Olin Library: Sociology: Social Theorists e-Books

Venturing into Usefulness, the second volume of The Selected Papers of Jane Addams, documents the experience of this major American historical figure, intellectual, social activist, and author between June 1881, when at twenty-one she had just graduated from Rockford Female Seminary, and early 1889, when she was on the verge of founding the Hull-House settlement with Ellen Gates Starr. During these years she evolved from a high-minded but inexperienced graduate of a women's seminary into an educated woman and seasoned traveler well-exposed to elite culture and circles of philanthropy.

The Stars Down to Earth shows us a stunningly prescient Adorno. Haunted by the ugly side of American culture industries he used the different angles provided by each of these three essays to showcase the dangers inherent in modern obsessions with consumption.

Cecilia Sjoholm reads Hannah Arendt as a philosopher of the senses, grappling with questions of vision, hearing, and touch even in her political work. Constructing an Arendtian theory of aesthetics from the philosopher's fragmentary writings on art and perception, Sjoholm begins a vibrant new chapter in Arendt scholarship that expands her relevance for contemporary philosophers. Arendt wrote thoughtfully about the role of sensibility and aesthetic judgment in political life and on the power of art to enrich human experience. Sjholm draws a clear line from Arendt's consideration of these subjects to her reflections on aesthetic encounters and works of art mentioned in her published writings and stored among her memorabilia.

23 collected interviews with the renowned French philosopher and cultural commentator, Jean Baudrillard This new collection gathers 23 highly insightful yet previously difficult-to-find interviews with Baudrillard, ranging over topics as diverse as art, war, technology, globalisation, terrorism and the fate of humanity.

"Considered one of the most influential and articulate figures in American anthropology, Ruth Benedict (1887-1948) was trained by Franz Boas and Elsie Clews Parsons and collaborated with the equally renowned anthropologist Margaret Mead, a student of hers with whom she was for a time romantically involved. When Benedict died suddenly at the age of sixty-one, she was popularly known for two best-selling works: Patterns of Culture, which became an exemplary model of the integration of societies, and The Chrysanthemum and the Sword, a study of Japanese culture commissioned by the U.S. government during World War II." "Benedict's lasting contribution to anthropology, however, cannot be appreciated solely through her more famous works. Equally innovative were her unpublished or little-noticed writings, which covered such topics as cross-cultural attributes of free societies, the national cultures of Thailand and Romania, and the comparison of Asian consensus politics with American political patterns. This biography by one of Benedict's last graduate students, Virginia Heyer Young, draws on these works, on Benedict's correspondence and collaborative work with Margaret Mead, and on unpublished course notes.

This book is the summation of many decades of work by Peter L. Berger, an internationally renowned sociologist of religion. Secularization theory--which saw modernity as leading to a decline of religion--has been empirically falsified. It should be replaced by a nuanced theory of pluralism. In this new book, Berger outlines the possible foundations for such a theory, addressing a wide range of issues spanning individual faith, interreligious societies, and the political order. He proposes a conversation around a new paradigm for religion and pluralism in an age of multiple modernities. The book also includes responses from three eminent scholars of religion:Nancy Ammerman, Detlef Pollack, and Fenggang Yang.

First published in 2011. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

In this posthumous volume, renowned sociologist Herbert Blumer analyzes George Herbert Mead's position in the study of human conduct. Engaged with Mead's work for over half a century, Blumer explored Mead's ideas for developing the theoretical and methodological position of symbolic interactionism, a term that Blumer would later introduce. Although Blumer focused on the sociological and social psychological implications of Mead's pragmatism, his objective was to explore social processes embodied in and formed through social action.

The work of Pierre Bourdieu, one of the most influential French intellectuals of the twentieth century, has had an enormous impact on research in fields as diverse as aesthetics, education, anthropology, and sociology. Pierre Bourdieu: Fieldwork in Art, Literature, and Culture is the first collection of essays to focus specifically on the contribution of Bourdieu's thought to the study of cultural production.

A Times Higher Education Book of the Week, Judith Butler elucidates the dynamics of public assembly under prevailing economic and political conditions, analyzing what they signify and how. Understanding assemblies as plural forms of performative action, Butler extends her theory of performativity to argue that precarity--the destruction of the conditions of livability--has been a galvanizing force and theme in today's highly visible protests."Butler's book is everything that a book about our planet in the 21st century should be. It does not turn its back on the circumstances of the material world or give any succour to those who wish to view the present (and the future) through the lens of fantasies about the transformative possibilities offered by conventional politics Butler demonstrates a clear engagement with an aspect of the world that is becoming in many political contexts almost illicit to discuss: the idea that capitalism, certainly in its neoliberal form, is failing to provide a liveable life for the majority of human beings."--Mary Evans, Times Higher Education

The author of this text claims that psychoanalysis offers in its clinical goals and its vision of possibility insight into the nature of subjectivity and the quality of good relations with others. It continues centuries of reflection and imagination about the good life.

