Examines key texts in the emergence of social theory as a coherent body of thought, defined in part by the idea that society has a distinctive logic of its own that comes from society itself. Students will read works by Adam Smith, Alexis de Tocqueville, Karl Marx, Georg Simmel, Emile Durkheim, Max Weber, Simone de Beauvoir, WEB DuBois, and Karl Polanyi. Through close reading and discussion, students will trace the development of sociological theory from its origins in the latter 18th century through the founding of the discipline of Sociology in the early 1900s to the recasting of central understandings that emerged around the middle of the 20th century.