Autonomy And Social Structures Essay
Autonomy and social structures
Word autonomy is derived from the latin words autos meaning “self” and “nomos” meaning “rule”. It expresses a self-governance and leading one’s life according to reasons, values, or desires that are authentically one’s own (Taylor 2015). However what we can call an authentically one`s own is still an open question.
In social science, the interplay between context and autonomy of the person is one of the key issues. Are human beings determined by the social structures or do they determine them? Several of the famous social scientists and thinkers such as Karl Marx, Antonio Gramsci, Pierre Bourdieu, Anthony Giddens and others deal with such questions in order to understand autonomy of human beings.
Gramsci and Marx provide a deterministic approach of social structures towards individuals autonomy. According to Gramsci, autonomy of human beings is restricted by hegemony. Hegemony is a world view, which is created by dominant groups in order to justify their interests. Within the social system, people accept the dominant worldview as their own because this ideology is constantly inculcated to the individuals through institutions such as family, education, religion and media. From childhood , the mind of people is influenced by the institutions which say what is right, wrong, logical, non logical, moral and unmoral. Individuals acquire knowledge about these values and if the ideologies of these institutions are coherent, the perspectives …show more content…
Because most of people accept the dominant worldview in their society as a reality, this dominant ideology then naturally leads toward limitation of other perspectives explaining realities. Hereby, a dominant worldview suppress other ways of explaining reality and autonomy of people is thus rather hypothetic (Gramsci
Word autonomy is derived from the latin words autos meaning “self” and “nomos” meaning “rule”. It expresses a self-governance and leading one’s life according to reasons, values, or desires that are authentically one’s own (Taylor 2015). However what we can call an authentically one`s own is still an open question.
In social science, the interplay between context and autonomy of the person is one of the key issues. Are human beings determined by the social structures or do they determine them? Several of the famous social scientists and thinkers such as Karl Marx, Antonio Gramsci, Pierre Bourdieu, Anthony Giddens and others deal with such questions in order to understand autonomy of human beings.
Gramsci and Marx provide a deterministic approach of social structures towards individuals autonomy. According to Gramsci, autonomy of human beings is restricted by hegemony. Hegemony is a world view, which is created by dominant groups in order to justify their interests. Within the social system, people accept the dominant worldview as their own because this ideology is constantly inculcated to the individuals through institutions such as family, education, religion and media. From childhood , the mind of people is influenced by the institutions which say what is right, wrong, logical, non logical, moral and unmoral. Individuals acquire knowledge about these values and if the ideologies of these institutions are coherent, the perspectives …show more content…
Because most of people accept the dominant worldview in their society as a reality, this dominant ideology then naturally leads toward limitation of other perspectives explaining realities. Hereby, a dominant worldview suppress other ways of explaining reality and autonomy of people is thus rather hypothetic (Gramsci