Download or read book The Great Alternatives of Social Thought written by Terrence E. Cook and published by Rowman & Littlefield. This book was released on 1991 with total page 326 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In an engaging and erudite style, this book takes the reader to the heart of western political theory. Like the cardinal points of a compass, the four alternatives that Cook presents-aristocrat, saint, capitalist, socialist-define the distinct strategies offered to cope with scarcities underlying violent human conflicts, for these core commitments dominate their contrasting economics and politics. Throughout, Cook evidences a detailed knowledge of many authors and themes in classical and modern political thinking. Resisting the temptation to regard the problematic as 'ideal types' from which to embellish or criticize, he blends an objective presentation of each view with penetrating insights and parallels. To each alternative, he applies the presumptions of rule and authority, especially mediated by expectations of democracy.
Download or read book A History of Social Thought written by Emory Stephen Bogardus and published by . This book was released on 1922 with total page 520 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Alternative Modernity written by Andrew Feenberg and published by Univ of California Press. This book was released on 1995-11-07 with total page 268 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this new collection of essays, Andrew Feenberg argues that conflicts over the design and organization of the technical systems that structure our society shape deep choices for the future. A pioneer in the philosophy of technology, Feenberg demonstrates the continuing vitality of the critical theory of the Frankfurt School. He calls into question the anti-technological stance commonly associated with its theoretical legacy and argues that technology contains potentialities that could be developed as the basis for an alternative form of modern society. Feenberg's critical reflections on the ideas of Jürgen Habermas, Herbert Marcuse, Jean-François Lyotard, and Kitaro Nishida shed new light on the philosophical study of technology and modernity. He contests the prevalent conception of technology as an unstoppable force responsive only to its own internal dynamic and politicizes the discussion of its social and cultural construction. This argument is substantiated in a series of compelling and well-grounded case studies. Through his exploration of science fiction and film, AIDS research, the French experience with the "information superhighway," and the Japanese reception of Western values, he demonstrates how technology, when subjected to public pressure and debate, can incorporate ethical and aesthetic values.
Download or read book Social Theory for Alternative Societies written by Matt Dawson and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2017-09-16 with total page 248 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book traces a unique story of social theory: one which focuses on its role in offering ideas for alternative societies. In charting this story, Matt Dawson argues that the differences in alternatives offered by social theorists not only demonstrate the diversity in, and value of, sociological perspectives, but also emphasize competing ideas of the role of intellectuals in social change. The text discusses a collection of social theorists –from key figures such as Marx, Durkheim and Du Bois to less well known or now commonly overlooked writers such as Levitas, Lefebvre and Mannheim. It explains their use of the tools of sociology to critique society and provide visions for alternatives, highlighting elements of the intellectual backgrounds of movements such as socialism, anti-racism, feminism and cosmopolitanism. Social Theory for Alternative Societies not only explores in detail a variety of thinkers, but also reflects on the relevance of sociology today and on the connection between social theory and the 'real world.' Thus it will be of interest to students of sociology and those interested in ideas for a better society.
Download or read book The Social Thought of Emile Durkheim written by Alexander Riley and published by SAGE Publications. This book was released on 2014-02-04 with total page 281 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This new volume of the SAGE Social Thinkers series provides a concise introduction to the work, life, and influences of Émile Durkheim, one of the informal “holy trinity” of sociology’s founding thinkers, along with Weber and Marx. The author shows that Durkheim’s perspective is arguably the most properly sociological of the three. He thought through the nature of society, culture, and the complex relationship of the individual to the collective in a manner more concentrated and thorough than any of his contemporaries during the period when sociology was emerging as a discipline.
Download or read book Liberal Economics and Democracy written by Conrad Waligorski and published by Lawrence, Kan. : University Press of Kansas. This book was released on 1997 with total page 280 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Waligorski shows why there is such resilience and viability to this brand of liberalism. The chapter on Keynes is as good a short piece on the economist as can be found anywhere". -- Kenneth M. Dolbeare, author of American Political Thought. "A coherent and insightful book by a sagacious thinker". -- Charles E. Lindblom, author of Politics and Markets.
Download or read book Spatial Social Thought written by Michael Kuhn and published by Columbia University Press. This book was released on 2014-04-15 with total page 333 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume presents perspectives on spatially construed knowledge systems and their struggle to interrelate. Western social sciences tend to be wrapped up in very specific, exclusionary discourses, and Northern and Southern knowledge systems are sidelined. Spatial Social Thought reimagines the social sciences as a place of encounter between all spatially bound, parochial knowledge systems.
