enough to believe him, was the true founder of civil society," is undoubtedly the Enlightenment ancestor of the Manifesto's...