As the American economy surged in the 1990s, economic sociology made great strides as well. Economists and sociologists worked across disciplinary boundaries to study the booming market as both a product and a producer of culture, tracing the correlations they saw between economic and social phenomena. In the process, they debated the methodological issues that arose from their interdisciplinary perspectives.

W. E. B. Du Bois was a public intellectual, sociologist, and activist on behalf of the African American community. He profoundly shaped black political culture in the United States through his founding role in the NAACP, as well as internationally through the Pan-African movement. Du Bois's sociological and historical research on African-American communities and culture broke ground in many areas, including the history of the post-Civil War Reconstruction period. Du Bois was also a prolific author of novels, autobiographical accounts, innumerable editorials and journalistic pieces, andseveral works of history.Written in very accessible prose, these two booklets, originally published in 1930, allowed W. E. B. Du Bois to reach a wide audience with an interest in Africa. What is so incredible about the two Africa booklets is their lasting relevance and value to the study of Africa today.

Moving back and forth between the history of philosophy and the contributions of philosophers in his own day, Durkheim takes up topics as diverse as philosophical psychology, logic, ethics, and metaphysics, and seeks to articulate a unified philosophical position. Remarkably, the 'social realism' that is so characteristic of his later work - where he insists, famously, that social facts cannot be reduced to psychological or economic ones, and that such facts constrain human action in important ways - is totally absent in these early lectures. For this reason, they will be of special interest to students of the history of the social sciences, for they shed important light on the course of Durkheim's intellectual development.

This book locates Elias's work clearly within the development of sociology and also against the background of current debates. Between the 1930s and the 1980s he developed a unique approach to social theory which is now beginning to take root in contemporary social research and theory. Since the translation of his work into English began to accelerate in the 1980s, a growing number of books and articles on topics including health, sexuality, crime, national and ethnic identity, femininity and globalization, in a variety of disciplines, make positive reference to Elias as an authority on the history of emotions, identity, violence, the body and state formation.

Deleuze and Foucault had a long, complicated and productive relationship, in which each was at various times a significant influence on the other. This collection combines 3 original essays by Deleuze and Foucault, in which they respond to each other's work, with 16 critical essays by key contemporary scholars working in the field. The result is a sustained discussion and analysis of the various dimensions of this fascinating relationship, which clarifies the implications of their philosophical encounter.

World-renowned Critical Theorist, activist, psychoanalyst, and public Marxist intellectual, Erich Fromm (1900-1980) played a pivotal role in the early Frankfurt Institute for Social Research and influenced emancipatory projects in multiple disciplines. While he remains popularly well known as author of such best-selling books as Escape from Freedom and The Art of Loving, Fromm's contribution to Critical Theory is now being rediscovered. Fromm's work on messianism in the 1950s-1970s responded to earlier debates among early twentieth century German Jewish thinkers and radicals, including Hermann Cohen, Rosa Luxemburg, Martin Buber, Gershom Scholem, and Georg Lukcs. The return to Fromm, as well as growing interest in Jewish messianism's influence on the Frankfurt School, makes this book timely. Fromm's bold defense of radical hope and trenchant critique of political catastrophism are more relevant than ever.

Clifford Geertz (1926-2006) was perhaps the most influential anthropologist of our time, but his influence extended far beyond his field to encompass all facets of contemporary life. Nowhere were his gifts for directness, humor, and steady revelation more evident than in the pages of the New York Review of Books, where for nearly four decades he shared his acute vision of the world in all its peculiarity. This book brings together the finest of Geertz's review essays from the New York Review along with a representative selection of later pieces written at the height of his powers, some that first appeared in periodicals such as Dissent, others never before published. This collection exemplifies Geertz's extraordinary range of concerns, beginning with his first essay for the Review in 1967, in which he reviews, with muffled hilarity, the anthropologist Bronislaw Malinowski. This book includes Geertz's unflinching meditations on Western academia's encounters with the non-Western world, and on the shifting and clashing places of societies in the world generally.

Before the current global era it is impossible to imagine that comparable events [like September 11] could have occurred, reflecting as they do our new-found interdependence. The rise of global terrorism, like world-wide networks involving in money-laundering, drug-running and other forums of organised crime, are all parts of the dark side of globalisation.' From the new Preface This book is based on the highly influential BBC Reith lecture series on globalisation delivered in 1999 by Anthony Giddens. Now updated with a new chapter addressing the post-September 11th global landscape, this book.