Download or read book The Vision of Catholic Social Thought written by Meghan J. Clark and published by Fortress Press. This book was released on 2014-04-01 with total page 182 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Vision of Catholic Social Thought traces the emergence of solidarity and human rights as critical theological and philosophical pillars of the anthropology and ethics foundational to the development of Catholic social teaching. Meghan J. Clark argues that the integration of human rights and the virtue of solidarity at the root of the Catholic social tradition are the unique contributions Catholic thought makes to contemporary debates in ethics, political and philosophical theory. Building upon the historical framework of the development of Catholic social thought, drawing deeply from the papal encyclical tradition and the theological and ethical developments of Vatican II, Clark forwards a constructive vision of virtue and social practice, applying this critical question of human rights on the international stage.
Download or read book Contributions to Alternative Concepts of Knowledge written by Hebe Kuhn, Michael Vessuri and published by BoD – Books on Demand. This book was released on 2016-09-01 with total page 274 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the past, the European social sciences labelled and discredited knowledge that did not follow the definition for scientific knowledge as applied by the European social sciences as an alternative concept of knowledge, as “indigenous” knowledge. Perception has changed with time: Not only has indigenous knowledge become an entrance ticket to the European social science world, but the indigenization of European theories is seen by some as the contribution of “peripheral” social sciences to join the theories of the “centers”. This book offers contributions to the discourses about alternative concepts of knowledge, inviting the reader to decide if they are alternative, indigenous, or European types of knowledge. However, in order to make this decision, the reader must know what the nature of the European concepts of science and of scientific knowledge is; this might be a motivation to read a book that presents thoughts claiming to be alternative concepts of knowledge, alternative to the European concept of science.
Download or read book Politics Volume 2 Social Theory written by Roberto Mangabeira Unger and published by Verso Books. This book was released on 2020-05-05 with total page 377 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Social Theory: Its Situation and Its Task is an introduction both to Unger's ideas and to the major debates of contemporary social, political and economic thought. Unger shows how the failures of social science and the criticism of such ambitious, deterministic theories as Marxism offer materials for an alternative practice of social understanding. This alternative severs, once and for all, the link between the explanation of social arrangements and the vindication of their necessity. Unger argues that the disappointment of so many liberal and socialist hopes coexists with unforeseen opportunities to advance progressive commitments. To seize such opportunities, however, we must rethink many of our basic beliefs about society about what it is and what it can become. Social Theory: Its Situation and Its Task shows that what at first seems a circumstance of intellectual and political paralysis turns out to be rich in unrecognized transformative possibility.
Download or read book Spatial Dimensions of Social Thought written by Thomas W. Schubert and published by Walter de Gruyter. This book was released on 2011-10-28 with total page 365 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Space provides the stage for our social lives - social thought evolved and developed in a constant interaction with space. The volume demonstrates how this has led to an astonishing intertwining of spatial and social thought. For the first time, research on language comprehension, metaphors, priming, spatial perception, face perception, art history and other fields is brought together to provide an integrative view. This overview confirms that often, metaphors reveal a deeper truth about how our mind uses spatial information to represent social concepts. Yet, the evidence also goes beyond this insight, showing for instance how flexible our mind operates with spatial metaphors, how the peculiarities of our bodies determine the way we assign meaning to space, and how the asymmetry of our brain influences spatial and face perception. Finally, it is revealed that also how we write language - from left to right or from right to left - shapes how we perceive, interpret, and produce horizontal movement and order. The evidence ranges from linguistics to social and spatial perception to neuropsychology, seamlessly integrating such diverse findings as speed in word comprehension, children's depictions of abstract concepts, estimates of the steepness of hills, and archival research on how often Homer Simpson is depicted left or right of Marge. The chapters in this book offer a topology of social cognition and explore the pivotal role language plays in creating links between spatial and social thought.
