In the 1850s the social and political theorist Alexis de Tocqueville spoke of 'a virus of a new and unknown kind' to explain the inexplicable failure of the French Revolution. This book uses Tocqueville's idea of the virus to explore the fatal relationship between the concepts of utopia and dystopia in western social and political thought. It traces this relationship from Ancient Greece to post-modern America and attempts to untangle their apparently fatal connection through a new virology that might promote a less paranoid future for our global society.

After the end of Euro-American hegemony and the return of the multi-centric world, Eurocentrism in philosophy and the social sciences has come under attack. However, no real alternative has been proposed. This provides an opportunity to reassess the philosophy of the social sciences that has been developed in the West. This book argues that the re-emergence of a multi-centric world allows the Euro-centric social sciences in general, and critical theory in particular, to finally disengage from countless paradoxes and impasses by which they have heretofore been hindered. The author presents a solution in the form of the "kaleidoscopic dialectic." This dialectic is unique in that it is able to overcome the precarious dichotomy between universalism and relativism by relying on an original approach to the philosophy of science. With this approach, the focus is on the configurations embedded in the ethics of understanding, accommodation and learning and on their connections to broader social scientific critique. This book demands that the European social sciences make philosophical and methodological adaptations to the new realities of the social world by becoming more reflexive and, by extension, less Euro-centric.

First published in 1983, Francois Perroux's A New Concept of Development analyses the major paradox of our era: the desire for progress and the mistrust of its consequences. The authors argues that the approach to the question of development may be the key to understanding both the present and what the future brings, representing a pattern which will seek to shape man's potential to his designs. By analysing the ideas and theories propounded by the economic approach the author's aim is to clarify both the meaning and direction of research in development. A scientific, oriented economy and efficient strategies should and must be the two components of one and the same momentum, required to go beyond the perilous paradox of our era.

Based in a holistic exposition and appraisal of Gramsci's writings that are of relevance to education in neoliberal times, this book, rather than simply applying Gramsci's theories to issues in education, argues that education constitutes the leitmotif of his entire aeuvre and lies at the heart of his conceptualization of the ancient Greek term hegemony that was used by other political theorists before him. Starting from this understanding, the book goes on to compare Gramsci's theories with those of later thinkers in the development of a critical pedagogy that can confront neoliberalism in all its forms."

Facing censorship and being confined to the fringes of the political debate of his time, Thomas Hobbes turned his attention to translating Homer's Iliad and the Odyssey from Greek into English. Many have not considered enough the usefulness of these translations. In this book, Andrea Catanzaro analyses the political value of Hobbes' translations of Homer's works and exposes the existence of a link between the translations and the previous works of the Malmesbury philosopher. In doing so, he asks: * What new information concerning Hobbes' political and philosophical thought can be rendered from mere translation? * What new offerings can a man in his eighties at the time offer, having widely explained his political ideas in numerous famous essays and treatises? * What new elements can be deduced in a text that was well-known in England and where there were better versions than the ones produced by Hobbes? Andrea Catanzaro's commentary and theoretical interpretation offers an incentive to study Hobbes lesser known works in the wider development of Western political philosophy and the history of political thought.

Alain Badiou and Slavoj Zizek have become two of the dominant voices in contemporary philosophy and critical theory. In this book, Geoff Pfeifer offers an in-depth look at their respective views. Using Louis Althusser's materialism as a starting point-which, as Pfeifer shows, was built partially as a response to the Marxism of the Parti Communiste Francais and partially in dialogue with other philosophical movements and intellectual currents of its times-the book looks at the differing ways in which both Badiou's and Zizek's work attempt to respond to issues that arise within the Althusserian edifice. Pfeifer argues here that, ultimately, Zizek's materialism succeeds in responding to these issues in ways that Badiou's does not. In building this argument, Pfeifer engages not only with the work of Althusser, Badiou, and Zizek and their intellectual backgrounds, but also with much of the contemporary scholarship surrounding these thinkers. As such, Pfeifer's book is an important addition to the ongoing debates within contemporary critical theory.