Anthony Giddens is widely recognized as one of the most important sociologists of the post-war period. This is the first full-length work to examine Giddens' social theory. It guides the reader through Giddens' early attempt to overcome the duality of structure and agency. He saw this duality as a major failing of social theories of modernity. His attempt to resolve the problem can be regarded as the key to the development of his brandmark `structuration theory'.

Why is America again unjustly at war? Why is its politics distorted by wedge issues like abortion and gay marriage? Why is anti-Semitism still so powerfully resurgent? Such contradictions within democracies arise from a patriarchal psychology still alive in our personal and political lives in tension with the equal voice that is the basis of democracy. This book joins a psychological approach with a political-theoretical one that traces both this psychology (based on loss in intimate life) and resistance to it (based on the love of equals) to the Roman Republic and Empire and to three Latin masterpieces: Virgil's Aeneid, Apuleius's The Golden Ass, and Augustine's Confessions. In addition, this book explains many other aspects of our present situation including why movements of ethical resistance are often accompanied by a freeing of sexuality and why we are witnessing an aggressive fundamentalism at home and abroad.

Erving Goffman is considered by many to have been one of the most important sociologists of the post-war era. His close observation of everyday life and his concern with the ways in which people play roles and manage the impressions they present to each other led to his pioneering creation of a new dramaturgical perspective for sociology. His later analysis explored the field of deviance and many of his works in this area are now considered as sociological classics, including Asylums, The Presentation of the Self in Everyday Life and Stigma. This collection brings together many of today's leading sociologists to pursue and build upon the diverse aspects of Goffman's legacy. The contributors present chapters on key topics of Goffman's work. Issues covered include: * mental illness and institutionalism * the incorporation of literary intertexts in Goffman's writings * Goffman's relationship to ethnomethodology * the singularity of Goffman's ethnography

In Confronting Gouldner James J. Chriss analyses the critical theory of sociologist Alvin W. Gouldner, exploring such issues as social justice, marriage and family, religion, political activism, public sociology, deviance and crime, and the problem of the communist dictator.

"This selection was first published in 1974 in issues no. 25 & 26 of the New Edinburgh Review, a quarterly paperback journal of literature and ideas that became the Edinburgh Review in 1984"

Translated by William Mark Hohengarten

Feminist theorist and philosopher Donna Haraway has substantially impacted thought on science, cyberculture, the environment, animals, and social relations. This long-overdue volume explores her influence on feminist theory and philosophy, paying particular attention to her more recent work on companion species, rather than her "Manifesto for Cyborgs." Margret Grebowicz and Helen Merrick argue that the ongoing fascination with, and re-production of, the cyborg has overshadowed Haraway's extensive body of work in ways that run counter to her own transdisciplinary practices. Sparked by their own personal "adventures" with Haraway's work, the authors offer readings of her texts framed by a series of theoretical and political perspectives: feminist materialism, standpoint epistemology, radical democratic theory, queer theory, and even science fiction.

SUBJECT: Homans, George Caspar, 1910-1989.

Fararo studies general theoretical sociology as a time-extended tradition with three phases: classical, postclassical, and recent. Employing a process philosophical approach, the author seeks to examine these three phases in an effort to provide a synthesis of the theories that seek to lay the foundations of theoretical sociology. The author especially focuses on the work of Talcott Parsons and George Homans, two contemporary theorists whose common aspiration was to forge a theoretical foundation for sociology that would serve to unify and integrate all theories growing out of sociological research in much the same way that the theory of evolution guides and integrates all other biological theories.

Dialectic of Enlightenment is undoubtedly the most influential publication of the Frankfurt School of Critical Theory. Written during the Second World War and circulated privately, it appeared in a printed edition in Amsterdam in 1947. "What we had set out to do," the authors write in the Preface, "was nothing less than to explain why humanity, instead of entering a truly human state, is sinking into a new kind of barbarism."Yet the work goes far beyond a mere critique of contemporary events. Historically remote developments, indeed, the birth of Western history and of subjectivity itself out of the struggle against natural forces, as represented in myths, are connected in a wide arch to the most threatening experiences of the present.

This book demonstrates that people's basic values and beliefs are changing, in ways that affect their political, sexual, economic, and religious behaviour. These changes are roughly predictable: to a large extent, they can be interpreted on the basis of a revised version of modernisation theory presented here. Drawing on a massive body of evidence from societies containing 85 percent of the world's population, the authors demonstrate that modernisation is a process of human development, in which economic development gives rise to cultural changes that make individual autonomy, gender equality, and democracy increasingly likely.

