Full Description
Societies consider certain institutions and activities as central, proper, and visible, while others are defined as peripheral, deviant, and private. Vilhelm Aubert takes us to the "hidden" societies: the privacy of love, the secrecy of the underground, the remoteness of a ship, the isolation of the ill, the retirement from social life into sleep, and similar fascinating topics.Vilhelm Aubert, a professor of sociology in the Law Faculty of Oslo University and a member of the board of directors of Oslo's famed Institute of Social Research, presents a theory of the hidden societies, a theory concerned with concepts such as time and space, causality, will, and' chance. Chapters on predictability and chance deal with lack of 6rder, with phenomena that appear meaningless or absurd from a point of view very prevalent in modern life. We are presented with a study of isolation as a sociological phenomenon - accepted or fostered by social action - and we see how the existence of lonely, private niches in a society serves, consciously or unconsciously, to satisfy-idiosyncratic needs of individual personalities.
Contents
1: The criminal and the sick; 2: Legal justice and mental health *; 3: Competition and dissensus: two types of conflict and of conflict resolution *; 4: Predictability in life and in science; 5: Chance in social affairs; 6: Sleep: a sociological interpretation * 1; 7: A note on love; 8: A total institution: the ship; 9: On the social structure of the ship; 10: Secrecy: the underground as a social system
