The revised edition includes new material on French pragmatist sociology and cultural sociology, and on contemporary social thinkers such as Zygmunt Bauman, Ulrich Beck, Manuel Castells, Randall Collins, Michael Mann, Saskia Sassen and Theda Skocpol. The authors conclude with a bold, new pragmatist agenda for social theory and the social sciences.
Written in a lively style, and avoiding jargon, Social Theory in the Twentieth Century and Beyond is aimed at students who wish to gain an understanding of the main debates and dilemmas driving social theory. Like its predecessor, it will be a standard introduction to modern social theory for students in sociology, politics and anthropology.
Preface to the Second Edition
Introduction
1. A Timeless Order and its Achievement: Structuralism and Genetic Structuralism
2. The Biological Metaphor: Functionalism and Neo-functionalism
3. The Enigma of Everyday Life: Symbolic Interactionism, the Dramaturgical Approach and Ethnomethodology
4. The Invasion of Economic Man: From Rational Choice Theory to the New Institutionalism
5. As Sociology meets History: Giddens’s Structuration Theory and Historical Sociology
6. The History of the Present: Foucault’s Archaeology and Genealogy
7. The Spread of Reason: Habermas’s Critical Theory and Beyond
8. A Brave New World?: Current Trends in Social Theory
9. Conclusion: Social Theory for the Twenty-First Century
Filipe Carreira da Silva University of Lisbon.
