This volume represents a collection of three essays written by seminal sociologist and philsopher Emile Durkheim in which he puts forward the thesis that society is both a dynamic system and the seat of moral life.

This radical appraisal of Durkheim's method, first published in 1988, argues that fundamental errors have been made in interpreting Durkheim. Mike Gane argues that to understand The Rules it is necessary also to understand the context of the French society in which the book was written.

Raymond Plant emphasizes that 'community' has a wide range of both descriptive meanings and evaluative connotations, linking this dual role of the word in the description and evaluation of social experience to its history in ideological confrontations.

J A Hobson was one of the most influential social, economic and political theorists of late 19th- and early 20th-century Britain. This book provides an overview of the novelty and incisiveness of Hobson's contribution to British liberal theory and radical practice. It helps in understanding of early 20th-century British progressive thought.

Robert Owen and the Owenites were associated with the rise of an early industrial society in Britain and with the development of an agricultural, frontier society in the United States during the first half of the 19th century. This was the first book on Owen to use both British and American source material.

Antonio Gramsci is one of the few Marxist theoreticians to have considered the role and nature of education, yet paradoxically his revolutionary, political and social theory seems at odds with his conservative approach to the content and processes of schooling. This book examines his educational, political and cultural writings.

This book constitutes a genuinely comparative study of the world's only truly succesful democratic socialist parties: the Social Democratic Parties of Denmark, Norway and Sweden.

Offers an introductory discussion of the importance of sociological knowledge, and particularly sociological theory, for the understanding of political life. This title covers the topics that include sociology and the discipline of politics, the elementary forms of political life, and the relationship between theory, evidence and insight.

Offers a fresh approach to the study of pressure groups, whose importance in the British political system has been increasingly recognised. This book examines the theoretical approaches to an understanding of their role in the political process and presents a number of specific studies.

A collection of three essays that deals with the response of the philosophical mind to the world of reality, with the search for truth. It features an essay that study Descartes in three parts: analysing Descartes' philosophical operation, Descartes' Method, and the position of his philosophy within the historical context of philosophical thought.