1800s: Martineau · Tocqueville · Marx · Spencer · Le Bon · Ward · Pareto · Tönnies · Veblen · Simmel · Durkheim · Addams · Mead · Weber · Du Bois · Mannheim · Elias Discourse is a generalization of the notion of a conversation to any form of communication.
Following work by Michel Foucault, these fields view discourse as a system of thought, knowledge, or communication that constructs our world experience.
In sociology, discourse is defined as "any practice (found in a wide range of forms) by which individuals imbue reality with meaning".
[6] Modernist theorists focused on achieving progress and believed in natural and social laws that could be used universally to develop knowledge and, thus, a better understanding of society.
[9] Discourse and language transformations are ascribed to progress or the need to develop new or more "accurate" words to describe discoveries, understandings, or areas of interest.
[9] In modernist theory, language and discourse are dissociated from power and ideology and instead conceptualized as "natural" products of common sense usage or progress.
[9] Modernism further gave rise to the liberal discourses of rights, equality, freedom, and justice; however, this rhetoric masked substantive inequality and failed to account for differences, according to Regnier.
The term discursive formation identifies and describes written and spoken statements with semantic relations that produce discourses.
As a researcher, Foucault applied the discursive formation to analyses of large bodies of knowledge, e.g. political economy and natural history.
The sociologist Iara Lessa summarizes Foucault's definition of discourse as "systems of thoughts composed of ideas, attitudes, courses of action, beliefs, and practices that systematically construct the subjects and the worlds of which they speak.