Product Description: The work of Michel Foucault, one of the most influential of modern French social theorists and philosophers, has had a dramatic and far-reaching effect on many disciplines. The essays in this reissued collection, originally published in 1986, present Foucault's work as an important contribution to the theoretical analysis of history, language and power...read more

Product Description: Auguste Comte is widely acknowledged as the founder of the science of sociology and the 'Religion of Humanity'. In this fascinating study, the first major reassessment of Comte’s sociology for many years, Mike Gane draws on recent scholarship and presents a new reading of this remarkable figure...read more

Product Description: Umberto Eco is arguably best known for his novel The Name of the Rose yet there is much more to him than simply being an exemplary novelist. Semiotician, literary and media critic, philosopher and historian, Umberto Eco is one of the greatest and most original thinkers working today...read more

Product Description: Having taken over the leadership of the French school of sociology after the death of his uncle, Emile Durkheim, in 1917, Mauss, celebrated author of The Gift, re-launched the flagship journal, the Année sociologique. Here are two of Mauss's most significant statements on the social sciences...read more

Product Description: Jean Baudrillard is one of the most revered philosophers of the past century, and his work has helped define how we think about the post-modern. In this fascinating book of interviews conducted with Francois L'Yvonnet, Baudrillard is on sparkling form and explores his life in terms of his educational, political and literary experiences, as well as reflecting on his intellectual genesis and his position as outsider in the field of great French thinkers...read more (view table of contents, read Amazon.com's description)

Product Description: Roland Barthes (1915-80) was one of the leading post-structuralist authors of his day as well as making many important contributions to semiotics. These three volumes provide a complete overview of his achievement. They provide an unparalleled critical assessment of his work in semiotics, structuralism and post-structuralism...read more (view table of contents, read Amazon.com's description)

Product Description: Presents an up-to-date account of modern French social thought. Divides French social theory into three logically coherent cycles: 1800-1880, the first developments of sociology; 1880-1940, classical sociology and the birth of modern anthropology; and 1940-2000, the development of Marxist social theory...read more

This book explores the influence of Foucault's later writings on basic theoretical and research concerns in the social sciences. The introduction contextualizes the development of Foucault's writings within a biographical frame and leads into Foucault's College de France lecture, 'Kant on Enlightenment and Revolution' which (along with Colin Gordon's commentary) raises the issues crucial to Foucault's latter project: the relationship between reason and liberty. The answer suggested - involving a reformulation of the relationship between the subject and power - connects with the issues raised in subsequent chapters, including Pasquino's focus on the relationship between the governmentality of the modern state and the self-governing individual and Meuret's analysis of the link between Adam Smith's novel conception of political economy and the emergent political structures of modern capitalist states. The following four chapters all extend Foucault's insights into new domains of social analysis: namely the role of language in constructing and governing the econmomy (Miller and Rose), the shifting relations between sovereignty and responsibility in the welfare state (Donzelot), the role of the professional expert in constructing new social realities amenable to governance (Johnson), the significance of th technologies of government in the development of a political rationality of the humanities (Hunter). In the final chapter Bevis, Cohen and Kendall subject Foucault's last major enterprise, the history of sexuality, to a critique, the criteria of which are derived from Foucault's own methodological measures of adequacy - that it be a history of the present which enable sus to think in novel ways and facilitates action. By showing how Foucault's writings increasingly influence and reconstruct social theory and analysis the book will appeal to a wide range of social scientist and other academics.

Jean Baudrillard arouses strong opinions. In this collection of his most important interviews the reader gains a unique and accessible overview of Baudrillard's key ideas. The collection includes many interviews that appear in English for the first time as well as a fascinating interview and encounter between the editor and Baudrillard in Paris.

Drawing on several of Baudrillard's key writings which are still only available in French, Gane provides an introduction to Baudrillard's cultural theory, particularly the conception of modernity and the complex process of simulation.

Product Description: Jean Baudrillard is one of the most important and provocative writers in the contemporary era. Widely acclaimed as the prophet of postmodernism, he has famously announced the disappearance of the subject, meaning, truth, class and the notion of reality itself...read more (view table of contents, read Amazon.com's description)

Mike Gane provides an introduction to recent developments in French theorist Jean Baudrillard’s thinking. This volume reflects Baudrillard’s new concern with radical uncertainty and the way in which he has reconfigured his earlier thinking in the light of more recent ideas and theories.The author disputes the notion that Baudrillard has now become an increasingly extreme theorist, remote from the realities of the world - and argues instead that new developments in Baudrillard’s work are a more appropriate reflection on a world of extremes. This book explicitly challenges the conservative response to Baudrillard’s work, and underlines the significance of what Baudrillard himself terms the ‘fourth order of simulation’, in a major contribution to new debates on the significance of recent developments in Western culture and society. (view table of contents)

Product Description: This book examines the interconnections of gender theory and lived gender relationships of some of the key social theorists of the classical period (1789 - 1920): Wollstonecraft, Godwin, Enfantin, Comte, Marx, Engels, Mill, Nietzsche, Durkheim and Weber...read more

Product Description: In this outstanding collection, Mike Gane brings together a selection of key articles on Durkheim and Mauss showing their points of convergence and divergence. Included here are Mauss's 'A sociological assessment of Bolshevism 1924-5' and his 'Letters on Communism, Fascism and Nazism'...read more

Product Description: Baudrillard has become widely identified as a powerful and enigmatic new force in cultural and social criticism. This book aims to articulate a detached assessment of his thought and reputation. This book should be of interest to students of social theory, philosophy, cultural studies, and postmodernism...read more

Product Description: This collection reflects the French influence on literary and representational theory which has been predominant in recent years. It includes studies of Perault, Borges, Eco, Barthes, Derrida, Marin and Foucault. This book should be of interest to teachers and students of literature, media, sociology, French studies, philosophy...read more

Product Description: A major contribution to the social scientific understanding of how people make sense of their lives, Ideological Dilemmas presents an illuminating new approach to the study of everyday thinking. Contradictory strands abound within both ideology and common sense...read more

Product Description: The work of Michel Foucault, one of the most influential of modern French social theorists and philosophers, has had a dramatic and far-reaching effect on many disciplines. The essays in this reissued collection, originally published in 1986, present Foucault's work as an important contribution to the theoretical analysis of history, language and power...read more