One of the foremost religious and social philosophers of the twentieth century, Martin Buber also wrote extensively on sociological subjects, particularly as these affected his philosophical concerns. Collected here, these writings offer essential insights into the human condition as it is expressed in culture and society.
Buber's central focus in his sociological work is the relation between social interaction, or intersubjectivity, and the process of human creativity. Specifically, Buber seeks to define the nature and conditions of creativity, the conditions of authentic...

S. N. Eisenstadt, one of the world's leading social theorists, provides a monumental synthesis of Japanese history, religion, culture, and social organization. Equipped with a thorough command of the literature, Eisenstadt explores the Japanese historical legacy and its impact on the Japanese experience of modernity. Eschewing the polemicism of structuralist or culturalist approaches, he expands his investigative framework to include a keenly systematic, broadly comparative analysis. What emerges is an innovative new construction, focusing on the nonideological character of Japanese...

The form of social relations described by the terms 'patronage' and 'patron-client relations' is of central concern to sociologists, anthropologists and political scientists today. Characterised by its voluntary and highly personal but often fully institutionalised nature, it is a type of behaviour found in almost every human society. It touches upon basic aspects of the construction and regulation of social order and is therefore closely connected to major theoretical problems and controversies in the social sciences.

This book analyses some special types of these interpersonal relations...

The overarching theme of the book is the historical meaning of the Axial Age, commonly defined as a period of several centuries around the middle of the last millennium BCE, and its cultural innovations. The civilizational patterns that grew out of this exceptionally creative phase are a particularly rewarding theme for comparative analysis.
The book contains essays on cultural transformations in Ancient Greece, Ancient Israel, Iran, India and China, as well as background developments in the core civilizations of the Ancient Near East. An introductory section deals with the history of the...

The reconstructed histories of interaction between Europe and the New World introduced here cast new light on the nature of the early modern world. This fresh perspective will grab the attention of historians, sociologists and social theorists alike.

This book is a major comparative analysis of fundamentalist movements in historical and cultural context, spanning revolutionary France, America and Japan, with an emphasis on the contemporary scene. Leading sociologist S. N. Eisenstadt examines the protofundamentalist movements that arose in the great "axial civilizations" in premodern times in order to illuminate the meaning of the global rise of fundamentalism that is shown to be an important current in modernity. The central theme of the book is the distinctively Jacobin features of fundamentalist movements and their ambivalent attitude...

This book deals with triumphant and tragic heroes, with victims and perpetrators as archetypes of the Western imagination. A major recent change in Western societies is that memories of triumphant heroism-for example, the revolutionary uprising of the people-are increasingly replaced by the public remembrance of collective trauma of genocide, slavery and expulsion. The first part of the book deals with the heroes and victims and explores the social construction of charisma and its inevitable decay. Part 2 focuses on a paradigm case of the collective trauma of perpetrators: German national...

First published in 1998. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

Dieses Buch gibt einen erstklassigen Uberblick uber die Forschungen von Shmuel N. Eisenstadt. Anschaulich stellt Eisenstadt dabei seine Positionen uber den sozialen Wandel, uber die Einheit und die Vielfalt der Moderne vor. Im Mittelpunkt stehen dabei in diesem Buch die "groen Revolutionen."