From the “missing fragment” to the “lost manuscript ”: Reflections on Parsons’s engagement with Simmel

Building a strong programme in sociological aesthetics: Helmut Staubmann’s Sociology in a New Key

“…In many respects, HS's approach parallels that of what Eduardo de la Fuente (2007Fuente ( , 2011 has called "the new sociology of art". Like Staubmann, the scholars who Fuente classifies as practitioners of the new sociology of art criticise the reductionism of much mainstream sociology of art, whether the production of culture perspective of Howard Becker with its strong opposition between social organizational and aesthetic approaches (Becker, 1982, xi) or Pierre Bourdieu's 'science of art ' (1993), with its aspiration to replace the claims of art history and aesthetics with the underlying 'social truth' that the motivations for social practices such as visiting art museums are simply euphemised transformations of more fundamental economic and political dispositions involving the accumulation of cultural capital by means of which, through strategies of conversion into the underlying economic base, social hierarchy can be transmitted across generations (Bourdieu, 1984). New sociologists of art have taken the social agency of art more seriously, seeing art as something more than merely the end product of social determinants or the repeater of more fundamental social processes such as class reproduction.…”