Synopses & Reviews
Toward an Interpretive Theory of Culture
Peter Berger and Thomas Luckmann
Society as a Human Product
Dorothy Smith
Knowing a Society from Within: A Womans Standpoint
Immanuel Wallerstein
The Modern World-System
Theda Skocpol
The State as a Janus-Faced Structure
Nancy Chodorow
Gender Personality and the Reproduction of Mothering
Breaking with Modernity
Jacques Derrida
The Decentering Event in Social Thought
Michel Foucault
Biopolitics and the Carceral Society
C.L.R. James
Black Power and Stokely
Alvin W. Gouldner
Toward a Reflexive Sociology
Herbert Marcuse
Repressive Desublimation of One-Dimensional Man
Harold Garfinkel
Reflexive Properties of Practical Sociology
Pierre Bourdieu
Structures, Habitus, Practices
Audre Lorde
The Masters Tools Will Never Dismantle the Masters House
Part Five
After Modernity: 19791991/2001
Charles Lemert
The Idea of the Postmodern
Jean-François Lyotard
The Postmodern Condition
Richard Rorty
Private Irony and Liberal Hope
Michel Foucault
Power as Knowledge
Jean Baudrillard
Simulacra and Simulations: Disneyland
Arlene Stein and Ken Plummer
I Cant Even Think Straight
Reactions and Alternatives
Jurgen Habermas
Critical Theory, the Colonized Lifeworld, and Communicative Competence
Anthony Giddens
Post-Modernity or Radicalized Modernity?
Ernesto LaClau and Chantal Mouffe
Radical Democracy: Alternative for a New Left
Nancy Hartsock
A Theory of Power for Women?
Jeffrey Alexander
Cultural Codes and Democratic Communication
James S. Coleman
The New Social Structure and the New Social Science
New Cultural Theories After Modernity
Cornel West
The New Cultural Politics of Difference
Henry Louis Gates, Jr.
"Race" as the Trope of the World
Donna Haraway
The Cyborg Manifesto and Fractured Identities
Trinh T. Minh-ha
Infinite Layers/Third World?
Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak
Can the Subaltern Speak?
Patricia Hill Collins
Black Feminist Thought in the Matrix of Domination
Gloria Anzaldúa
The New Mestiza
Jeffrey Weeks
Sexual Identification Is a Strange Thing
Judith Butler
Imitation and Gender Insubordination
Paula Gunn Allen
Who Is Your Mother? Red Roots of White Feminism
Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick
The Epistemology of the Closet
Part Six
Global Realities After
Charles Lemert
Social Theories of Global Uncertainties
Immanuel Wallerstein
The Modern World-System in Crisis
Zygmunt Bauman
Liquid Modernity
David Harvey
Neo-liberalism on Trial
Stanley Hoffman
The Clash of Globalizations
Stuart Hall
The Global, the Local, and the Return of Ethnicity
Manuel Castells
The Global Network
Saskia Sassen
Toward a Feminist Analytics of the Global Economy
Amartya Sen
Asian Values and the Wests Claim to Uniqueness
Ulrich Beck
World Risk Society
Achille Mbembe
Necropower and Late Modern Colonial Occupation
Rethinking the Past that Haunts the Future
Avery Gordon
Ghostly Matters
Edward Said
Intellectual Exile: Expatriates and Marginals
Elijah Anderson
The "Nigger Moment" in the Cosmopolitan Canopy
Charles Tilly
Future Social Science and The Invisible Elbow
Julia Kristeva
Womens Time
William Julius Wilson
Global Economic Changes and the Limits of the Race Relations Vision
Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri
The Multitude Against the Empire
Raewyn Connell
Southern Theory: Gender and Violence
Slavoj Žižek
Cynicism as a Form of Ideology
Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari
The Rhizome/A Thousand Plateaus
Giorgio Agamben
Sovereign Power and Bare Life
Bruno Latour
Spheres and Networks: The Spaces of Material Life
Review
"A rich, highly textured, historically sweeping, and strikingly inclusive collection."
—Jeffrey Alexander, Yale University
"Powerful and provocative…Social Theory is an essential guide through the complex contours of multicultural ideology and theory from the nineteenth century to the present."
—Manning Marable, Pulitzer Prize winner for Malcom X
"The breadth, scope, and variety of this reader is truly unique. For nearly twenty years, Ive kept up-to-date on contemporary social theory by using Lemert as a guide to complete articles and books worth reading."
—Jerry Daday, Western Kentucky University
"Social Theory provides a distinctive opportunity to read primary source material across a wide range of theoretical, political, and historical contexts, yet is expansive enough to offer flexibility in how I teach from one semester to the next."
—Anthony Hatch, Georgia State University
"This book is nothing short of a spiritual experience. The writings are wonderfully diverse, and Dr. Lemerts essays are a vital and powerful supplement to the words of these transformative thinkers."
—Ben McKeown, sociology student
Praise for Prior Editions:
"Lemert has given ample space to those who are at the margins of or fall completely outside of what most consider social theory…and [who] contribute to a diverse, broad, multilevel, and, in places, deep treatment of social theory and its evolution. …Late modern and postmodern theorists are well represented, and the focuses on race, gender, and globalization make this text useful for courses far beyond the standard undergraduate one in sociological theory. This book would also be well suited to more focused courses on modernity and postmodernity or even in a cultural studies curriculum. …Excellent."
