The Sociology Of Radical Commitment

This edited volume presents the life and thought of Kurt H. Wolff, a Jewish refugee from Darmstadt, a student of Karl Mannheim, practitioner of the sociology of knowledge, translator of the classic works of Simmel, Durkheim, and Mannheim, and creator of the radical existential sociology of surrender-and-catch, through multiple modalities. Two interviews provide an autobiographical portrait. Testimonies by close family members, friends, and colleagues allow the reader a more intimate insight into his subjectivity. Excerpts from a travelogue journal kept by his spouse, Carla E. Wolff provide an understanding of how the Wolff's interpreted their situation and times. Several chapters devoted to explicating Wolff's place in the sociological tradition, especially in light of his work in the sociology of knowledge. Several chapters exhibit creative work in the further development of his thought, especially concerning his surrender-and-catch. The thrust of the book is to explicate Wolff's relation to the tradition and to the orientation to which he belongs while at the same time to exhibit how he develops a sociology of radical commitment. This commitment can demand great existential risk in the quest to uncover the universal in the unique--the creation of new meaning (the catch) though the surrender. Wolff's hope is to find possibilities for humankind that lead us out of the crises, to which traditional scientia has been disappointingly ineffective.

Sociologist, social critic, and political radical C. Wright Mills (1916-1962) was one of the leading public intellectuals in twentieth century America. Offering an important new understanding of Mills and the times in which he lived, Radical Ambition challenges the captivating caricature that has prevailed of him as a lone rebel critic of 1950s complacency. Instead, it places Mills within broader trends in American politics, thought, and culture. Indeed, Daniel Geary reveals that Mills shared key assumptions about American society even with those liberal intellectuals who were his primary opponents. The book also sets Mills firmly within the history of American sociology and traces his political trajectory from committed supporter of the Old Left labor movement to influential herald of an international New Left. More than just a biography, Radical Ambition illuminates the career of a brilliant thinker whose life and works illustrate both the promise and the dilemmas of left-wing social thought in the United States.

This book focuses on the important work of Karl Mannheim by demonstrating how his theoretical conception of a reflexive sociology took shape as a collaborative empirical research programme. The authors show how contemporary work along these lines can benefit from the insights of Mannheim and his students into both morphology and genealogy. It returns Mannheim's sociology of knowledge inquiries into the broader context of a wider project in historical and cultural sociology, whose promising development was disrupted and then partially obscured by the expulsion of Mannheim's intellectual generation. This inspired volume will appeal to sociologists concerned with the contemporary relevance of his work, and who are prepared for a fresh look at Weimar sociology and the legacy of Max Weber.

This book suggests that the enduring problem of generations remains that of knowledge: how society conceptualises the relationship between past, present and future, and the ways in which this is transmitted by adults to the young. Reflecting on Mannheim’s seminal essay ‘The Problem of Generations’, the author explores why generations have become a focus for academic interest and policy developments today. Bristow argues that developments in education, teaching and parenting culture seek to resolve tensions of our present-day risk society through imposing an artificial distance between the generations. Bristow’s book will be of interest to students and scholars in the fields of Sociology, Social Policy, Education, Family studies, Gerontology and Youth studies.

This volume is the first handbook to explore existentialism as epistemology and method. Transdisciplinary in scope, it considers the nature of human subjectivity and how human experience ought to be studied, examining the connections that exist between the individual’s imagining of the world and their everyday practice within it. With attention to the question of whether humans are ultimately alone in their self-knowledge or whether what they know of themselves is constructed in common with others, it enables the reader to recognize core questions that frame the methods and orientation of an existential inquiry. In addition to historical exposition, it offers a variety of chapters from around the world that explore the diverse global spaces for, and different types of, existential focus and discussion, thus questioning the view that the existential "problem" may be singularly a matter for the post-enlightenment West. The fullest and most comprehensive survey to date of what human beings can and should make of themselves, The Routledge International Handbook of Existential Human Science will appeal to scholars across the humanities and social sciences with interests in anthropology, sociology, philosophy, and research methods.

A festschrift honoring the work of Edward A. Tiryakian, consisting of a large number of essays.

This volume brings together a number of authors that see themselves as contribu tors to, or critical commentators on, a new field that has recently emerged within the sociology of knowledge. This new field is 'the Sociology of Philosophical Knowledge' (SPK). Studying philosophers and their knowledge from broadly sociological or political perspectives is not, of course, a recent phenomenon. Marxist writers have used such perspectives throughout the twentieth century, and, since the sixties, feminist authors have also occasionally engaged in sociological analysis of philosophers' texts. What distinguishes SPK from these sociologies is that SPK is not engaged in a political struggle; indeed, SPK remains, in general, neutral with respect to the truth or falsity of the doctrines it studies. In doing so, SPK follows the 'strong programme' in the sociology of scientific knowledge. In 'Wittgenstein as a Conservative Thinker', David Bloor draws on the work of the sociologist Karl Mannheim in order to situate Wittgenstein's philosophy. Mannheim distinguished between two important styles of thought in the nine teenth century. The first, the 'natural law' ideology was associated with ideas of the Enlightenment and the French Revolution. It emphasized individualism, progress, and universal reason. The second style of thought was 'conservatism'.

In 1973 The New Criminology was published and quickly established itself as a key textbook in criminology, casting a major influence over a generation of scholars. It has remained in print ever since. This volume, published twenty-five years later, traces the major developments in the field including feminism, postmodernism, critical criminology and realism. The articles are by leading authorities from Britain, the United States and Australia and include Stan Cohen, Elliott Currie, Pat Carlen and Kerry Carrington as well as separate commentaries by the three original authors themselves: Ian Taylor, Paul Walton and Jock Young.

Many people of all ages today continue to be attracted to sociology and other social sciences because of their promise to contribute to better political, social, and moral understandings of themselves and their social worlds-and often because they hope it will help them to build a better society. In a world of new movements and deepening economic inequality following the Great Recession, this new edition is vital. It features dozens of new examples from the latest research, with an emphasis on the next generation of liberation sociologists. The authors expand on the previous edition with the inclusion of sections on decolonisation paradigms in criminology, critical speciesism, and studies of environmental racism and environmental privilege. There is an expanded focus on participatory action research, and increased coverage of international liberation social scientists. Work by psychologists, anthropologists, theologians, historians, and others who have developed a liberation orientation for their disciplines is also updated and expanded.