What is the nature of our current societies? Do we see a clash of
civilizations, or the end of history? The advent of globalization,
or the birth of the network society? Are we witnessing the
emergence of a risk society, or the advent of the knowledge
society? More fundamentally, is 'society' an ideological construct
that should be abandoned? Coming into English from the Latin term
'societas' via Old French 'societe', the etymology of 'society,' in
the sense of a system adopted by a group of co-existing individuals
for mutually beneficial purposes, can be traced back at least to
the mid-sixteenth century. By the Age of Enlightenment, 'society'
was increasingly used in intellectual discourse to characterize
human relations, often in contrast to notions of 'the state'.
During the nineteenth century, the concept was subject to highly
elaborate treatment in various intellectual fields, such as
political economy, philosophy, and legal thought; and 'society'
continues to be a central conceptual tool, not only for sociology,
but also for many other social-science disciplines, such as
anthropology, economics, political sciences, and law. The notion
resonates beyond the social sciences into the humanities; it is a
fundamental concept, like nature, the universe, or the economy.
Moreover, 'society' remains a highly contested concept, as was
demonstrated, for example, by the controversy surrounding the
former British prime minister Margaret Thatcher's pithy assertion
of the neoliberal economic wisdom that 'there is no such thing as
society' (Woman's Own, 31 October 1987); and by the term's
rehabilitation at the turn of the twenty-first century, not least
with the ascendancy of the notion of 'civil society'. This
four-volume collection, a new title in the Routledge Critical
Concepts in Sociology series, brings together both canonical and
the best cutting-edge research to document the intellectual origins
and development of what remains a key framework within which
contemporary work in the social sciences in general, and sociology
in particular, proceeds. Edited by Reiner Grundmann and Nico Stehr,
two leading scholars in the field, this Routledge Major Work makes
available the most useful, important and representative treatments
of the subject matter, and helps to make sense of the great variety
of perspectives and approaches in which social scientists and other
thinkers have understood, and continue to understand, society.
Fully indexed and with a comprehensive introduction newly written
by the editors, which places the collected material in its
historical and intellectual context, Society is an essential
reference work, destined to be valued by scholars and students as a
vital research resource.
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