Are there any stunning works of modern(ish) social theory missing? Any more feminist suggestions than those listed? Anything here you definitely would not recommend?
Alexander
Neofunctionalism and After (1998)
The Civil Sphere (2006)
The Dark Side of Modernity (2013)
Althusser
Althusser: The Detour of Theory – Gregory Elliott (1987)
Althusser: A Critical Reader – Gregory Elliott (1994)
Reading Capital (1970)
Lenin and Philosophy (1971)
Essays in Self Criticism (1976)
Philosophy and the Spontaneous Philosophy of the Scientists (1990)
Philosophy of the Encounter (2006)
Baudrillard
Baudrillard Now – Ryan Bishop (2009)
Symbolic Exchange and Death (1976)
Seduction (1990)
The Gulf War Did Not Take Place (1995)
Bauman
The Contemporary Bauman - Anthony Elliott (2007)
Modernity and the Holocaust (1989)
Liquid Modernity (2000)
Berman
All that is Solid Melts Into Air (1982)
Bourdieu
Bourdieu: A Critical Reader – Richard Shusterman (1999)
Distinction (1979)
Homo Academicus (1984)
The Field of Cultural Production (1993)
Masculine Domination (1998)
On Television and Journalism (1998)
Acts of Resistance (2001)
The Social Structures of the Economy (2003)
Brennan
Between Feminism and Psychoanalysis (1989)
Butler
Understanding Judith Butler – Anita Brady (2011)
Gender Trouble (1990)
Bodies that Matter (1993)
Excitable Speech (1997)
Undoing Gender (2004)
Castells
Manuel Castells – Felix Stalder (2005)
Networks of Outrage and Hope (2012)
Debord
Society of the Spectacle (1973)
Foucault
Michel Foucault: Beyond Structuralism and Hermeneutics - Dreyfus and Rabinow (1982)
Foucault, Health and Medicine – Petersen and Bunton (1997)
The Birth of the Clinic (1972)
The Order of Things (1969)
The Archaeology of Knowledge (1970)
Discipline and Punish (1976)
Fraser
Unruly Practices (1989)
Fortunes of Feminism (2013)
Giddens
A Contemporary Critique of Historical Materialism (2nd ed, 1995)
The Constitution of Society (1984)
Nation States and Violence (1985)
Social Theory and Modern Sociology (1987)
Beyond Left and Right (1994)
In Defence of Sociology (1996)
Conversations with Anthony Giddens (1998)
Goffman
Erving Goffman – Greg Smith (2006)
Presentation of Self in Everyday Life (1959)
Asylums (1961)
Stigma (1963)
Strategic Interaction (1969)
Frame Analysis (1974)
Forms of Talk (1981)
Habermas
Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere (1962)
Knowledge and Human Interests (1968)
Legitimation Crisis (1973)
Theory of Communicative Action Vols 1 and 2 (1981)
Philosophical and Political Profiles (1983)
Philosophical Discourse of Modernity (1985)
Postmetaphysical Thinking (1992)
Between Facts and Norms (1996)
Inclusion of the Other (1999)
The Liberating Power of Symbols (2001)
Future of Human Nature (2003)
Between Naturalism and Religion (2008)
Europe (2009)
Kuhn
On the Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1962)
Luhmann
Social Systems (1984)
Mackinnon
Toward a Feminist Theory of the State (1989)
Mannheim
Ideology and Utopia (1936)
Marcuse
Herbert Marcuse and the Crisis of Marxism – Douglas Kellner (1984)
Negations (1972)
The Aesthetic Dimension (1979)
A Study on Authority (2008)
Merton
Social Theory and Social Structure (1949)
The Sociology of Science (1973)
On the Shoulders of Giants (1985)
On Social Structure and Science (1996)
Negri
Antonio Negri – Timothy Murphy (2012)
Marx Beyond Marx (1979)
Empire (2000)
Multitude (2004)
Parsons
Talcott Parsons: Theorist of Modernity – Turner and Robertson (1991)
Talcott Parsons: An Intellectual Biography – Uta Gerhardt (2002)
The Social System (1951)
Schutz
The Phenomenology of the Social World (1967)
Spivak
In Other Worlds (1987)
Thompson
The Poverty of Theory (1978)
Walby
Theorising Patriarchy (1990)
The Future for Feminism (2011)
15 comments:
I guess Empire is unavoidable, but I wouldn't bother with Multitude unless you're actually teaching a unit on Negri Studies. He was an appalling stylist in the 1970s and he's only got worse since then.
Do read Schutz if you have a moment(!) - easy reading and mindblowing. Habermas took the idea of the Umwelt from him & completely bollixed it. I'm tempted to recommend Dewey - the Pragmatists have had a bad rap since Rorty, but they don't deserve it.
It pains me to say it, but I'm not sure I'd bother with Thompson (as a social theorist) either. If you read What's Left? by Lisa Jardine & the late Julia Swindells you'll never see EPT and 'socialist humanism' in the same light again.