Download or read book Catholic Social Thought written by Jonathan Boswell and published by Peeters Publishers. This book was released on 2000 with total page 350 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: These essays are an attempt to recover something of the form, style and force of Catholic non-official social thinking in the face of contemporary social thought and contemporary injustice in advanced societies. After an opening essay by the doyen of Catholic writers in this field, Jean-Yves Calvez, SJ, the book is divided into three sections. The first and largest group of essays discuss patterns and predicaments of Catholic social thought in general terms and from different points of view. The context here is partly the debate on modernity, high-modernity and post-modernity, partly the issue of how far and in what ways Catholic Social Thought can claim to be distinctive, relative to contemporary secular thought. The second section of the book focusses on relationships between Catholic social thought and its restatement, and a number of contemporary debates on public issues. Particular attention is given, in successive essays, to issues of anti-poverty, human rights, economic theory and international finance. A third and shorter section describes a number of institutional projects which attempt to carry Catholic social values forward into concrete action, focussing on work in health and welfare, grass roots economic co-operation, anti-poverty and international peace and justice. Final contributions by the reputed international scholar in this field, John Coleman, SJ, and the book editors, respectively evaluate the collection as a whole and discuss further steps.
Download or read book Alternative Discourses in Asian Social Science written by Syed Farid Alatas and published by SAGE. This book was released on 2006-05-10 with total page 234 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book situates Asian social sciences in the global context in terms of the perspectives that have evolved and the contributions they have made to the general body of knowledge in the field. More than a mere chronology of key growth points of various social science disciplines in the vast region of Asia and the Pacific, the book focuses on major theoretical problems and issues and offers a critique of various approaches and orientations pursued by scholars worldwide in the investigation of Asian societies and cultures.
Download or read book British Social Theory written by John Scott and published by SAGE. This book was released on 2018-06-04 with total page 227 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A unique contribution to discussions of social theory, this book counters the argument that no social theory was ever produced in Britain before the late twentieth century. Reviewing a period of 300 years from the seventeenth century to the mid-twentieth century, it sets out a number of innovative strands in theory that culminated in powerful contributions in the classical period of sociology. The book discusses how these traditions of theory were lost and forgotten and sets out why they are important today.
Download or read book Social Thought in England 1480 1730 written by A.L. Beier and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2016-02-05 with total page 541 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Authorities ranging from philosophers to politicians nowadays question the existence of concepts of society, whether in the present or the past. This book argues that social concepts most definitely existed in late medieval and early modern England, laying the foundations for modern models of society. The book analyzes social paradigms and how they changed in the period. A pervasive medieval model was the "body social," which imagined a society of three estates – the clergy, the nobility, and the commonalty – conjoined by interdependent functions, arranged in static hierarchies based upon birth, and rejecting wealth and championing poverty. Another model the book describes as "social humanist," that fundamentally questioned the body social, advancing merit over birth, mobility over stasis, and wealth over poverty. The theory of the body social was vigorously articulated between the 1480s and the 1550s. Parts of the old metaphor actually survived beyond 1550, but alternative models of social humanist thought challenged the body concept in the period, advancing a novel paradigm of merit, mobility, and wealth. The book’s methodology focuses on the intellectual context of a variety of contemporary texts.
Download or read book The Left Alternative written by Roberto Mangabeira Unger and published by Verso Books. This book was released on 2020-05-05 with total page 169 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Confronting the major debates in the world today-about national alternatives and alternative globalizations-Unger shows that there is a set of initiatives that we can begin to develop with the materials at hand. Fully updated with a new preface, The Left Alternative equips the Left with the ideas that it needs to overthrow the dictatorship of no alternatives.
Download or read book German Cosmopolitan Social Thought and the Idea of the West written by Austin Harrington and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2016-05-19 with total page 451 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: There has been considerable interest in recent years in German social thinkers of the Weimar era. Generally, this has focused on reactionary and nationalist figures such as Schmitt and Heidegger. In this book, Austin Harrington offers a broader account of the German intellectual legacy of the period. He explores the ideas of a circle of left-liberal cosmopolitan thinkers (Troeltsch, Scheler, Tönnies, Max Weber, Alfred Weber, Mannheim, Jaspers, Curtius, and Simmel) who responded to Germany's crisis by rejecting the popular appeal of nationalism. Instead, they promoted pan-European reconciliation based on notions of a shared European heritage between East and West. Harrington examines their concepts of nationhood, religion, and 'civilization' in the context of their time and in their bearing on subsequent debates about European identity and the place of the modern West in global social change. The result is a groundbreaking contribution to current questions in social, cultural and historical theory.
