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Books : Nonfiction : Social Sciences : Sociology : History
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Luis Alberto Urrea's Across the Wire offers a compelling and unprecedented look at what life is like for those refugees living on the Mexican side of the border—a world that is only some twenty miles from San Diego, but that few have seen. Urrea gives us a compassionate and candid account of his work as a member and "official translator" of a crew of relief workers that provided aid to the many refugees hidden just behind the flashy tourist spots of Tijuana. His account of the struggle of these people to survive amid abject poverty, unsanitary living conditions, and the legal and political chaos that reign in the Mexican borderlands explains without a doubt the reason so many are forced to make the dangerous and illegal journey "across the wire" into the United States.
More than just an expose, Across the Wire is a tribute to the tenacity of a people who have learned to survive against the most impossible odds, and returns to these forgotten people their pride and their identity.
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THE PROTESTANT ETHIC AND THE SPIRIT OF CAPITALISM is considered a founding text in economic capitalism, economic sociology and sociology in general.In the book, Weber wrote that capitalism in Europe evolved when the Protestant ethic influenced large numbers of people to engage in work in the secular world, developing their own enterprises and engaging in trade and the accumulation of wealth for investment. In other words, the Protestant work ethic was a force behind a mass action that influenced the development of capitalism.
This book is not a detailed study of Protestantism but rather an introduction into Weber's studies of interaction between moral ideas and economics. He argues convincingly about the American ethics and ideas that have so positively influenced the development of capitalistic financial prosperity, and thereby, both the personal and common good.
Translated by leading sociologist Talcott Parsons, this was the first and still remains the seminal translation of Weber's main work.
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Once again, Lemert has revised and updated Social Things, a best seller that is admired by teachers, students, and parents for its riveting brilliance. In this edition, he challenges readers to appreciate the surprising story of how globalization requires even the most reluctant to engage with its strange effects. In a new and original chapter, “Global Things Queer the Social," Lemert unblushingly explains that globalization became a dominant force in everyday life at the very time when ordinary life was threatened by extraordinary human crises of poverty and disease. The new world order is queer in more ways than one. It forces us to rethink social taboos, including those on talk about sex and sexualities. As in its earlier editions, Social Things excites, disturbs, and instructs readers who wonder what “globalization” means to them and how their sociological competence can contend with the way it emboldens people to look at the world honestly.
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Although Vico lived his whole life as an obscure academic in Naples, his New Science is an astonishingly ambitious attempt to provide a comprehensive science of all human society by decoding the hitory, mythology, and law of the ancient world. "My imagination grows every time I read Vico as it doesn't when I read Freud or Jung."—James Joyce.
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Social Darwinism in American Thought portrays the overall influence of Darwin on American social theory and the notable battle waged among thinkers over the implications of evolutionary theory for social thought and political action. Theorists such as Herbert Spencer and William Graham Sumner adopted the idea of the struggle for existence as justification for the evils as well as the benefits of laissez-faire modern industrial society. Others such as William James and John Dewey argued that human planning was needed to direct social development and improve upon the natural order. Hofstadter's classic study of the ramifications of Darwinism is a major analysis of the social philosophies that animated intellectual movements of the Gilded Age and the Progressive Era.
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The complete translation of Simmel's classic work in which he provides us with a dazzling and wide-ranging discussion of the social, psychological and philosophical aspects of the money economy.
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A main text for classical social theory. Most chapters focus on one theorist and provide both a social and an historical perspective. Analyzes the impact of race, class, and gender on the development of classical theory. Discusses the impact of post-modernism on classical theory.
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This text provides an overview of the history of classical sociological theory and the work of the major classical theorists. It concludes with a metatheoretical schema that informs the text, and provides an introduction to metatheorizing in sociology.
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Included in RACE, CLASS, AND GENDER are 64 interdisciplinary readings. The authors provide very accessible articles that show how race, class, and gender shape people's experiences, and help students to see the issues in an analytic, as well as descriptive way. The book provides conceptual grounding in understanding race, class, and gender; it has a strong historical and sociological perspective; and it is strengthened by conceptual introductions by the authors. Students find the readings engaging and accessible, but may gain the most from the introduction sections that highlight key points and relate essential concepts. Included in the collection of readings are narratives aimed at building empathy, and articles on social issues such as prison, affirmative action, poverty, immigration, and racism, among other topics.
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In this influential 1925 essay, presented here in Spanish and English, José Vasconcelos predicted the coming of a new age, the Aesthetic Era, in which joy, love, fantasy, and creativity would prevail over the rationalism he saw as dominating the present age. In this new age, marriages would no longer be dictated by necessity or convenience, but by love and beauty; ethnic obstacles, already in the process of being broken down, especially in Latin America, would disappear altogether, giving birth to a fully mixed race, a "cosmic race," in which all the better qualities of each race would persist by the natural selection of love.
