Long recognised as a foundational figure in the development of social scientific thought, Emile Durkheim's work has been the subject of intense debate over the years. This authoritative and comprehensive collection of essays re-examines the impact of Durkheim's thought, considering the historical contexts of his work as well as evaluating his ideas in relation to current issues and controversies. Eminent authorities in the field have contributed to this up-to-date overview, giving the reader - both students and academics - a chance to engage directly with leading figures in the field about contemporary trends, ideas and dilemmas. This volume reflects the cross-disciplinary application of Durkheim's theories and will interest scholars of anthropology, political science, cultural studies and philosophy, as well as sociology. This is a landmark volume that redefines the relevance of Durkheim to the human sciences in the twenty-first century.

An authoritative and comprehensive collection of essays redefining the relevance of Durkheim to the human sciences in the twenty-first century.

This is the only collection of Durkheim's writings to draw upon the whole body of his work. Many of the texts in the book are here translated for the first time. Dr. Giddens takes his selections from a wide variety of sources and includes a number of items from untranslated writings in the Revue Philosophique, Année Sociologique and from L'évolution pedagogue en France. Selections from previously translated writings have been checked against the originals and amended or re-translated where necessary. Dr. Giddens arranges his selections thematically rather than chronologically. However, extracts from all phases of Durkheim's intellectual career are represented, giving the date of their first publication, which makes the evolution of his thought easily traceable. In his introduction Dr. Giddens discusses phases in the interpretation of Durkheim's thought, as well as the main themes in his work, with an analysis of the effects of his thinking on modern sociology. The book is for students at any level taking courses in sociology, social anthropology and social theory, for whom Durkheim is one of the major writers studied.

'The Anthem Companion to Georg Simmel' brings together new interpretations of the work of this sociologist and philosopher. The companion highlights issues, themes and concepts that most concern readers in social and cultural theory today, with an emphasis on critical perspectives that show how Simmel's work is relevant, interesting and significant for contemporary discussions and debates. Also included in this volume is Austin Harrington’s translation of selections from Simmel’s book on Goethe and a comprehensive list of Simmel’s work in English.

Durkheim's Ghosts is a fascinating presentation of the tradition of social theory influenced by Emile Durkheim's thinking on the social foundations of knowledge. From Saussure and Levi-Strauss to Foucault, Bourdieu and Derrida, today's criticisms of modern politics and culture owe an important, if unacknowledged, debt to Durkheim. These engaging and innovative essays by leading sociologist Charles Lemert bring together his writings on the contributions of French social theory past and present. Rather than merely interpret the theories, Lemert uses them to explore the futures of sociology, social theory, and culture studies. Durkheim's Ghosts offers the reader original insights into Durkheim's legacy and the wider French traditions for the cultural and social sciences. Of special note is the book's new and exciting theory of culture and semiotics. Provocative, scholarly, imaginative and ambitious this book will be invaluable to anyone interested in social theory, culture, and intellectual history of modern times.

The classic works of Emile Durkheim are characterized by a structural approach to the understanding of collective behaviour, and it is this element of his writings that has been most taken up by modern social science. This volume, however, rejects the dominant structural approach, and draws instead on Durkheim's later work, in which he shifted to a symbolic theory of modern industrial societies that emphasized the importance of ritual and placed the tension between the sacred and the profane at the center of society. In so doing, the contributors offer both a radically different approach to Durkheimian sociology and a new way of linking the interpretation of culture and the interpretation of society. In his introduction to the volume, Jeffrey Alexander elaborates the new interpretation of Durkheim that informs the contributions. His arguments form a background for the lively and provacative chapters that follow, which provide broadly cultural interpretations of such topics as popular upheavals and social movements, ranging from the French Revolution to the massive rebellions in Poland and Nicaragua in the 1980s; political crisis, from Watergate to the crisis of legitimation in contemporary capitalism; and the creative and contingent element in symbolic behaviour, including the symbolics of intimate friendship, and the ritual and rhetoric of media events. In addition to re-examining Durkheimian sociology, the essays also demolish the myth that attention to cultural values implies conservatism or the inability to analyze social change, and challenge the common antithesis between normative theory and microsociology. Its exploration of the links between Durkheimian sociology and the most important developments in contemporary sociology, history, anthropology and semiotics will ensure it a broad appeal across the social sciences.

This volume provides the reader with clear, lively and balanced introductions to the most recent scholarship on Darwin and his intellectual legacies.

The fundamental task of philosophy since the seventeenth century has been to determine whether the essential principles of both knowledge and action can be discovered by human beings unaided by an external agency. No one philosopher contributed more to this enterprise than Kant, whose Critique of Pure Reason (1781) shook the very foundations of the intellectual world. Kant argued that the basic principles of the natural science are imposed on reality by human sensibility and understanding, and thus that human beings are also free to impose their own free and rational agency on the world. This 1992 volume is the only systematic and comprehensive account of the full range of Kant's writings available, and the first major overview of his work to be published in more than a dozen years. An internationally recognised team of Kant scholars explore Kant's conceptual revolution in epistemology, metaphysics, philosophy of science, moral and political philosophy, aesthetics, and the philosophy of religion.

Moving back and forth between the history of philosophy and the contributions of philosophers in his own day, Durkheim takes up topics as diverse as philosophical psychology, logic, ethics, and metaphysics, and seeks to articulate a unified philosophical position. Remarkably, in these lectures, given more than a decade before the publication of his groundbreaking book, The Division of Labour in Society (1893), the 'social realism' that is so characteristic of his later work - where he insists, famously, that social facts cannot be reduced to psychological or economic ones, and that such facts constrain human action in important ways - is totally absent in these early lectures. For this reason, they will be of special interest to students of the history of the social sciences, for they shed important light on the course of Durkheim's intellectual development.

Informative and provocative, this book introduces readers to debates in the contemporary study of religion and suggests future research possibilities.