—Stephen Lippmann, Teaching Sociology
"Lemert provides an illuminating introduction to the collection and introductions to each section that provide an overview of the socio-historical context and delineation of key thinkers and texts in each period. Combining important classical and contemporary material, Lemert's collection enables the student and reader to trace out the origins of the modern world to our present global and conflicted condition."
—Douglas Kellner, University of California, Los Angeles
"This collections presents a provocative wide-angle view of the history of social theory, including very recent work which interestingly engages with a future only dimly coming into focus. Well-chosen selections from the new social movements as well as the classics and recent mainstream make this a fine introduction for courses in the social sciences. The collection also offers students and scholars in other fields a valuable overview of the ideas and assumptions that have shaped thought in the humanities, jurisprudence, and public policy more generally."
—Sandra Harding, UCLA, Co-Editor of Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society
"Lemert gives shape to a sociological imagination for the twenty-first century. This is necessary reading for us all."
—Patricia Clough, Queens College and CUNY Graduate Center
"With an equally sure grasp of the classics of the past and the probable classics of the future, Charles Lemert has assembled a remarkable array of stimulating readings in social theory. The result is a well-stocked tool kit for the canon wars of the twenty-first century."
—Martin Jay, University of California at Berkeley
"Social Theory is an essential guide through the complex contours of multicultural ideology and theory from the nineteenth century to the present. Lemert brings together a surprising range of multicultural voices and perspectives into a powerful and provocative introductory text. Social Theory clearly illustrates how critical ideas have the power to transform societies."
—Manning Marable, Columbia University
"A rich, highly textured, historically sweeping, and strikingly inclusive collection that aims to reconstruct, perhaps for the first time, the actual dialogue of contemporary social thought."
—Jeffrey Alexander, Yale University
"Charles Lemert captures the surfacing of multiple theoretical voices in the postmodern era. No theory course should be without Social Theory."
—Steve Seidman, State University of New York at Albany
Synopsis
The 20th anniversary edition of this bestseller encompasses an inspiring range of ideas comprising our current understanding of social theory
Synopsis
For over twenty years Charles Lemert has scoured the canon of social theory, pulling together long-established classics as well as engaging modern writing to create an essential collection of social theory from the nineteenth century to the present. In this heavily revised fifth edition, Lemert reevaluates the received canon and reasserts this iconic texts place in the standard curriculum.
Classic, essential texts from thinkers like Marx, Durkheim, and James remain; other key writers, like Dewey and Connell, are presented in a new light; and leading figures in the discussion of twenty-first-century society, such as Elijah Anderson and Bruno Latour, are anthologized here for the first time. In addition to classic and multicultural readings, the new fifth edition introduces a discussion of global social theory as well as important new and evolving topics like mobile technologies, the virtual realm, masculinities, and bare life. For the first time, timelines are included to visually present readings against the backdrop of significant events in social and world history. With more than 100 authors, thinkers, and scholars represented, the fifth edition of Social Theory is an essential component of any course on social theory.
Synopsis
"A rich, highly textured, historically sweeping, and strikingly inclusive collection." Jeffrey Alexander, Yale University
"Powerful and provocative . . . Social Theory is an essential guide through the complex contours of multicultural ideology and theory from the nineteenth century to the present.” Manning Marable, Pulitzer Prize winner for Malcom X
The breadth, scope, and variety of this reader is truly unique. For nearly twenty years, Ive kept up-to-date on contemporary social theory by using Lemert as a guide to complete articles and books worth reading.” Jerry Daday, Western Kentucky University
Social Theory provides a distinctive opportunity to read primary source material across a wide range of theoretical, political, and historical contexts, yet is expansive enough to offer flexibility in how I teach from one semester to the next.” Anthony Hatch, Georgia State University
This book is nothing short of a spiritual experience. The writings are wonderfully diverse, and Dr. Lemerts essays are a vital and powerful supplement to the words of these transformative thinkers.” —Ben McKeown, sociology student
For over twenty years Charles Lemert has scoured the canon of social theory, pulling together long-established classics as well as engaging modern writing to create an essential collection of social theory from the nineteenth century to the present. In this heavily revised fifth edition, Lemert reevaluates the received canon and reasserts this iconic texts place in the standard curriculum.
Classic, essential texts from thinkers like Marx and Du Bois remain; other key writers, like John Dewey and Raewyn Connell, are presented in a new light; and leading figures in the discussion of twenty-first-century society, such as Elijah Anderson, Bruno Latour, and Achille Mbembe, are anthologized here for the first time. In addition to classic and multicultural readings, the new fifth edition introduces a discussion of global social theory as well as important new and evolving topics like mobile technologies, the virtual realm, masculinities, and bare life. New in this edition, timelines are included to visually present readings against the backdrop of significant events in social and world history. With more than 100 authors, thinkers, and scholars represented, the fifth edition of Social Theory is an essential component of any social theory course.
Charles Lemert is University Professor and Andrus Professor of Social Theory Emeritus at Wesleyan University and Senior Fellow of the Center for Comparative Research at Yale University. He is the author and editor of many books, most recently Globalization: The Basics and Why Niebuhr Matters.
About the Author
Charles Lemert is currently University Professor and Andrus Professor of Social Theory Emeritus at Wesleyan University and Senior Fellow of the Center for Comparative Research at Yale University. He is the author and editor of many books, most recently
Globalization: The Basics and
Why Niebuhr Matters.
Table of Contents
Preface, 2013
Acknowledgments, 2013 Edition
Introduction
Social Theory: Its Uses and Pleasures
Charles Lemert
Part One
Modernitys Classical