Overview
The paper will test your ability to analyze theoretical arguments. You will turn in a short, roughly two-to-three-page response paper that addresses the readings of that theme. With regard to paper questions, I would like you to ask and answer a question about what you see as the most important ideas in the readings. Understanding the readings well enough to ask a good question about them is part of the assignment.
To get credit for your work, it must be submitted in a format that I can open and read (docx, googledoc, or pdf). Messing with the margins or the type size or the font to shorten or lengthen the paper is a waste of my time and yours. Choose an argument that can fit in the page allowance and make it within the page allowance.Please include at the top of your paper the question you will be answering in the paper.
Your paper should include an introduction, which lays out the argument and the ways you will demonstrate the correctness of your argument, body paragraphs, which will follow the path you lay out in the introduction to prove your argument, and a conclusion, which will summarize the claims previously made and draw out their logical implications. Please do not include a quotation from a dictionary as the definitive proof of the meaning of a key term. Words change their meaning over time.
Citations and Sources: Every single idea that you reference that is not your own and every piece of information you cite must have a footnote or endnote. These citations must include the page number(s) where you found that particular idea or piece of information. Footnotes or endnotes should come at the end of the sentence. If you cite more than one source in a single sentence, you should include the source for each piece of information or idea in a single footnote in the order that they appear in the sentence. I realize that in sociology you often use parenthetical citations. I ask that you use footnotes, however, because several of the books that we have read have been published many times and when I see, for example (Marx, 1978, p. 75), it tells me very little about what text you are reading. I strongly encourage you to use the footnotes and endnotes function in the insert menu in MS Word for Mac, in the insert menu for Googledocs, or in the references menu in MS Word for Windows, instead of trying to format the footnote yourself. I expect your citations to be in a “history” format from the Turabian format in the Chicago Manual of Style (CMS). After you have cited a source for the first time, you may use the shortened forms described in the CMS. If you fail to cite the source for your information or ideas that are not your own, you will receive points off. If cite no sources, you will receive no points for the paper. If you cite no course readings, you will receive 75% of the possible points. Unless the source is for an institution that conducts serious research (like NASA) or a contemporary news article used to address a contemporary topic, I will treat all citations of websites as non-citations. If you cite a source not from the course readings, it must come from an academic press or a peer-reviewed journal. If you have questions, ask me ahead of time. These strict rules are a way to help you avoid…
Those texts are:Gateway Reading
Piketty, Thomas, and Emmanuel Saez. "Inequality in the Long Run." Science 344, no. 6186 (23 May 2014): 838-43.
Theoretical Reading
Sewell, William H. "A Strange Career: The Historical Study of Economic Life." History and Theory 49, no. 4 (2010): 146-66.
Theoretical Reading
Marx, Karl and Friedrich Engels. "Manifesto of the Communist Party [1848]." In The Marx-Engels Reader, edited by Robert C. Tucker, 469-501. New York: W. W. Norton, 1978.