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This introduction provides an overview of the life, career, and social thought of Gerhard Lenski. Following a preliminary description of Lenski's contributions, this essay is divided into two sections.
- Bernice Mc Nair Barnett
- 2004
In this paper I will summarize Lenski's ecological-evolutionary theory using both works as my primary source. He begins, as most theorists do, by making a simple assertion about the nature of man. 1. Man is by nature, a social animal who engages in "antagonistic cooperation" in order to maximize her need satisfaction.
Here, Lenski went against the tide of Western sociological thought heavily influenced by Marxist ideas at the time, pointing to critical flaws in Marxian theory, especially its fundamental optimistic assumptions about the nature of human nature and about its promise of freedom and affluence to the masses.2 Lenski argued that Marxist
Feb 20, 2021 · In his books, Power and Privilege and Human Societies: An Introduction to Macrosociology, Lenski expands on the works of Leslie White and Lewis Henry Morgan. He views technological progress as the most basic factor in the evolution of societies and cultures.
Gerhard Lenski offers among the most general and ambitious of sociologies. His ecological-evolutionary theory seeks to address the following question: "How can we explain the process of growth and development of individual human societies and the world-system of societies over the history of humankind?" (Lenski, Nolan, and Lenski 1995:70).
An important feature of Lenski's theory has been his emphasis on the need for a broadly inclusive approach in theory building. In a 1988 article, he argued that macrosociological theory should be based on our knowledge of the entire universe of human societies, past as well as present, and should seek to explain the major features of that ...
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Gerhard Lenski in Power and Privilege (1966) classified societies on the basis of their main tools of subsistence and, unlike Marx, demonstrated statistically that variations in the primary tools used in a given society systematically accounted for different types of social stratification systems.
