Peter Worsley's studies at Cambridge were interrupted by war service as a communist officer in the colonial forces in Africa and India, which got him interested in anthropology. He then went into mass education in Tanganyika, studied with Max Gluckman at Manchester, and won the Curl Prize of the Royal Anthropological Institute, but, in the McCarthy epoch, was banned from Africa, so went to Australia where he was again banned, this time from New Guinea, but did field-research for his Ph.D. on an Australian Aboriginal tribe. His subsequent book on 'Cargo' cults in Melanesia is now regarded as a classic, but his left-wing politics ensured that he could not get a job in anthropology, so he switched to sociology, returning to Manchester as the first Professor of Sociology, just in time to join a British Government Mission to Tanzania - and to be deeply involved in the student revolution. His book on The Third World introduced that term into the English language, while the Penguin edition of Introducing Sociology sold over half a million copies. He went to China a few months after Nixon. On retirement as Professor Emeritus of the University of Manchester, he taught in New York, where he wrote Knowledges.

Series Information:
Routledge Key Sociologists

Karl Marx probably had more influence on the political course of the last century than any other social thinker. There are many different kinds of Marxism, and the Twentieth Century saw two huge Marxist states in total opposition to one another. In the West, Marxism has never presented a revolutionary threat to the established order, though it has taken root as the major theoretical critique of capitalist society in intellectual circles, and new interpretations of Marx's thought appear each year.
Peter Worsley discusses all these major varieties of Marxism, distinguishing between those ideas which remain valid, those which are contestable, and those which should now be discarded. Rather than treating Marxism purely as a philosophy in the abstract, he concentrates upon the uses to which Marxism has been put and emphasises the connections between the theoretical debates and political struggles in the real world.

Mpu Monaguna's early thirteenth century epic poem Sumanasantaka is a vernacular rendering of Kalidasa's story of Prince Aja and Princess Indumati told in the Raghuvamsa. In it the poet exploits his source narrative to describe and comment on the Javanese world of his times. In Mpu Monaguna's Sumanasantaka the authors offer an edited text and translation of Mpu Monaguna's epic kakawin and extensive commentary on the editing of the manuscripts and history of the poem and its story, the relationship between the Old Javanese poem and Kalidasa's Raghuvamsa, the way in which the poem imagines the lived environment of ancient Java in the early thirteenth century and Balinese painted representations of the story of Prince Aja and Princess Indumati.