This book explores the influence of Foucault's later writings on basic theoretical and research concerns in the social sciences. The introduction contextualizes the development of Foucault's writings within a biographical frame and leads into Foucault's College de France lecture, Kant on Enlightenment and Revolution which, along with Colin Gordon's commentary, raises the issues crucial to Foucault's latter project - the relationship between reason and liberty. The answer suggested - involving a reformulation of the relationship between the subject and power - connects with the issues raised...

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.

The work of Michel Foucault, one of the most influential of modern French social theorists and philosophers, has had a dramatic and far-reaching effect on many disciplines. The essays in this reissued collection, originally published in 1986, present Foucault's work as an important contribution to the theoretical analysis of history, language and power. They also represent a critical response to this contribution, encouraging readers not only to read Foucault for themselves, but to think about some new problems in a new way.

The essays brought together here are of two kinds: first, essential essays by Durkheim and Mauss which reveal the radical ambitions of Durkheimian social theory, and second, a number of complementary essays which explore the scope and limits of this sociological tradition. The central essay of the collection, written by Marcel Mauss, concerns the analysis of the Bolshevik experiment in its early years. Although Mauss argued that the Bolsheviks did not understand the importance of the market he was not for the abolition of the soviets. Indeed he offers the remarkable interpretation that the...