Social Theory: A Historical Introduction
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Book Overview
The second edition of this remarkably lucid text, provides awide-ranging historical introduction to social theory. The newedition preserves, and further enhances, the book's strikingqualities - its clarity, reliability, comprehensiveness andscholarship. The theorists treated include Montesquieu, Adam Smithand the Scottish Enlightenment, Hegel, Marx, Tocqueville, Maistre, Gobineau, Darwin, Spencer, Kautsky, Nietzsche, Durkheim, Weber, Simmel, Freud, Lukacs, Gramsci, Heidegger, Keynes, Hayek, Parsons, the Frankfurt School, Levi-Strauss, Althusser, Foucault, Habermas, Bourdieu, Beck, and Giddens.
Callinicos examines the ways in which social theory grew out of theeighteenth century Enlightenment, a time when societies emerging inthe West ceased to invoke the authority of tradition to validatethemselves, instead looking to scientific knowledge to justifytheir mastery of the world. He traces social theory's connectionswith central themes in modern philosophy, with the development ofpolitical economy, and with the impact of evolutionary biology onsocial thought.
The book has been carefully updated to ensure that it engages withthe most up-to-date debates in social theory, and concludes with asubstantial new chapter. Here Callinicos assesses the significanceof contemporary debates about globalization, including the recentre-emergence of critiques of capitalism and imperialism in the workof Michael Hardt, Toni Negri, Luc Boltanski, Eve Chiapello, DavidHarvey, Robert Brenner, Giovanni Arrighi, and Slavoj Zizek.
This updated version of a widely praised text will be essentialreading for students of politics, sociology and social andpolitical thought.
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