'Sociology' tag archive

The future of post-socialism Michael Rustin This article discusses three contributions to new thinking on the Left. * Two of these, Anthony Giddens’ s Beyond Left and Right: The Future ofRadical Politics and David Miliband’s collection Reinventing the Left (to which Giddens contributes the first chapter), set out to provide the new thinking which the […]

Back to Utopia: Anthony Giddens and Modern Social Theory fan Craib I I ![ Over the past fifteen years, Anthony Giddens has produced a series of studies in social theory that must at the very least be caUed impressive. Despite the boom in theoretical work during the ’70s, he is the only British sociologist of […]

Giddens and Historical Materialism Paul Bagguley Jntroduction In this paper I examine a recent critique of historical materialism by the British sociologist Anthony Giddens and the alternative theory of history developed by him. This is contained in his recent book A Contemporary Critique of Historical Materialism. It is the most recent in a series of […]

SOCIALIZATION AND TBE SELf JEAN GRIMSHAW The problems inherent in theories which present human selves as nothing but the products of social conditioning have long been recognised. Marx, for example, wrote: The materialist doct.rine that men are products of circumstances and upbringing, and that, therefore, changed men are products of other circumstances and changed upbringing, […]

Lukacs aacl tbe MaJlxist Ca-iticislll of Sociology IanCraib This paper is situated in the context of three interrelated arguments. The first and central issue is epistemological, concerning the grounds upon which one theory of ‘point of view’ claims to be superior to others, to represent ‘the truth’, to be ‘scientific’, to produce ‘knowledge’. The last […]

4 5 HMSO, 1963, App.Two(A), Annek K. 6 Cited in Danie1s and Schouten, op. cit., pp16ff. The same conclusion has been drawn from the observation of constant pass rates in the British GCE (a-level) over the years despite a tremendous increase in numbers of candidates. Cp. John Pearce, School Examinations (Macmi11an, London, 1972, p103): ‘The […]

THE SOOAL FUD[TIOD OF PHIOSOPHY When the words physics, chemistry, medicine, or history are mentioned in a conversation, the participants usually have something very definite in mind. Should any difference of opinion arise, we could consult an encyclopaedia or accepted textbook or turn to one or more outstanding specialists in the field in question. The […]

lU[IEn IiOlDmAnn 15 THERE AmARHI5T 50[IOl06Y? Translated and IntradlHed bV Ion the socially relevant, like so many practitioners of the ‘sociology of literature’. When Lucien Goldmann’ s essay , Is There a Marxist Sociology?’ first appeared in Les Temps Modernes in 1957, it made an important contribution to the revival of a serious consideration of […]

Niklas Luhmann, who died in 1998 (see Obituary in RP 94), is not widely discussed by social and cultural theorists outside Germany, Switzerland, Austria, Scandinavia and Italy. Yet in Germany his influence rivals and even exceeds that of Habermas in certain reaches of social theory, extending also to philosophers and logicians. More surprisingly, perhaps, he […]

In an article first published in July 1968 in New Left Review, Perry Anderson gave an analysis of a critical weakness of British intellectual culture. His diagnosis is remarkable and surprising. One of the key problems, Anderson argued, was that Britain has failed to make any contribution to the classical sociological tradition; moreover, this failure […]