'A strength of the book is its effective balancing of essays that critique traditional religious structures and those that construct radical new modes of thinking about the divine.' - Kelley Raab, St. Lawrence University, Religious Studies Review

Controversially turning away from the current debates which surround "social theory", this book offers historical analysis of the "profound burden" of sociology and its implications today. The author provides detailed studies of a number of contemporary theories, ranging from historical materialism, phenomenology, structuralism and world system theory. He contends that the rightful heir of the sociological tradition is the dynamic sociology of knowledge, in particular the figuration research programme of Norbert Elias. In its sociological analysis of philosophy, the book ranges from analyses of the Hegelian Apogee to Marx's Theory of Knowledge, combined with an examination of the current condition of sociology. "The Sociological Revolution" might be of interest to students across a number of disciplines, including philosophy, sociology, the history of ideas and cultural studies.

It is important that all those concerned with education - parents, teachers, administrators and policymakers - should have a reasonable understanding of the present system and how it has developed, sometimes over a period of many years. This work traces the development of Western educational ideas from the Greek society of Socrates, Plato and Aristotle, to the ideas and ideologies behind some of the controversial issues in education today. This book discusses the continuous development of educational thought over three millennia. The focus upon the history of ideas in this volume is partly an attempt to move history of education away from an approach based on 'great men' to technological, economic and political influences on ideas and beliefs. It reviews many issues, ranging from the purposes of education from the earliest times, to the challenge of postmodernism in the present century. The authors provide an accessible and thought-provoking guide to the educational ideas that underlie practice.

Focussing on individuals whose ideas shaped intellectual life between 400 and 1500, Fifty Key Medieval Thinkers is an accessible introduction to those religious, philosophical and political concepts central to the medieval worldview. Including such diverse figures as Bede and Wyclif, each entry presents a biographical outline, a list of works and a summary of their main theories, alongside suggestions for further reading. Chronologically arranged, and with an introductory essay which presents important themes in context, this volume is an invaluable reference tool for all students of Medieval Europe.

American runaway market culture has convinced us that everything is better off owned by companies, not citizens. Land, scholarly research, internet protocols, life-saving medical discoveries, and the very DNA of plants and animals - rather than stay in the hands of the people, its all being sold off on the cheap. Its the difference between Linux and Windows and its a battle that could shape countless areas of American life.

Focusing on individuals whose ideas shaped intellectual life between 400 and 1500, Fifty Key Medieval Thinkers is an accessible introduction to those religious, philosophical and political concepts central to the medieval worldview. Including such diverse figures as Bede and Wyclif, each entry presents a biographical outline, a list of works and a summary of their main theories, alongside suggestions for further reading. Chronologically arranged, and with an introductory essay which presents important themes in context, this volume is an invaluable reference tool for all students of Medieval Europe.

Featuring over eighty essays, Cultural Theory: The Key Thinkers is a seminal guide to the literary critics, sociologists, historians, artists, philosophers and writers who have shaped culture and society, and the way in which we view them. Ranging from Arnold to Le Corbusier, from Eco to Marx, the entries offer a lucid analysis of the work of influential figures in the study of cultural theory, making this the perfect introduction for the student and general reader alike.

Contents:
Introduction
1. Objectivity, objectivism and objectifying attitudes
2. Gadamer, Habermas and the idea of dialogue
3. Empathy and Verstehen: the early Dilthey
4. Towards a critique of historical reason: the later Dilthey
5. Phenomenological foundations: Weber, SchÜtz and the theory of intersubjectivity
6. Problems with the dialogue: challenging Gadamer and Habermas
7. Social science in the public sphere: Weber, Habermas and modernity

Norman Vance has written the first full-length study of the impact on Victorian Britain of the history and literature of ancient Rome. His comprehensive account shows how not only scholars and poets but also engineers, soldiers, scientists and politicians, gained inspiration from the writing, theory and practice of their Roman predecessors.

Professor Vance provides a fascinating account of the sense of connection Victorian Britain felt for the Roman experience, a connection made the more complex because Britain had once been a Roman colony and because Christianity took hold and spread under the Roman empire.