Arguing that death is the central force shaping our social life and order, Michael Kearl draws on anthropology, religion, politics, philosophy, the natural sciences, economics, and psychology to provide a broad sociological perspective on the interrelationships of life and death, showing howdeath contributes to social change and how the meanings of death are generated to serve social functions. Working from a social as well as a psychological perspective, Kearl analyzes traditional topics, including aging, suicide, grief, and medical ethics while also examining current issues such asthe impact of the AIDS epidemic on social trust, governments' use of death symbolism, the business of death and dying, the political economy of doomsday weaponry, and death in popular culture.

Reassembling the Social is a fundamental challenge from one of the world's leading social theorists to how we understand society and the 'social'.Bruno Latour's contention is that the word 'social', as used by Social Scientists, has become laden with assumptions to the point where it has become misnomer. When the adjective is applied to a phenomenon, it is used to indicate a stablilized state of affairs, a bundle of ties that in due coursemay be used to account for another phenomenon. But Latour also finds the word used as if it described a type of material, in a comparable way to an adjective such as 'wooden' or 'steely'.

Henri Lefebvre is now recognized as one of the most influential social theorists of the Twentieth Century. In English, his writings on cities, everyday life, and the production of space have become hugely influential across Cultural Studies, Sociology, Geography and Architecture. Henri Lefebve: Key Writings presents for the first time the full range of Lefebvre's thought. The selection reinforces the centrality of Lefebvre to current debates in social and spatial theory but also sets Lefebvre's work in the context of his broader philosophical and political concerns. The extracts are divided into sections, each separately introduced by the editors: Philosophy and Marxism; The Critique of Everyday Life; The Country and the City; History, Time and Space; Politics. Nearly all the extracts presented here are new translations and most have never appeared in English before. Henri Lefebvre (1901 - 1991) held a range of academic posts both in France and America and wrote over seventy books including The Production of Space and Critique of Everyday Life.

Levi-Strauss measures the short distance between "complex" and "primitive" societies and finds a shared madness in the ways we enact myth, ritual, and custom. Yet he also locates a pure and persistent ethics that connects the center of Western civilization to far-flung societies and forces a reckoning with outmoded ideas of morality and reason.

This first volume of Niklas Luhmann's two-part final work was initially published in German in 1997. The culmination of his thirty-year theoretical project to reconceptualize sociology, it offers a comprehensive description of modern society on a scale not attempted since Talcott Parsons. Beginning with an account of the fluidity of meaning and the accordingly high improbability of successful communication, Luhmann analyzes a range of communicative media, including language, writing, the printing press, and electronic media as well as "success media," such as money, power, truth, and love, all of which structure this fluidity and make communication possible.

Distinguishing four sources of power - ideological, economic, military and political - this series traces their interrelations throughout human history. This fourth volume covers the period from 1945 to the present, focusing on the three major pillars of post-war global order: capitalism, the nation-state system and the sole remaining empire of the world, the United States. In the course of this period, capitalism, nation-states and empires interacted with one another and were transformed. Mann's key argument is that globalization is not just a single process, because there are globalizations of all four sources of social power, each of which has a different rhythm of development.

Herbert Marcuse is one of the most influential thinkers of our time. Born in Berlin, Marcuse studied philosophy with Husserl and Heidegger at the Universities of Freiburg and Berlin. Marcuse's critical social theory ingeniously fuses phenomenology, Freudian thought and Marxist theory; and provides a solid ground for his reputation as the most crucial figure inspiring the social activism and New Left politics of the 1960s and 1970s. The largely unpublished work collected in this volume makes clear the continuing relevance of Marcuse's thought to contemporary issues. The texts published here, dealing with concerns during the period 1942-1951, exhibit penetrating critiques of technology and analyses of the ways that modern technology produces novel forms of society and culture with new modes of social control.

Roberts situates Martineau's controversial writing in its historical context and presents a sophisticated scholarly analysis of their predominantly hostile reception.

Jeffrey Isaac is James H. Rudy Professor of Political Science and Director of the Center for the Study of Democracy and Public Life at Indiana University, and Editor in Chief of the journal Perspectives on Politics. He lives in Bloomington, IN.