I read Castells when I had an interest in the origins of the activists in radical social movements. He informed us in the grand manner of European intellectuals that it was well known that the leaderships of the environmental movements were of petit-bourgeois origin. Imagine my excitement. However, try as I might I could find no reference to any evidence that might justify such a claim. It appeared it was something that one just knew. In the light of such grand pronouncements I find myself warming to Anglo-Saxon empiricism.
Brian Barry, Democracy, Power and Justice (1989)
Marshall Berman, All That Is Solid Melts Into Air (1982)
G. A. Cohen, Karl Marx's Theory of History (1978); If You're an Egalitarian, How Come You're So Rich? (2000)
William E. Connolly, The Terms of Political Discourse (1974)
Bernard Crick, In Defence of Politics (5th ed. 2000)
Guy Debord, Society of the Spectacle (1967)
Jon Elster, Ulysses and the Sirens (1979); Sour Grapes (1983)
Raymond Geuss, History and Illusion in Politics (2001); Philosophy and Real Politics (2008)
Colin Hay, Why We Hate Politics (2007)
Albert O. Hirschman, Exit, Voice and Loyalty (1970); Shifting Involvements (1982); The Rhetoric of Reaction (1991)
Paul Ormerod, The Death of Economics (1994)
Hanna Fenichel Pitkin, Wittgenstein and Justice (1972)
Bernard Yack, The Fetishism of Modernities (1997)
I would definitely bother with Thompson. As a social theorist. But if a non-Thompsonian critique of Althusser is called for, Gavin Kitching's neglected Marxism and Science: Analysis of an Obsession (1994)
Is Maurice Duverger still relevant?
nothing by zygmunt bauman? there's the bauman reader, published by oxford press, or his whole "liquid" series: liquid modernity, liquid modernity, liquid love, liquid life, liquid fear, liquid times. also, how about david harvey's "the condition of postmodernity" or something by henri lefebvre on the sociology of everyday life or the social production of space?
les
Ah, but Phil, I feel compelled to read The Poverty of Theory. It's sat on my shelf unread for about 15 years! But yes, Schutz! The plan isn't absolutely rigid - if something crops up during the reading that sounds interesting I'll probably seek it out.
Les, I've already done Lefebvre and David Harvey. But Bauman is a serious omission - I'll lump him in.
Cheers for that list, Boursin. Perhaps something to move on to after I've completed this one? ;)
Althusser was important to read in the 1960s and 1970s because his 'innovations' (to be polite) in Marxist theory spoke to the deepening crisis of post-1956/1968 Western Communism. So a course on the intellectual history of the post-war European left should probably include his work. As a guide to Marx his work is best ignored.
As for Giddens. The most overrated social theorist alive? Probably. Turgid, banal and derivative. Derek Sayer once wrote a very astute critical appraisal of Giddens’ much vaunted theory of ‘structuration’, making the case that it bore a striking resemblance to Marx’s theory of alienated labour. Worth reading. I still resent the time I wasted reading Giddens when I was an undergraduate and postgraduate. Hours I can never have back.
Zizek can be fun in small measures. His commentaries on Lenin and Robespierre are entertaining and occasionally profound. His introduction to Trotsky’s Terrorism & Communism is shockingly indulgent of the book’s Jacobin authoritarianism.
I would include some stuff by Ranciere: On The Shores of Politics and Hatred of Democracy. And his early critique of Althusser. He pointed out that Althusser had no clothes at a time when almost everyone else was celebrating his genius.
And Adorno: Negative Dialectics.
Mike
I would add (although I'm geared towards crim/border stuff):
Giorgio Agamben - Homo Sacer
Homi Bhabha - The Location of Culture
Tara Brabzaon - From Revolution to Revelations
Gilles Deleuze & Felix Guattari - Anti-Oedipus; A Thousand Plateaus
Michel Foucault - The Birth of Biopolitics; Secuirty, Terrirtory, Population
David Garland - The Culture of Control
Paul Gilroy - There Ain't No Black in the Union Jack; After Empire
Stuart Hall, et al - Resistance Through Rituals; Policing the Crisis
Steve Redhead - The Jean Baudrillard Reader
Edward Said - Orientalism
Imogen Tyler - Revolting Subjects
Nick Vaughan-Williams - Border Politics
I always liked Althusser, Mike. Reading For Marx and *understanding* the dense prose was real feather-in-my-cap stuff back in the day. I'm not inclined to write his project off either. Perhaps different to other commentators, I see it as an attempt to render Marx intelligible in light of the terms and theoretical advances in French social science of the day. The result was unwieldy and overly abstract, but I remain convinced there's something in it ...
Oh, I'd burn all those and just move Capital up your list. All the rest are footnotes. And nowhere near as interesting as the footnotes in Capital.
" *understanding* the dense prose was real feather-in-my-cap stuff back in the day."
undergraduates still do that to this day.
i would also add loic wacquant for the work he's done on the body ("carnal" sociology, although i actually hate that term), urban inequality and the kind of carcereal society we've developed for ourselves here in the states.
les
Lovely to see Erving Goffman there. A much underrated sociologist, particularly his stuff about framing and defining the situation.
Marx & Goffman. All the rest are ghosts at the feast
Some updates. A few, not a lot. I would like to have a life outside of work and home occasionally!
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