This book is a groundbreaking attempt to rethink the landscapes of the social world and historical practice by theorizing social haunting: the ways in which the social forms, figures, phantasms and ghosts of the past become present to us time and time again.

Examining the relationship between historical practices such as archaeology and archival work in order to think about how the social landscape is reinvented with reference to the ghosts of the past, the author explores the literary and historical status and accounts of the ghost, not for what they might tell us about...

This book looks at the phantasms and spirits of classical social science and philosophy, including Hegel’s ‘World-Spirit’, Weber’s ‘Verstehen’ and Marx’s phantasms, exploring the relationships and interactions between those spirits and materiality across five broad themes.