Cohen, Albert
COHEN, ALBERT (–), French novelist whose four outstanding novels, written over a period of four decades, form one of the most outspoken series in modern Jewish literature. Cohen, who was born in Corfu, was educated in France, then studied law in Geneva, where he became active in various international organizations and pursued a sporadic literary career. His first published work was a volume of poems, Paroles juives (), whose tone, by turns violent, opulent, tender, and lyrical, foreshadowed that of his later writing. In , with the encouragement of Chaim *Weizmann, Cohen founded a short-lived periodical, La Revue juive. He later became the Zionist Organization's delegate to the League of Nations. During the Nazi occupation Cohen fled to London, where he became the Jewish Agency's special representative to the Allied governments in exile. After the defeat of the Nazis, he worked at the un headquarters of the International Refugee Organization.
The most important themes in Cohen's writings are the problem of personal integrity in a world of untruth, the eternal message of Israel to humankind, and the place of the Jew in the modern world. These themes recur in
Cohen: Status Frustration ()
Cohen set out to develop Merton's strain theory and particularly to address questions about why groups commit crimes and why people commit non-utilitarian crimes. In doing so he developed a theory about subcultures.
The key to subcultural theories is that actually deviants conform to norms and values, they just happen to be different norms and values from the rest of society.
Cohen argued that working-class boys often failed at school resulting in a low status. A response to this was the formation of subcultures or gangs with values that were largely the reverse of mainstream values. What was deemed taboo or deviant in mainstream society was praiseworthy and good in the subculture. Likewise what was considered praiseworthy in mainstream culture was deviant and discouraged in the subculture.
Cohen's theory sought to explain delinquency among particular groups in society (young, working-class males) and non-utilitarian crimes. Crimes like vandalism or fighting can be explained by the subcultures inverting the values of mainstream society, turning socially deviant acts into ones that are praiseworthy and a way of achieving status within the g
Albert Cohen
Albert Cohen
Albert Cohen was one among several prominent sociologists in the s and early s who focused their attention on the formation and activities of lower class male gang delinquents. Cohen characterized the behavior of these gangs as being non-utilitarian, malicious, and negativistic. By non-utilitarian, he meant that their delinquent activities do not seem oriented toward a purpose. When delinquents steal, for example, they usually are not stealing anything that will be of use to them; instead, they seem to steal at random, take things they do not need, and often destroy those things. By malicious, he meant that they seem to take pride in being “just plain mean.” And by negativistic, Cohen meant that these juvenile gangs seem to take the dominant middle class norms, turn them upside down, and do the opposite of what is expected of them. Cohen writes,
The same spirit is evident in playing hooky and in misbehavior in school. The teacher and her rules are not merely something onerous to be evaded. They are to be flouted. There is an element of active spite and malice, contempt and ridicule, challenge and defiance, exquisitely symbolized, in an incid
Albert K. Cohen - Biography
Albert K. Cohen (June 15, , Boston, Massachusetts, U.S.A.) is a prominent American criminologist. He is known for his Subcultural Theory of delinquent urban gangs, including his influential book Delinquent Boys: Culture of the Gang. He has served as Vice President of the American Society of Criminology, and in he received the society's Edwin H. Sutherland award.
Work
Albert Cohen was a student of Talcott Parsons and wrote a Ph.D. under his inspiration. Parsons and Cohen continued to correspond also after Cohen left Harvard. Cohen wrote about delinquent gangs and suggested in his theoretical discussion how such gangs attempted to "replace" society’s common norms and values with their own sub-cultures. He proposed two basic ideologies, the first of which is called status frustration.
Status frustration is directed mainly to the young people of lower classes. There is no parallel between their own social realities and the rest of society's promoted goals. They become frustrated at the disadvantages and inequalities that they face, and this leads to Cohen’s second principle; reaction formation.
Reaction formation is the reaction from status
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