In this posthumous volume, renowned sociologist Herbert Blumer analyzes George Herbert MeadOs position in the study of human conduct. Engaged with MeadOs work for over half a century, Blumer explored MeadOs ideas for developing the theoretical and methodological position of symbolic interactionism, a term that Blumer would later introduce. Although Blumer focused on the sociological and social psychological implications of MeadOs pragmatism, his objective was to explore social processes embodied in and formed through social action. Envisioning individual and collective social action as ongoing accomplishments achieved through symbolic interaction, Blumer insisted on grounding scholarly knowledge about the human condition in the empirical world of peopleOs experiences.

This title examines the remarkable life of Margaret Mead. Readers will learn about her family background, childhood, education, development of anthropological theories, and societal contributions. Color photos, detailed maps, and informative sidebars accompany easy-to-read, compelling text. Features include a timeline, facts, additional resources, web sites, a glossary, a bibliography, and an index. Essential Lives is a series in Essential Library, an imprint of ABDO Publishing Company. Grades 6-9.

From the names of cruise lines and bookstores to an Australian ranch and a nudist camp outside of Atlanta, the word serendipity--that happy blend of wisdom and luck by which something is discovered not quite by accident--is today ubiquitous. This book traces the word's eventful history from its 1754 coinage into the twentieth century--chronicling along the way much of what we now call the natural and social sciences. The book charts where the term went, with whom it resided, and how it fared. We cross oceans and academic specialties and meet those people, both famous and now obscure, who have used and abused serendipity. We encounter a linguistic sage, walk down the illustrious halls of the Harvard Medical School, attend the (serendipitous) birth of penicillin, and meet someone who "manages serendipity" for the U.S. Navy.

C. Wright Mills was a radical public intellectual, a tough-talking, motorcycle-riding anarchist from Texas who taught sociology at Columbia University. Mills's three most influential books--The Power Elite, White Collar, and The Sociological Imagination--were originally published by OUP andare considered classics. The first collection of his writings to be published since 1963, The Politics of Truth contains 23 out-of-print and hard-to-find writings which show his growth from academic sociologist to an intellectual maestro in command of a mature style, a dissenter who sought toinspire the public to oppose the drift toward permanent war. Given the political deceptions of recent years, Mills's truth-telling is more relevant than ever.

This volume is designed as a contribution to the synthesis of theory ineconomics and sociology. We believe that the degree of separationbetween these two disciplines separation emphasized by intellectualtraditions and present institutional arrangements arbitrarily concealsa degree of intrinsic intimacy between them which must be brought tothe attention of the respective professional groups.

High school and the difficult terrain of sexuality and gender identity are brilliantly explored in this smart, incisive ethnography. Based on eighteen months of fieldwork in a racially diverse working-class high school, Dude, You're a Fag sheds new light on masculinity both as a field of meaning and as a set of social practices. C. J. Pascoe's unorthodox approach analyzes masculinity as not only a gendered process but also a sexual one. She demonstrates how the "specter of the fag" becomes a disciplinary mechanism for regulating heterosexual as well as homosexual boys and how the "fag discourse" is as much tied to gender as it is to sexuality.

Barack Obama's galvanizing victory in 2008, coming amid the greatest economic crisis since the 1930s, opened the door to major reforms. But the president quickly faced skepticism from supporters and fierce opposition from Republicans, who scored sweeping wins in the 2010 midterm election. Here, noted political scientist Theda Skocpol surveys the political landscape and explores its most consequential questions: What happened to Obama's "new New Deal"? Why have his achievements enraged opponents more than they have satisfied supporters? How has the Tea Party's ascendance reshaped American politics? Skocpol's compelling account rises above conventional wisdom and overwrought rhetoric.

Georg Simmel developed a "form" method for the newly revived field of sociology, drawing on the subjectivity/objectivity dialectic. While his book's organization differs from that of contemporary texts, his method remains implicit in the field to this day.

This is the first edition in any language of all of Max Weber's writings on academic and political vocations. The translation is new and liberally annotated, including a look at Weber's personality and what it was that made him such a phenomenon. Max Weber made many significant interpretations of both academic and political vocations in his two lectures on Science as a Vocation (Wissenschaft als Beruf, 1917) and Politics as a Vocation (Politik als Beruf) 1919), as well as in a series of newspaper articles including those written between 1908 and 1920. Since these writings are of more than historical interest, there was a need to bring them all together in a single volume.

Max Weber's best-known and most controversial work, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, first published in 1904, remains to this day a powerful and fascinating read. Weber's highly accessible style is just one of many reasons for his continuing popularity. The book contends that the Protestant ethic made possible and encouraged the development of capitalism in the West. Widely considered as the most informed work ever written on the social effects of advanced capitalism, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism holds its own as one of the most significant books of the twentieth century. The book is one of those rare works of scholarship which no informed citizen can afford to ignore.