When one defines "order" as a sorting of priorities, it becomes beautifully clear as to what Foucault is doing here. With virtuoso showmanship, he weaves an intensely complex history of thought. He dips into literature, art, economics and even biology in The Order of Things, possibly one of the most significant yet most overlooked works of the twentieth century. Eclipsed by his later work on power and discourse, nonetheless it was The Order of Things that established Foucault's reputation as an intellectual giant. Pirouetting around the outer edge of language, Foucault unsettles the surface of literary writing. In describing the limitations of our usual taxonomies, he opens the door onto a whole new system of thought, one ripe with what he calls "exotic charm". Intellectual pyrotechnics from the master of critical thinking, this book is crucial reading for those who wish to gain insight into that odd beast called Postmodernism, and a must for any fan of Foucault.

Series Information:
Bronislaw Malinowski: Collected Works

Janet Coleman's two volume history of European political theorizing, from the ancient Greeks to the Renaissance is the introduction which many have been waiting for. It treats some of the most influential writers who have been considered by educated Europeans down the centuries to have helped to construct their identity, their shared "languages of politics" about the principles and practices of good government, and the history of European philosophy. It seeks to uncover and reconstruct the emergence of the "state" and the various European political theories which justified it.

This volume continues the story by focusing on medieval and Renaissance thinkers and includes extensive discussion of the practices that underpinned medieval political theories and which continued to play crucial roles in the eventual development of early-modern political institutions and debates. Throughout the author draws on recent scholarly commentaries written by specialists in philosophy, contemporary political theory, and on medieval and Renaissance history and theology. She shows that the medieval and Renaissance theorists' arguments can be seen as logical and coherent if we can grasp the questions they thought it important to answer. Janet Coleman strikes a balance between trying to understand the philosophical cogency of medieval and Renaissance arguments on the one hand, and on the other, elucidating why historically-situated medieval and Renaissance thinkers, respectively, thought the ways they did about politics; and why we often think otherwise.

The volume will meet the needs of students of philosophy, history and politics, proving to be an indispensable secondary source which aims tosituate, explain, and provoke thought about the major works of political theory likely to be encountered by students of this period and beyond.

The years of political and social despair in France-from the great depression through the Nazi occupation, Resistance, and liberation, to the Algerian War-forced French intellectuals to rethink the values of their culture. Their faltering attempts to break out of a psychological impasse are the subject of this thoughtful and compassionate book by a distinguished American historian. In this first treatment of contemporary French thought to bridge philosophy, literature, and social science and to show its relation to comparable thinking in Germany, Britain, and the United States. Hughes also assesses the work of other writers in terms of their emotional biography and role in society.

Hughes found those who struggled to find meaning and purpose amid chaos to be among the most brilliant minds of their century. They included the social historians Bloch and Febvre; the Catholic philosophers Maritain and Marcel; the proponents of heroism Martin du Gard, Bernanos, Saint-Exupery, Malraux, and DeGaulle; and the phenomenologists Sartre and Merleau-Ponty. They also included the strangely assorted trio of Camus, Teilhard de Chardin, and Levi-Strauss, who showed the way to a wider cultural community. Yet in nearly every case these scholars achieved something quite different from what they set out to do. For this self-questioning generation, the interchange between history and anthropology became most compelling and of greatest interest to the world outside.

"T""he Obstructed Path" blends H. Stuart Hughes' concern for the many ways in which historians define and practice their craft, his lifelong interest in literature, his fascination with the influence of Marx and Freud, and his empathy with the varieties of Christian thought. It also demonstrates his delicate grasp of singular personalities such as Bernanos, Merleau-Ponty, Jean-Paul Sartre and Levi-Strauss. His profound insight into the flaws of many elaborate philosophical constructions, and into the core of deep emotions, bold images, and searing passions that were often hidden in them, bring us close to these thinkers and makes this an enduring work.

The author's aim in these essays, which complement his pioneering books on natural history, has been to find out more about the different categories of people who engaged in this field in the past, and to piece together how the subject has been shaped by changes in society as a whole. For long the historical study of natural history was neglected, being questionably science as historians of science chose to define that word; David Allen's work has done much to remedy this. One group of the essays included here seeks to reinterpret and document more fully topics covered in The Naturalist in Britain; others look at crazes that swept society, notably the Victorian mania for fern collecting, and at the biographies of some of the leading naturalists in 18th- and 19th-century Britain.

