This work aims to show that sociology is indeed an art form, one that had strong kinship with literature, painting, Romantic history, and philosophy in the 19th century, the age in which sociology came into full stature.

""One of our most original social thinkers,"" according to the New York Times, Robert Nisbet offers a new approach to sociology. He shows that sociology is indeed an art form, one that has a strong kinship with literature, painting, Romantic history, and philosophy in the nineteenth century, the age in which sociology came into full stature. Sociology as an Art Form is an introduction for the initiated and the uninitiated in so-ciology.Nisbet explains the degree to which sociology draws from the same creative impulses, themes and styles (rooted in history), and actual modes of representa-tion found in the arts. He shows how the founding sociologists such as Marx, Weber, Durkheim, and Simmel constructed portraits (of the bourgeois, the worker, and the intellectual) and landscapes (of the masses, the poor, the factory system), all reflecting and contribut-ing to identical portraits and landscapes found in the literature and art of the period. In addition to marking the similarities between sociologists' and artists' efforts to depict motion or movement, Nisbet emphasizes the relation of sociology to the fin de siecle in art and literature, with examples such as alienation, anomie, and degeneration. He creates an elegant, brilliantly reasoned appraisal of sociology's contribution to modern culture.This book will be of interest to sociologists, artists, and anyone interested in how the fields relate to one another.

In this highly influential study of art forms as models for a theory of communications, Hugh Dalziel Duncan demonstrates that without understanding of the role of symbols in society, social scientists cannot hope to develop adequate models for social analysis. He reviews critically major contributions to communication theory during the past century: Freud's analysis of dream symbolism, Simmel's concept of sociability, James' insights into religious experience, and Dewey's relating of art to experience.

During the age of Enlightenment music aestheticians first became actively interested in the relationship between music and numerous other branches of intellectual activity. By the late nineteenth century, however, there had been a proliferation of sophisticated musicological research techniques by positivists primarily preoccupied with scientific concepts of music as sound. Such an approach tended to detach music from its cultural and social environment. Throughout the twentieth century numerous theories on music aesthetics have returned to concepts of musical meaning and communication that were common practice during the Enlightenment. To avoid becoming defunct, music aesthetics has had to move in new directions to cope with the changing and diverse phenomena of musical experience in contemporary society. An aesthetic evaluation of popular music as an 'art' form undoubtedly demands the formulation of some aesthetic theory. -- from http://www.jstor.org (Feb. 3, 2014).

This timely book details the theoretical and practical elements of political rhetoric and their effects on the interactions between politicians and the public. Expert contributors explore the issues associated with political rhetoric from a range of disciplinary perspectives, including political science, linguistics, social psychology and communication studies. Chapters examine what makes a speech effective, politicians’ use of moral appeals in political advertising, political attacks on social media, and gender and emotion in political discourse.