Life and the Student (1927), with a new introduction by Jonathan B. Imber, is a compilation of reflections, commentaries, and letters from other scholars that Charles Horton Cooley, accumulated throughout his life. The book includes personal passages on various topics within the realms of reading and writing, thinking, art, science, sociology, academia, religion, and human nature.

There is no formal structure to the book, except the literary sense that organizes these thoughts and observations about life. It is impossible to categorize these widely ranging commentaries. They include discussions of the automobile, the impressionable nature of young people, the claim that the question of racial superiority is still unresolved, his belief that eugenists are inconsistent in their views, and more.

Cooley's work sought to emphasize the connection between society and the individual. He believed that the two could only be understood in relationship to each other. While researching the effects of social responses and social participation, he created the concept of the "looking-glass self," which is the theory that a person's sense of self grows out of interpersonal interactions and the perceptions of others. Cooley also showed that social life and the relationship between groups and communities stems from mental phenomena.

Tavistock Press was established as a co-operative venture between the Tavistock Institute and Routledge & Kegan Paul (RKP) in the 1950s to produce a series of major contributions across the social sciences. This volume is part of a 2001 reissue of a selection of those important works which have since gone out of print, or are difficult to locate. Published by Routledge, 112 volumes in total are being brought together under the name The International Behavioural and Social Sciences Library: Classics from the Tavistock Press. Reproduced here in facsimile, this volume was originally published in 1966 and is available individually. The collection is also available in a number of themed mini-sets of between 5 and 13 volumes, or as a complete collection.

Tavistock Press was established as a co-operative venture between the Tavistock Institute and Routledge & Kegan Paul (RKP) in the 1950s to produce a series of major contributions across the social sciences. This volume is part of a 2001 reissue of a selection of those important works which have since gone out of print, or are difficult to locate. Published by Routledge, 112 volumes in total are being brought together under the name The International Behavioural and Social Sciences Library: Classics from the Tavistock Press. Reproduced here in facsimile, this volume was originally published in 1974 and is available individually. The collection is also available in a number of themed mini-sets of between 5 and 13 volumes, or as a complete collection.

In this accessible introduction for students, teachers, and activists, Chad Kautzer guides readers through the dynamic field of radical philosophy. Kautzer s innovative approach is to organize the analysis of radical philosophical projects from Marxism, feminism, and queer theory to radical environmental, race, and political theory around their defining methodological commitments and emancipatory goals. Beginning with a discussion of the historical, dialectical, and reflexive forms of critique these projects employ, Radical Philosophy reveals the internal structure and overlapping similarities of particular philosophical projects discussed in subsequent chapters. The result is a coherent and systematic introduction for beginners and specialists alike."

Students drop out of universities in large numbers, many graduate to jobs that do not require a degree and a large number learn little at university, whilst graduate salaries have shrunk over time and student loan debt and default have grown. University research achievements have declined while university administration has expanded massively. The contemporary university is mired in auditing, regulation, waste and aimlessness and its contribution to serious social innovation has deteriorated markedly. The miserable state of the universities reflects a larger social reality, as bureaucratic capitalism has replaced creative capitalism. Universities and Innovation Economies examines the rise and fall of the mass university and post-industrial society, considering how we might revitalize economic and intellectual creativity. Looking to a much more inventive social and economic paradigm to drive long-term growth, the author argues for a smaller, leaner, more effective university model - one capable of delivering a greater degree of high-level discovery and creative power. A potent critique of the post-industrial mass university that urges a reimagination of universities as places of discovery and invention, this book will appeal to readers interested in higher education, creativity, social theory, the sociology of work and organisations, political economy, pedagogy and public policy.

