Goffman's analytic framework can provide tools useful for a critical theory of modern society. While commentators have remarked on Goffman's apparent technical neutrality, a sociology of humor can help reveal his critical thrust. Using a latent content analysis, we demonstrate how several frames found in Jerry Seinfeld's humor are both dramaturgical and covertly critical. We use these themes to illuminate the critical analyses of modern social life provided by Goffman's method.

Both Goffman's dramaturgical paradigm and the humor of the television program

This is the first of two articles that investigate Marx’s method of successive abstractions, an approach that merges dialectical sensibilities with scientific procedures. This first article explains Marx’s techniques of concept construction and use of constants and variables in his comparative analysis of modes of production. The second article applies the method of successive abstractions to a historical-materialist sociology of religion.

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Professor of Sociology at Eastern Kentucky University. He has published several works on Marxist theory, method, and political economics, including Marx's Scientific Dialectics (Brill, 2007). Many scholars see science and politics as mutually exclusive realms, where the latter's influence contaminates former's purity. Karl Marx's critics often interpret him within this framework, where his value-laden judgments render his analysis of capitalism moot. Though defenders argue that Marx rejects an objective-subjective dichotomy, this book offers a different interpretation. Through the method of critique Marx examines problems and biases in putatively neutral forms of scientific knowledge, specifically models that fail to capture the relations of power and knowledge dominant in capitalist society. By incorporating these relations into his abstractions and tracing their historical movement, Marx's corrective to malformed approaches to scientific knowledge more readily lays bare capitalist society's exploitative and distortive nature. This book demonstrates these principles and applies them to conventional sociological methods, theories of religion, and class analysis.