For many years now, Professor Aron's course of lectures at the Sorbonne on "Les Grandes doctrines de l'histoire sociologique" has been a mecca for students from the United States, Europe, and the rest of the world. These lectures now serve as the basis for this major work--to be completed in succeeding volumes--on the history of man's understanding of his social order"--Book jacket.

By studying how different societies understand categories such as time and causality, the Durkheimians decentered Western epistemology. With contributions from philosophy, sociology, anthropology, media studies, and sinology, this volume illustrates the interdisciplinarity and intellectual rigor of the “category project” which did not only stir controversies among contemporary scholars but paved the way for other theories exploring how the thoughts of individuals are prefigured by society and vice versa.

This book is a comprehensive overview of several major schools of sociological theory. Looking at various approaches from different cultural contexts, Abraham first explains conflicting views about the meaning of sociological theory itself, then analyzes the basic sociological concepts of "system," "structure," "function," and "conflict", and the methodology of sociological theory. Designed to familiarize students with contemporary schools of theory--including the most recent trends--the book clearly defines structural functionalism, conflict theory, symbolic interactionism, and phenomenological sociology.

Sociological Thought: Beyond Eurocentric Theory is designed to provide students of sociology with an alternative vision of social theory. In an exciting and original introduction to the book, Abdo provides an innovative critique of the Eurocentric and male-oriented nature of conventional sociological textbooks, and provides us with a new approach to understanding the field. The horizons of social theory are expanded by the inclusion of a chapter by Rosa Luxemburg and a chapter by the fourteenth century Arab/North African scholar Ibn Khaldun.