Imperial Networks investigates the discourses and practices of British Colonialism. It reveals how British colonialism in the region was informed by, and itself informed, imperial ideas and activities elsewhere, both in Britain and in other colonies.
Drawing on materialist South African historiography, postcolonial theory and geographical conceptions, imperial Networks examines:
* the origins and early nineteenth century development of the three interacting discourses of colonialism - official, humanitarian and settler
* the contests, compromises and interplay between these discourses and their proponents
* the analysis of these discourses in the light of a global humanitarian movement in the aftermath of the antislavery campaign
* the eventual colonisation of the Xhosa and the construction of colonial settler identities.
Imperial Networks introduces students to key debates in the historiography of nineteenth century South Africa, as well as in materialist and postcolonial constructions of the past.

The Handbook of Economic Methodology is a major multidisciplinary reference work on the developing field of economic methodology. It consists of more than a hundred specially commissioned essays by leading scholars from around the world. This definitive volume provides detailed and authoritative coverage of crucial topics and issues that have developed in recent decades and introduces a variety of emerging themes which economic methodologists have begun to explore. This comprehensive Handbook includes a variety of substantive entries in which experts in the field summarise past achievements in economic methodology and indicate the direction of future research. They provide biographical entries to introduce important economists, methodologists and philosophers. The volume also focuses on economic issues to which economic methodology is central and wider intellectual themes that have impinged on economic methodology, from general movements in intellectual history to broad philosophical themes. Orthodox and heterodox approaches to economics and epistemological, ontological, logical and normative dimensions of economic methodology are discussed and evaluated. This magnificent reference work presents a state-of-the-art analysis of the evolution of economic methodology as well as prospects for its future development. The Handbook of Economic Methodology will be indispensable to those with an interest in economic methodology, the philosophy of economics and the history of economic thought.

The Victorian Age introduces students of nineteenth-century literary and cultural history to the main areas of intellectual debate in the Victorian period. Bringing together for the first time in one volume a wide range of primary source material, this anthology gives readers a unique insight into the ways in which different areas of Victorian intellectual debate were interconnected.
The Victorian Age covers developments in social and political theory, economics, science and religion, aesthetics, and sexuality and gender, and provides access to a range of documents which have hitherto been highly inaccessible - both difficult to locate and difficult to interpret and understand. This authoritative anthology contains:
* a general introduction which explains the various ways in which the relationships between literary and intellectual culture can be theorised
* essays describing the background to the areas of debate illustrated by the selected source documents
* bibliographical notes on all the documents included
* brief accounts of the reputation and career of the documents' authors.
This volume will enable humanities students, as well as the general reader, to understand complex areas of debates in an unusually wide range of disciplines, several of which will be unfamiliar.

Terry Eagleton provides a novel account of Ireland's neglected "national" intellectuals, an extraordinary group, including such figures as Oscar Wilde's father William Wilde, Charles Lever, Samuel Ferguson, Isaac Butt, Sheridan Le Fanu. They formed a kind of Irish version of "Bloomsbury," but one composed, exceptionally, of scientists, mathematicians, economists, and lawyers, rather than preponderantly of artists and critics.

Their work, much of it published in the pages of the "Dublin University Magazine," was deeply caught up in networks of kinship, shared cultural interests and intersecting biographies in the outsized village of nineteenth-century Dublin. Eagleton explores the preoccupations of this remarkable community, in all its fascinating ferment and diversity, through the lens of Antonio Gramsci's definitions of "traditional" and "organic" intellectuals, and maps the nature of its relation to the Young Ireland movement, combining his account with some reflections on intellectual work in general and its place in political life.

"Scholars and Rebels" is essential reading for all those concerned to understand not just the complexities of nineteenth-century Irish intellectual culture and the emergent Irish Revival, but the formation also of Irish culture in the twentieth century.

What is the basis of belief in an era when globalization, multiculturalism and big business are the new religion? Slavoj Zizek, renowned philosopher and irrepressible cultural critic takes on all comers in this compelling and breathless new book.
From 'cyberspace reason' to the paradox that is 'Western Buddhism', On Belief gets behind the contours of the way we normally think about belief, in particular Judaism and Christianity. Holding up the so-called authenticity of religious belief to critical light, Zizek draws on psychoanalysis, film and philosophy to reveal in startling fashion that nothing could be worse for believers than their beliefs turning out to be true.
On Belief is essential reading for anyone interested in how we continue to hold beliefs in this postmodern age.

