The shock waves of conservative advances have reached into every corner of American and British politics. Parties of the right have prospered, while parties of the left have stumbled, retreated, and are now regrouping. The agenda for both right and left is set by the terms of the free-market doctrines that have displaced the post-war consensus politics of liberal capitalism.

This volume describes and challenges the ideological basis of the free-market right. Though critiques of the policies of the Reagan and Thatcher governments are hardly in short supply, this major new study...

Karl Mannheim s Ideology and Utopia has been a profoundly provocative book. The debate about politics and social knowledge that was spawned by its original publication in 1929 attracted the most promising younger scholars, some of whom shaped the thought of several generations. The book became a focus for a debate on the methodological and epistemological problems confronting German social science. More than thirty major papers were published in response to Mannheim s text. Writers such as Hannah Arendt, Ernst Robert Curtius, Max Horkheimer, Herbert Marcuse, Helmuth Plessner, Hans...

Two main criteria have guided the selection and presentation of the material for this text-book. Firstly, there is the claim that sociology is a science. Throughout, the emphasis has been on presenting sociological perspectives rather than conveying a mass of factual information. Science is essentially analytical. And sociology, if it is to justify its claim to be a science, must be more than simply 'political arithmetic', counting heads and providing demographic data for governments. Secondly, science, like other intellectual activities, can be exciting. The emphasis throughout is on the...

Max Weber's lecture 'Science as a Vocation' is a classic of social thought, in which central questions are posed about the nature of social and political thought and action. The lecture has often taken to be a summation of Weber's thought. It can also be argued that, together with the responses of its admirers and critics, it provides a focus for discussion of the nature of modernity and its political consequences, and of the philosophical and political implications of the social or human sciences. This volume provides a full, clear, revised translation of the lecture, together with...

This comprehensive study of Marcuse's thought concentrates on his theory of freedom, arguing that it is this which supplies the key to all his writings. This argument is substantiated by a detailed chronological examination of Marcuse's works. The author shows the rigorous logic underlying Marcuse's thinking, which is often obscured in Marcuse's own presentation, and pays particular attention to the influence of Heidegger, and of Marx's notion of human labour. This sympathetic reconstruction of the subject attempts to rescue Marcuse from misunderstanding and superficial criticism, and...

Sociologists and historians are not always the best of neighbours, each group tending to perceive the other in terms of the crudest of stereotypes. However, the two approaches are obviously complementary - change is structured, and structures change. Each discipline can free the other from its own kind of parochialism and the aim of this book is to bridge the gap between these tow subcultures, to give historians a more acute sense of structure and sociologists a more acute sense of change.

Keith Taylor has undertaken a thorough study of the full range of writings by the brilliant French thinker Henri Saint-Simon (1760-1825), including his unpublished manuscripts, and the result is the first comprehensive and truly representative selection in English from the works of this founding father of social science and socialism, whose ideas exerted a formative influence on such major and diverse intellectual figures as Comte, Proudhon, Marx and Engels, Herzen, Carlyle and Durkheim. When Saint-Simon's writings first appeared, they aroused little more than amusement and curiosity. The...

The term 'Frankfurt School' is used widely, but sometimes loosely, to describe both a group of intellectuals and a specific social theory. Focusing on the formative and most radical years of the Frankfurt School, during the 1930s, this study concentrates on the Frankfurt School's most original contributions made to the work on a 'critical theory of society' by the philosophers Max Horkheimer and Herbert Marcuse, the psychologist Erich Fromm, and the aesthetician Theodor W. Adorno.

Phil Slater traces the extent, and ultimate limits, of the Frankfurt School's professed...

In this book, Dr Heasman begins by stating some central questions and answers concerning sociology and how we are to set about studying society. It goes on to deal with family groupings and social differences; with education and the part it plays in socialization; with the meaning and the importance of social differences; and with the relative importance of work and leisure and the ways in which leisure can be used. It considers the effects of the change in the size of the population in the last hundred years upon social life in Britain, examines the problems of social change and looks at...