Durkeim's book on suicide, first published in 1897 is widely regarded as a classic text, and is essential reading for any student of Durkheim's thought and sociological method. This book examines the continuing importance of Durkheim's methodology. The chapters cover such issues as the use of statistics, explanation of suicide, anomi and religion and the morality of suicide. This book should be of interest to scholars of Durkheim's thought and sociologists looking for a fresh methodological perspective.

The Intellectual as Stranger explores the historical association between images of the intellectual and those of the stranger, or the outsider to society. Using detailed case-studies, Pels examines the ambiguous strangerhood of political intellectuals such as Marx, Durkheim, Sorel, Freyer and Hendrik de Man.

A striking characteristic of modern knowledge society is the rapid spread of certain ideas and concepts back and forth from everyday to scientific discourses, and across many different contexts of meaning. This work attempts to open up a new road to the study of these dynamics of knowledge. Sociologists of knowledge and recently evolutionary theorists have offered explanations that either attribute social attention to particular ideas or shifts of meaning to the predominance of certain groups. Maasen and Weingart, however, offer a radical new explanation that explores knowledge dynamics by...

Throughout the history of social thought, there has been a constant battle over the true nature of society, and the best way to understand and explain it. This volume covers the development of methodological individualism, including the individualist theory of society from Greek antiquity to modern social science. It is a comprehensive and systematic treatment of methodological individualism in all its manifestations.

Post-Marxism is now a well-established theoretical position concerned with rescuing aspects of Marxist thought from the collapse of Marxism as a global, cultural and political force. Marxism has now generally come to be regarded as a discredited system of thought, carrying with it a burden of authoritarianism and totalitarianism which is at odds with the current commitment to cultural pluralism and libertarianism. This book traces the crystallisation of post-Marxism as a specific theoretical position in its own right and considers the role played in its development by post-structuralism,...

At first sight, Karl Marx and Ludwig Wittgenstein may well seem to be as different from each other as it is possible for the ideas of two major intellectuals to be. Despite this standard conception, however, a small number of scholars have long suggested that there are deeper philosophical commonalities between Marx and Wittgenstein. They have argued that, once grasped, these commonalities can radically change and enrich understanding both of Marxism and of Wittgensteinian philosophy. This book develops and extends this unorthodox view, emphasizing the mutual enrichment that comes from...

The German philosophers Gadamer and Habermas shared an idea of the process of understanding as a 'dialogue' between the researchers of other cultures and the subjects whose lives and actions they study. This book offers a new challenge to their central theory and questions the validity of the basic thesis they hold in common by critically re-examining their views of earlier figures in the German hermeneutic tradition.

The Politics of Atrocity and Reconciliation examines contemporary political violence and atrocity in the context of the crisis of the nation-state. It explores the way violence is used to unmake the social world and how its product: suffering, is used to try to remake the social world. Humphrey considers both the unmaking of the world through torture, war, urbicide and ethnic cleansing and the resultant remaking of the world through testimony and witnessing in the forums of truth commissions and trials. The discussion thus moves from terror to trauma.

A critical and provocative exploration of the political, conceptual and cultural points of resonance between Deleuze's minor politics and Marx's critique of capitalist dynamics, engaging with Deleuze's missing work, The Grandeur of Marx.
This book explores the core categories of communism and capital in conjunction with a wealth of contemporary and historical political concepts and movements - from the lumpenproletariat and anarchism, to Italian autonomia and Antonio Negri, immaterial labour and the refusal of work. This book will serve as an introduction to Deleuze's politics...