How is a social decision made out of individual members' decisions? This is one of the primary questions in the social sciences. Logic and Social Choice provides an answer to the topic by the application of mathematical logic. Yasusuke Murakami formulates social decision-making in logical terms, and shows that an analysis of social decision is equivalent to a logical calculus in many-valued logic. The logical conditions are then derived for various types of societies, especially for democracy. This foundation enables the author to discuss such topics as the relation between direct democracy...
How is a social decision made out of individual members' decisions? This is one of the primary questions in the social sciences. Logic and Social Choi...
The studies which comprise this book are essentially organized around a critical encounter with European social theory in its 'classical period' - i.e. from the middle years of the nineteenth century until the First World War - and have the aim of working out some of the implications of that encounter for the position and prospects of the social sciences today. The issues involved relate to the following series of problems: method and epistemology; social development and transformation; the origins of 'sociology' in nineteenth-century social theory; and the status of social science as...
The studies which comprise this book are essentially organized around a critical encounter with European social theory in its 'classical period' - i.e...
There is today widespread recognition of the fact that the future of human civilization depends to a high degree upon Man's capacity to understand the forces and factors which control his own behaviour. Such understanding must be achieved, not only as regards individual conduct, but equally as regards the mass phenomena resulting from group contacts, which are becoming increasingly intimate and influential. Until this present volume, nowhere have the three sciences of sociology, psychology and social anthropology been properly mobilized to deal with the social problems which yearly grow more...
There is today widespread recognition of the fact that the future of human civilization depends to a high degree upon Man's capacity to understand the...
Professor Rex's controversial book concerns not only those who are professional sociologists but all thinking people who live in the modern world. One of the objects of sociology is to give 'power to the people', to make a contribution to the understanding of political problems. Rex writes from a deep conviction that sociology is a subject whose insights should be made available to the great mass of the people, so that they may liberate themselves from the mystification of social reality that is continually and routinely presented to them through the media, by those who exercise power and by...
Professor Rex's controversial book concerns not only those who are professional sociologists but all thinking people who live in the modern world. One...
These essays, commissioned by John Rex, reflect the state of sociology in Britain today. Leading representatives of the diverse 'schools' provide lucid accounts of their own particular approaches to this complex discipline and in doing so demonstrate the techniques described. Topics covered include the empirical study of stratification, social evolution, survey techniques, mathematical sociology, systems theory, phenomenological approaches, Weberian sociology, structuralism, contemporary Marxism, and the development of theory after Talcott Parsons.
These essays, commissioned by John Rex, reflect the state of sociology in Britain today. Leading representatives of the diverse 'schools' provide l...
Professor John Rex was one of Britain's most eminent sociologists, and a teacher of a whole generation of sociology students. In this book he presents a stimulating introduction to the major issues of sociological theory and gives an account of the perspective which has informed his thinking and writing. He deals with the objectives of sociological investigation, the methods it uses and how in these respects it resembles or differs from natural science and history. He goes on to discuss the work of Weber, Durkheim, Marx, Engels, Mills and other important theorists, and concludes with a...
Professor John Rex was one of Britain's most eminent sociologists, and a teacher of a whole generation of sociology students. In this book he presents...
Auguste Comte proclaimed himself the founder of sociology and, on the whole, this claim is accepted. His most important work is the six-volume Cours de Philosophie Positive of which this present book is a selective abridgement. Comte, as this selection shows, was a methodological visionary. He was an eminently successful terminological innovator and to him we owe not only 'sociology' and 'positivism' but also 'biology' and 'altruism'. Professor Andreski, in his lucid introduction, assesses Comte's place under six headings, as scientist, philosopher, sociological theorist, sociological...
Auguste Comte proclaimed himself the founder of sociology and, on the whole, this claim is accepted. His most important work is the six-volume Cours d...
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...
Keith Taylor has undertaken a thorough study of the full range of writings by the brilliant French thinker Henri Saint-Simon (1760-1825), including hi...
This volume provides a fascinating perspective on the social sciences through its examination of the leading proponents, their ideas and careers. It includes useful suggestions for further reading. All the great names in the history of the subject are here - Freud, Marx, Weber, Adam Smith and so on - along with many less prominent but nevertheless important thinkers.
This volume provides a fascinating perspective on the social sciences through its examination of the leading proponents, their ideas and careers. I...
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...
Karl Mannheim's Ideology and Utopia has been a profoundly provocative book. The debate about politics and social knowledge that was spawned ...