To add to Apoptosis's reply - Durkheim and Marx are not "discredited", either. Obviously few modern historians accept Marx's theory of history holus bolus, but his theories of ideology, and of the way in which a capitalist economy transforms both social relations and the experienece of social relations, remain highly influential.
The whole idea that the hand mill creates feudalism and the steam mill creates capitalism is indeed largely discredited (except for lingering baby boomers in sociology departents.) The very idea that we are largely determined by collectively unconscious societal movements (materialistically or not) didn't have much truck when I was a history undergrad. Especially if you take it to the extremes of believing that certain societies thought in anthropomorphic ways or in abstract symbolic ways.
What you actually find if you look at history is that nuanced and sophisticated ideas can exist in all times and places. Sure we discover new things, even develop tools for reasoning such as the scientific method. However, we are just as much determined by our conscious mind as our unconcious. None of this should be surprising given that for all our vaulted technology, we still use tools with our manual dexterity just like our earliest ancestors.
Durkheim's account of the way in which moderntiy differs from pre-modernity, and in particular that social life in modernity has certain characteristics resulting from atrophy of the collective consciousness, also remains influential, even if no one believes every single word that Durkheim wrote.
Yeah, if the idea that we share some sort of species memory or shared societal mind is also definately discredited.
I'll grant the guy in the previous post that Freud's general approach for treating psychological problems through therapy is still influential. However, I think he'll also agree that habit is a far more likely determinent of human action than supposed "suppressed neurosis". In fact, you have to dig pretty deep to find anything of value in Freud's writings on the unconcious at all. When you get to Freud trying to be a historian, it gets particularly bad because all of these guys didn't see anything wrong with using made-up conjecture. Freud's theory on the origin of religion for example, posits that we have a race memory stretching back to when we were man-apes who killed the alpha male because he was hoarding all the sexual access to females. They then worshipped a "god" figure to alleviate their guilt.
For all of these turn of the century social philosophers/scientists when I say that they are largely discredited I don't mean that it is impossible to find a few pearls strewn among the pig
. However, it is still a whole lot of pig
, because their methodologies were bad and their research sloppy, even for their time.
I would leave everyone who followed in the footsteps of G.W.F Hegel to the historians to catalogue, and instead read people who have collected those pearls for us and actually use the methodologies which make them credible experts. I would read Joseph Campbell not as an authority on myth or the psychology of myth, but rather as an indicator of how seriously people in academic circles took Jungian psychology 60 years ago.