This volume brings together papers inspired by the work of Duncan Foley, an extraordinarily productive economist who has made seminal contributions to a wide variety of areas. Foley's work cannot be easily classified, but one thread that runs through it is a critical examination (along both ethical and analytical lines) of conventional neoclassical economic theory, particularly involving general equilibrium theories of value and money. Foley was a pioneer of complexity economics as well, which adopts approaches to these questions drawn from natural sciences, so the collection therefore has an interdisciplinary quality that will interest a wide variety of readers. Some of the chapters are intellectual biographies that contextualize and identify Foley's contributions to Keynesian macroeconomics, Marxian value theory, and complexity theory in economics. The topics covered include the economics of complexity; the ethics of general equilibrium theory; the economics of climate change; applications of Keynesian, Marxian and Ricardian political economy; and money and financial crises. The collection should be useful to scholars who work in various economic traditions critical of the currently dominant free-market approach, but it also speaks to scholars of critical theory in various disciplines beyond economics such as the mathematicians, physicists, and other natural scientists who are interested in understanding the complexity of social processes using their analytical frameworks. This book should also appeal to graduate students in economics who are working in these traditions, as well as scholars (including current graduate students in orthodox programs) who are dissatisfied with the current state of economic theory and would like to satisfy their intellectual curiosity by sampling the contributions of critical theorists.

Pursuing Intersectionality, Unsettling Dominant Imaginaries offers a sustained, interdisciplinary exploration of intersectional ideas, histories, and practices that no other text does. Deftly synthesizing much of the existing literatures on intersectionality, one of the most significant theoretical and political precepts of our time, May invites us to confront a disconcerting problem: though intersectionality is widely known, acclaimed, and applied, it is often construed in ways that depoliticize, undercut, or even violate its most basic premises. May cogently demonstrates how intersectionality has been repeatedly resisted, misunderstood, and misapplied: provocatively, she shows the degree to which intersectionality is often undone or undermined by supporters and critics alike. A clarion call to engage intersectionality's radical ideas, histories, and justice orientations more meaningfully, Pursuing Intersectionality answers the basic questions surrounding intersectionality, attends to its historical roots in Black feminist theory and politics, and offers insights and strategies from across the disciplines for bracketing dominant logics and for orienting toward intersectional dispositions and practices.

This edited collection brings together scholars who draw on phenomenological approaches to understand the experiences of young people growing up under contemporary conditions of globalization. Phenomenology is both a philosophical and pragmatic approach to social sciences research, that takes as central the meaning-making experiences of research participants. One of the central contentions of this book is that phenomenology has long informed critical empirical approaches to youth cultures, yet until recently its role has not been thusly named. This volume aims to resuscitate and recuperate phenomenology as a robust empirical, theoretical, and methodological approach to youth cultures. Chapters explore the lifeworlds of young people from countries around the world, revealing the tensions, risks and opportunities that organize youth experiences.

Drawing on the thought of Durkheim, this volume focuses on societal changes at the symbolic level to develop a new conceptualisation of the emergence of postsecular societies. Neo-Durkheimian categories are applied to the case of Turkey, which in recent years has shifted from a strong Republican and Kemalist view of secularism to a more Anglo-Saxon perspective. Turkish society thus constitutes an interesting case that blurs modernist distinctions between the secular and the religious and which could be described as 'postsecular'. Presenting three symbolic case studies - the enduring image of the founder of the Republic Ataturk, the contested site of Ayasofia, and the remembering and commemoration of the murdered journalist Hrant Dink - The Making of a Postsecular Society analyses the cultural relationship that the modern Republic has always had with Europe, considering the possible implications of the Turkish model of secularism for a specifically European self-understanding of modernity. Based on a rigorous construction of theoretical categories and on a close scrutiny of the common challenges confronting Europe and its Turkish neighbour long considered 'other' with regard to the accommodation of religious difference, this book sheds light on the possibilities for Europe to find new ways of arranging the relationship between the secular and the religious. As such, it will appeal to scholars of social theory, the sociology of religion, secularisation and religious difference, and social change.

How do urban ruins provoke their cultural revaluation? This book offers a unique sociological analysis about the social agencies of material culture and atmospheric knowledge of buildings in the making. It draws on ethnographic research in Berlin along the former Palace of the Republic, the E-Werk and the Cafe Moskau in order to make visible an interdisciplinary regime of design experts who have developed a professional sensorium turning the built memory of the city into an object of aesthetic inquiry.

