Max Weber and Michael Foucault are among the most controversial and fascinating thinkers of our century. This book is the first to jointly analyse them in detail, and to make effective links between their lives and work; it coincides with a substantial resurgence of interest in their writings.

The author's exciting interpretative approach reveals a new dimension in reading the work of Foucault and Weber; it will be invaluable to students and those researching in sociology and philosophy.

Illness as a Work of Thought is a practical application of Foucault's archaeological and genealogical methods of the study of illness and modernity. From medicine and psychiatry to psychology and the social sciences, Monica Greco explores what the history of these different disciplines contributes to what we understand by the term 'psychosomatics' and analyses how the study of psychosomatic illness can transform the way we think of illness, subjectivity and the ethics and politics of health.

This text aims to revise the understanding of 18th-century British culture and its relation to the rational culture of present-day economics and social science. Wendy Motooka explores a rich variety of 18th century literary writing, including Henry Fielding and Laurence Sterne, and moral philosophy/political economy, including Adam Smith. In joining imaginative literature, moral philosophy and the emerging scientific rationalism, Motooka examines the meaning of reason and of its putative opposite, sentimentalism, arguing controversially that the legacy of sentimentalism is social science.

By exploring the writings of Mandeville, Hume and Smith, this book offers a critique of Hayek's theory of cultural evolution and explores the roots of his powerful defence of liberalism.
This book is an original contribution to the debate, and vital reading for researchers in politics, political theory, and economics.

This text uses the philosophy of Wittgenstein as a perspective from which to challenge the very idea of critical social theory, represented pre-eminently by Giddens, Habermas and Bhaskar. Renouncing the quest for an alternative Wittgensteinian theory of social and political life, the author shows that Wittgenstein nevertheless has considerable significance for critical thought and practice.

This book reconstructs and brings together the work of a number of social and political theorists in order to gain new insight on the emergence and character of modern Western society. It examines the intersection point of social theory and historical sociology in a new theoretical approach called "reflexive historical sociology."

There is analysis of the works of Max Weber, Michel Foucault, Norbert Elias, Eric Voegelin and a number of others. The book is divided into three parts. Part 1 examines the works of Eric Voegelin, Norbert Elias, Lewis Mumford and Franz Borkenau. Part 2 is...

Durkheim's sociological thought is based on the premise that the world cannot be known as a thing in itself, but only through representations, rough approximations of the world created either individually or collectively. This set of papers by leading Durkheimians from Britain, America and continental Europe is a concentrated attempt to understand what he meant by representations, how his understanding of the term was influenced by Kant and by neo-Kantians like Charles Renouvier and how his use of the concept in his work developed over time. By arguing that his use of representations is at...

The author of this book defends the theory that human nature is in fact an historical phenomenon. Drawing on the work of Marx and Hegel, he develops a historical account of human needs and powers which provides the basis for a distinctive form of Marxist humanism. According to this view, human beings are not merely passive individual consumers; they are active, social and productive beings. The first half of the book explores the role work plays in our lives and how it contributes to our fulfilment. The moral and social implications of these ideas are analyzed in the second half in the...

The synthesis of Marx and Foucault has traditionally been seen within the social sciences as deeply problematic. The author overturns this received wisdom by subjecting both thinkers to an original re-reading through the lens of the philosophy of critical realism.
The result is an illuminating synthesis between Marx's social relations of production and Foucault's disciplinary power from which the author constructs a model of the material causes of our capacity to act. The laws of motion of a society and its microphysics are shown to be complementary parts of a theory of capital, society's...

This reader offers students an overview of some of the most significant sociological work on gender produced over the last three decades of the 20th-century. The text is informed by an understanding of gender as both a structural social division and a set of everyday social practices. The readings cover both theoretical and empirical work representing a range of perspectives and each section includes selections which address the intersection of gender with differences of race, class and sexuality.