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In this compelling, powerful book, the late Irish journalist and essayist Jack Holland set out to answer a daunting question: how do you explain the oppression and brutalization of half the world's population by the other half, throughout history? The result is an eye-opening journey through centuries, continents and civilizations as it looks at both historical and contemporary attitudes to women. Misogyny encompasses the Church, witch hunts, sexual theory, Nazism, pro-life campaigners, and finally, today's developing world, where women are increasingly and disproportionately at risk because of radicalized religious beliefs, famine, war, and disease. Extensively researched, highly readable and provocative, this book chronicles an ancient, pervasive and enduring injustice. The questions it poses deal with the fundamentals of human existence — sex, love, violence — that have shaped the lives of humans throughout history, and ultimately limn an abuse of human rights on a nearly unthinkable scale.
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Pierre Bourdieu is one of the world's most important social theorists and is also one of the great empirical researchers in contemporary sociology. However, reading Bourdieu can be difficult for those not familiar with the French cultural context, and until now a comprehensive introduction to Bourdieu's oeuvre has not been available.
David Swartz focuses on a central theme in Bourdieu's work--the complex relationship between culture and power--and explains that sociology for Bourdieu is a mode of political intervention. Swartz clarifies Bourdieu's difficult concepts, noting where they have been misinterpreted by critics and where they have fallen short in resolving important analytical issues. The book also shows how Bourdieu has synthesized his theory of practices and symbolic power from Durkheim, Marx, and Weber, and how his work was influenced by Sartre, Levi-Strauss, and Althusser.
Culture and Power is the first book to offer both a sympathetic and critical examination of Bourdieu's work and it will be invaluable to social scientists as well as to a broader audience in the humanities.
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The writings of the critical theorists caught the imagination of students and intellectuals in the 1960s and 1970s. They became a key element in the formation and self-understanding of the New Left, and have been the subject of continuing controversy. Partly because of their rise to prominence during the political turmoil of the sixties, and partly because they draw on traditions rarely studied in the Anglo-American world, the works of these authors are often misunderstood.
In this book David Held provides a much-needed introduction to, and evaluation of, critical theory. He is concerned mainly with the thought of the Frankfurt school--Horkheimer, Adorno, Marcuse, in particular--and with Habermas, one of Europe's leading contemporary thinkers. Several of the major themes considered are critical theory's relation to Marx's critique of the political economy, Freudian psychoanalysis, aesthetics, and the philosophy of history. There is also a discussion of critical theory's substantive contribution to the analysis of capitalism, culture, the family, and the individual, as well as its contribution to epistemology and methodology.
Held's book will be necessary reading for all concerned with understanding and evaluating one of the most influential intellectual movements of our time.
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When first published, The Sociological Tradition had a profound and positive impact on sociology, providing a rich sense of intellectual background to a relatively new discipline in America. Robert Nisbet describes what he considers the golden age of sociology, 1830-1900, outlining the major themes of nineteenth-century sociologies: community, authority, status, the sacred, and alienation. Nisbet focuses on sociology's European heritage, delineating the arguments of Tocqueville, Marx, Durkheim, and Weber in new and revealing ways.
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This volume examines four key ideas that have played a central role in discussion and thought about the nature of society: industrial society, democracy, individualism and modernity. Within each chapter, a number of ancillary ideas are discussed such as alienation, technology, capitalism, socialism, social class, citizenship, bureaucracy, and community. The thoughts of Karl Marx, Max Weber, Emile Durkheim and Georg Simmel on these topics are also discussed.
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More than a work of reconstruction, Aron's study is an engagement with the question of modernity that explores three traditions: the French liberal school of political sociology, the Comtean tradition, and the Marxists.
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In Max Weber: A Skeleton Key Randall Collins gives a concise overview of the work of one of sociology's greatest classic thinkers. The many strands of Weber's theorizing and the breadth and scope of his historical comparisons are here brought clearly into focus. This is an ideal text for students in sociology.
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This book provides a comprehensive and accessible account of the new theories of discourse developed by Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe, while in particular drawing on central insights provided by Slavoj Zizek. The book accounts for intellectual development of the discourse theory of Laclau and Mouffe from a Gramsci-inspired critique of structural Marxism over a neo-Gramscian theory of discourse to a new type of postmodern theorizing of great relevance for social, cultural and political theory.
The central concepts of discourse, hegemony and social antagonism are carefully explained and discussed and the theoretical framework is applied both on a variety of theoretical problems and in a sample of empirical studies. The book concludes with a discussion of the implications of discourse theory for our political understanding of democracy, citizenship and ethics.
New Theories of Discourse is written out of the basic conviction that postmodernity provides a great challenge to social, cultural and political theory and makes thinkable a whole range of new political projects of which the development of a radical plural democracy is one of the most promising and exciting.
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This is a short, inexpensive, paperback introduction to sociology for students taking their first sociology courses. The types of "beginnings" discussed include the founding of sociology, biographies of the major founders of sociology, the development of major sociological theories, and the emergence of some major sociological research methods.
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