William Graham Sumner is remembered primarily as an opponent of government intervention in social and economic issues. Focusing on Folkways (1906), this book examines Sumner's fundamental work as a comparative ethnographer with an appreciation for the rules and rituals that regulate everyday behavior.

In Folkways, Sumner developed classifications and an array of sociological concepts that continue to influence the discipline today. This new book presents key excerpts from Folkways as well as three of Sumner's other classic essays. It also includes five original essays by contemporary authorities that explain and explore Sumner's importance and influence. By linking Sumner's work to contemporary research about social control, the sociology of law, and sociological theory, these new essays confirm his status as a foundational thinker in the field.

Sumner offers an elegant conceptual schema with which to analyze the moral codes of in- and out-groups. His extensive use of comparative anthropological data demonstrates a qualitative methodology that can easily be applied to the analysis of contemporary American society. This volume includes contributions by Jonathan B. Imber, Howard G. Schneiderman, and A. Javier Trevino.

This book presents a Foucauldian problematization of crime, with a particular focus on the twentieth century. Its central concern is to consider how crime has been conceived as problem, and to address the responses that have been suggested to deal with it. The book uses developments in Denmark - developments that can be readily identified in most other western countries - as a paradigmatic case for understanding how crime has been problematized in the West. Scrutinizing the responses that have been adapted to deal with crime, this book demonstrates how a range of power modalities have evolved throughout the twentieth century. In this respect, moreover, the book offers an important supplement to existing discussions and uses of Foucault's work within criminology. Christian Borch shows how the tendency of criminologists to focus on either disciplinary power or governmentality has neglected the broader complex of Foucault's concerns: ignoring its historical underpinnings, whilst for the most part limiting studies to only very recent developments, without giving sufficient attention to their historical backdrop.Thus, the book demonstrates, a Foucauldian approach to crime holds greater analytical potentials for criminological research than have so far been recognized.

Human trafficking has become one of the most spoken-of problems of our day, and fighting it has grown into a multi-million-dollar project sector. This book is about how we all come to name various exploitative migratory experiences "human trafficking" and how we build a consensus on how to counter it. This book investigates counter-trafficking as a transnational field and tries to show how connected stances against a "global social problem" are produced internationally in general, and nationally in particular within the example of three countries which are defined with different positions according to the phenomenon: Ukraine as a "source country," Turkey as a "transit and destination country," Germany as a "destination country." The book examines how power relations limit the language to propose and solve social problems in the example of human trafficking. It shows the limits of scientific studies on the issue and the chasm between counter-trafficking and its primary target group, the trafficked people.

This edited collection explores the genesis of Bourdieu's classical book Distinction and its international career in contemporary Social Sciences. It includes contributions from contemporary sociologists from diverse countries who question the theoretical legacy of this book in various fields and national contexts. Invited authors review and exemplify current controversies concerning the theses promoted in Distinction in the sociology of culture, lifestyles, social classes and stratification, with a specific attention dedicated to the emerging forms of cultural capital and the logics of distinction that occur in relation to material consumption or bodily practices. They also empirically illustrate the theoretical contribution of Distinction in relation with such notions as field or habitus, which fruitfulness is emphasized in relation with some methodological innovations of the book. In this respect, a special focus is put on the emerging stream of "distinction studies" and on the opportunities offered by the geometrical data analysis of social spaces.

This book, first published in 1983 with a second edition in 1992, investigates the emergence of the sociology of knowledge in Germany in the critical period from 1918 to 1933. These years witnessed the development of distinctive paradigms centred on the works of Max Scheler, Georg Lukacs and Karl Mannheim. Each theorist sought to confront the base-superstructure models of the relationship between knowledge and society, which originated in Orthodox Marxism. David Frisbsy illustrates how these and other themes in the sociology of knowledge were contested through a detailed account of the central sociological debates in Weimar Germany. This reissue of The Alienated Mind will be of particular interest to students and academics concerned with the development of an important tradition in the sociology of knowledge and culture, social theory and German history.

