recommended:
Engels, Fredrick The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State 1884
particularly Chapter 2.4 (anthropologists should also read the Preface to the Fourth Edition (1891))

 

These notes are the last in a series of eleven lecture for my class Dynamics of the Family.
[created April 7, 2001]

Issues of policy: On (social) science and politics

From personal beliefs

to constitutive acts by the State

necessarily based on a political ideology thereby made hegemonic, that is consequential for everyday experience

and to different types of resistance (in all people, whatever their personal beliefs or class position).

 

Reconstituting social science as intimately involved (rhetorically and authoritatively) with ideology (from M. Weber to feminist deconstruction) and yet inconclusive, and so perhaps "objective" (if carefully constructed to reveal its own ideological groundings) by being displaced from positions of authority.