Social Theory in the Twentieth Century and Beyond

Patrick Baert, Filipe Carreira da Silva

• Publisher: Polity
• Year: 2025
• Print ISBN:
  9780745639819
  9780745639802
• Edition: 2
• eBook ISBN:
  9781509500048
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Social Theory
• Index: Social Sciences

This revised edition of Patrick Baert's widely acclaimed Social Theory in the Twentieth Century, now benefitting from the collaboration of Filipe Carreira da Silva has been brought right up-to-date with cutting-edge developments in social theory today. It offers an easy-to-read but provocative account of the development of social theory, covering a range of key figures and classic schools of thought. The authors bridge the gap between philosophy and social theory, locating the theoretical views of individuals such as Michel Foucault, Anthony Giddens and Jürgen Habermas within wider historical traditions.

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.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Table of Contents
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Preface to the Second Edition
• Introduction
• 1 One Hundred Years of French Social Theory: From Structuralism to Pragmatism
• 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 Sociology Meets History: Giddens’s Theory of Modernity Sociology and modernity
• 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? The Empirical Turn in Social Theory How distinctive is our age?
• 9 Conclusion: Social Theory for the Twenty-First Century The roles of social theory
• Index
• End User License Agreement