Pierre Bourdieu is one of the world's most important social theorists and is also one of the great empirical researchers in contemporary sociology. However, reading Bourdieu can be difficult for those not familiar with the French cultural context, and until now a comprehensive introduction to Bourdieu's oeuvre has not been available. David Swartz focuses on a central theme in Bourdieu's work-the complex relationship between culture and power-and...

“Reason and Revolution: Hegel and the Rise of Social Theory” is the philosopher Herbert Marcuse's first major work in English-a masterful interpretation of Hegel's philosophy and the influence it has had on European political thought from the French Revolution to the present day. “Reason & Revolution”, written in 1941, was the first Hegelian Marxist text to appear in English, the first systematic study of Hegel by a Marxist, and the first...

"Defying the conventional split between "theory" and "methodology," this book introduces a yet unarticulated and thus far never systematized method of theorizing designed to reveal abstract social patterns. Insisting that such methodology can actually be taught, it tries to make the mental processes underlying the practice of a "concept-driven sociology" more explicit. Many sociologists tend to study the specific, often at the expense of also studying...