When Sociological Impressionism was first published in 1981, it was the first comprehensive study on Simmel's social theory to appear in English since 1925. A pioneering work, it did much to bring about the rediscovery of Georg Simmel as one of the key sociologists of the twentieth century. David Frisby provides a provocative introduction to aspects of Simmel's social theory, seriously challenging many interpretations of his work, most notably the view that Simmel produced a formal sociology. By drawing on many little-known essays and pieces by Simmel and his contemporaries, the book locates him within the social and intellectual milieu in which he was working. This is a reissue of the second edition, published in 1992, which includes a new afterword confronting critical responses to the first edition. This is an important work, which will be of interest to students of sociology and social philosophy in Germany in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century.

This book, first published in 1976, discusses four classical paradigms for sociology - the positivism of Saint-Simon and Comte, Durkheim, Marx and Weber - and four contemporary developments or revisions of them - the sociologie active of Dumazedier and his colleagues in France, sociology in Socialist Poland, the work of Dahrendorf and the 'new sociology' of Mills and his successors. Christopher Bryant suggests that no neutral language exists in which to compare the characteristics of these different paradigms, yet highlights those features which are common to all of them. Unique in its approach and analysis of the relationship between sociology and action, this book is of value and interest to students of sociology and theory and professional sociologists.

For centuries, the trickster has been used in various narratives, including mythological, literary and cinematic, to convey the idea of agency, rebellion and, often turbulent, progress. In "The Trickster and the System: Identity and Agency in Contemporary Society," " "Helena Bassil-Morozow shows how the trickster can be seen as a metaphor to describe the psycho-anthropological concept of change, an impulse that challenges the existing order of things, a progressive force that is a-structural and anti-structural in its nature. The book is about being able to see things from an unusual, even odd, perspective, which does not coincide with the homogenous normality of the mass, or the social system, or a political ideology, or some other kind of authority.

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The Trickster and the System" offers an analytical paradigm which can be used to examine relationships between tricksters and systems, change and stability, in a wide range of social, political and cultural contexts. It covers a range of systems, describes different types of tricksters and discusses possible conflicts, tensions and dialogues between the two opposing sides. One of the central ideas of the book is that social systems use shame as a tool to control and manage all kinds of tricksters individuality, agency, creativity, spontaneity, innovation and initiative, to name but a few. The author argues that any society that neglects its tricksters (agents of change), ends up suffering from decay, stagnation or even mass hysterical outbursts.

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The Trickster and the System: Identity and Agency in Contemporary Society "provides a fresh perspective on the trickster figure in a variety of cultural contexts. It covers a range of psychological, cultural, social and political phenomena, from personal issues to the highest level of society s functioning: self-esteem and shame, lifestyle and relationships, creativity and self-expression, media, advertising, economy, political ideology and, most importantly, human identity and authenticity. The book is essential reading for scholars in the areas of psychoanalysis, analytical psychology, myth, cultural and media studies, narrative analysis, cultural anthropology, as well as anyone interested in critical issues in contemporary culture.

Helena Bassil-Morozow is a cultural philosopher, film scholar and academic writer whose many publications include "Tim Burton: The Monster and the Crowd "(Routledge, 2010) and "The Trickster in Contemporary Film "(Routledge, 2011). Helena is currently working on another Routledge project, "Jungian Film Studies: the Essential Guide "(co-authored with Luke Hockley). Her principal academic affiliation is the University of Bedfordshire, Faculty of Creative Arts, Technologies & Science. "

Does charitable giving still matter but need to change? Philanthropy, the use of private assets for public good, has been much criticised in recent years. Do elite philanthropists wield too much power? Is big-money philanthropy unaccountable and therefore anti-democratic? And what about so-called "tainted donations" and "dark money" funding pseudo-philanthropic political projects? The COVID-19 pandemic has amplified many of these criticisms, leading some to conclude that philanthropy needs to be fundamentally reshaped if it is to play a positive role in our future. Rhodri Davies, drawing on his deep knowledge of the past and present landscape of philanthropy, explains why it's important to ask what philanthropy is for because it has for centuries played a major role in shaping our world. Considering the alternatives, including charity, justice, taxation, the state, democracy and the market, he examines the pressing questions that philanthropy must tackle if it is to be equal to the challenges of the 21st century.