Plato's Utopia Recast is an illuminating reappraisal of Plato's later works, which reveals radical changes in his ethical and political theory. Christopher Bobonich examines later dialogues, with a special emphasis upon the Laws, and argues that in these late works Plato both rethinks and revises the basic ethical and political positions that he held in his better known earlier works, such as the Republic. This book will change our understanding of Plato. His controversial moral and political theory, so influential in Western thought, will henceforth be seen in a new light.

Learning behind Bars is an oral history of former Irish republican prisoners in the Republic of Ireland and Northern Ireland between 1971, the year internment was introduced, and 2000, when the high-security Long Kesh Detention Centre/HM Prison Maze closed. Dieter Reinisch outlines the role of politically motivated prisoners in ending armed conflicts as well as the personal and political development of these radical activists during their imprisonment. Based on extensive life-story interviews with Irish Republican Army (IRA) ex-prisoners, the book examines how political prisoners developed their intellectual positions through the interplay of political education and resistance. It sheds light on how prisoners used this experience to initiate the debates that eventually led to acceptance of the peace process in Northern Ireland. Politically relevant and instructive, Learning behind Bars illuminates the value of education, politics, and resistance in the harshest of social environments.

This volume is an essential collection of the most influential attempts to depict the fundamental nature of reality or being - from Spinoza's doctrine of a single, indivisible substance to Russell's "logical atomism" and from the Buddha's account of a casual interrelated world to Leibniz's one of causally independent "monads". Among the metaphysical debates are those between monists and pluralist and materialist and idealist. The authors range in time from Lao Tzu and Plato to Heidegger and Whitehead. The selected texts include many classics from 'the golden age' of metaphysics in the seventeenth and eighteenth century. A comprehensive introduction by the editor, together with his preambles to each text, makes this an ideal volume for students on historically informed courses in metaphysics and the more speculative realms of philosophy.

Terry Eagleton provides a novel account of Ireland's neglected "national" intellectuals, an extraordinary group, including such figures as Oscar Wilde's father William Wilde, Charles Lever, Samuel Ferguson, Isaac Butt, Sheridan Le Fanu. They formed a kind of Irish version of "Bloomsbury," but one composed, exceptionally, of scientists, mathematicians, economists, and lawyers, rather than preponderantly of artists and critics.

Their work, much of it published in the pages of the "Dublin University Magazine," was deeply caught up in networks of kinship, shared cultural interests and intersecting biographies in the outsized village of nineteenth-century Dublin. Eagleton explores the preoccupations of this remarkable community, in all its fascinating ferment and diversity, through the lens of Antonio Gramsci's definitions of "traditional" and "organic" intellectuals, and maps the nature of its relation to the Young Ireland movement, combining his account with some reflections on intellectual work in general and its place in political life.

"Scholars and Rebels" is essential reading for all those concerned to understand not just the complexities of nineteenth-century Irish intellectual culture and the emergent Irish Revival, but the formation also of Irish culture in the twentieth century.

What is the basis of belief in an era when globalization, multiculturalism and big business are the new religion? Slavoj Zizek, renowned philosopher and irrepressible cultural critic takes on all comers in this compelling and breathless new book.
From 'cyberspace reason' to the paradox that is 'Western Buddhism', On Belief gets behind the contours of the way we normally think about belief, in particular Judaism and Christianity. Holding up the so-called authenticity of religious belief to critical light, Zizek draws on psychoanalysis, film and philosophy to reveal in startling fashion that nothing could be worse for believers than their beliefs turning out to be true.
On Belief is essential reading for anyone interested in how we continue to hold beliefs in this postmodern age.

Nietzsche famously attacked traditional morality, and propounded a controversial ethics of 'life-enhancement'. Simon May presents a wide-ranging and provocative critique of Nietzsche's ethics, which are shown to be both revolutionary and conservative, and to have much to offer us today after the demise of old values and the alleged 'death of God'. May's book will be illuminating not just for scholars and students of Nietzsche, but for anyone interested in current debates about ethics and modernity.