‘The Anthem Companion to Alexis de Tocqueville’ contains original interpretations of Tocqueville’s major writings on democracy and revolution as well as his lesser-known writings on colonies, prisons and minorities. The Introduction by Daniel Gordon discusses how Tocqueville was canonized during the Cold War and the need to reassess the place of Tocqueville’s voice in the conversation of post-Marxist social theory. Each chapter that follows compares Tocqueville’s ideas on a given subject with those of other major social theorists, including Bourdieu, Dahl, Du Bois, Foucault, Lévi-Strauss and Marx. This comprehensive volume is based on the idea that Tocqueville was not merely a founder or precursor whose ideas have been absorbed into modern social science. The broad questions that Tocqueville raised, his comparative vision, and his unique vocabulary and style can inspire deeper thinking in the social sciences today.

‘The Anthem Companion to C. Wright Mills’ offers the best contemporary work on C. Wright Mills, written by the best scholars currently working in this field. Original, authoritative and wide-ranging, the critical assessments of this volume will make it ideal for Wright Mills students and scholars alike. ‘Anthem Companions to Sociology’ offer authoritative and comprehensive assessments of major figures in the development of sociology from the last two centuries. Covering the major advancements in sociological thought, these companions offer critical evaluations of key figures in the American and European sociological tradition, and will provide students and scholars with both an in-depth assessment of the makers of sociology and chart their relevance to modern society.

The book presents an authoritative assessment of Norbert Elias (1897–1990). It recognizes Elias as one of the major contributors to the development of sociological tradition in the past century and charts the continuing relevance of his conception of sociology for contemporary society. Only toward the end of his career as an academic did Elias’s work begin to attract the attention of English-speaking sociologists, historians, and scholars of cultural studies. The book provides an authoritative and broad representation of Elias’s oeuvre and work inspired by it. While Elias is best known for his major study of The Civilizing Process, the reach and subtle depths of Elias’s conception of process sociology has been cemented more recently by the English-language publication of Elias’s collected work of 18 volumes. The baton of process sociology is being passed on to further generations of sociologists. Chapters from leading contributors outline the nature of the sociological practice of Elias and address fundamental questions of historical sociology, democratization, gender, racialization processes, and embodiment. Later chapters highlight the contribution of process sociology for understanding developments in nation, state and global sociology, criminology, art, and education.

These essays explore important themes and contemporary legacies of Alexis de Tocqueville's classic work Democracy in America.

This edited volume will illustrate the continuing interest in Bauman’s work through a number of chapters each dealing with the important aspects of his work and shedding light on some new angles and perspectives on his life and work. It seeks to position Bauman within the field of sociology and to provide some examples of his lasting contribution to and relevance for the discipline. Bauman’s ideas remain an important source of inspiration for many scholars and researchers working within a variety of different fields and sub-fields, appealing equally to empirical work and theoretical elaboration. This book contains ten chapters, and all chapters are devoted to the presentation and discussion of themes and ideas that were characteristic of Bauman’s way of doing and writing. The purpose of this volume – as with the other volumes published in the Anthem Press ‘Companion to Sociology’ series – is to provide a comprehensive overview of Zygmunt Bauman’s continued importance within the field of sociology and related social science disciplines.

The Anthem Companion to Harold Garfinkel brings together leading scholars and upcoming researchers in contemporary ethnomethodology to bring out the experimental character of Garfinkel’s legacy in the social sciences and beyond. Therefore, the Companion takes its cue from Garfinkel’s noted “breaching experiments,” enabling the reflexive investigation of “trust conditions” in situ, and asks how this research interest has been productively pursued and distinctively rearticulated, both within and beyond Garfinkel’s oeuvre. Whilst Garfinkel’s experimental legacy is often acknowledged, no systematic introduction to its distinctive outlook, tension-riddled diversification, and heuristic interest(s) is available to date. The Anthem Companion to Harold Garfinkel both fills and reflects upon that “gap in the literature,” thereby articulating ethnomethodology’s experimental outlook, if not recasting its current research directions.

Raymond Aron is an exceptional figure among twentieth-century sociological and political thinkers. The book focuses on the sociological work of this author of the century, who analyzed his age both in its grand-scale political and socio-economic traits and in the complex social ramifications of its day-to-day life. Aron experts from a total of seven countries examine Aron’s sociology in detail starting with his road from philosophy to sociology not least under the impression of the Great Depression and its aftermath, especially the rise of National Socialism in Germany. His epistemological studies on the limits of objective knowledge in history and the social sciences in which he moves away from Durkheim's approach and instead adopts Max Weber's sociology of understanding are analysed. This acknowledgment of the limits of knowledge laid the foundations for Aron’s liberalism and humanism. His sociology of industrial society as an economy of economic growth in its market economy and planned economy versions, its social stratification, his criticism of the Marxist concept of social class, the structure of the ruling elites and the pluralistic and one-party, totalitarian political regimes are presented, as is Aron's analysis of the dialectic of modern society between the idea of equality and the authority structures in the state and the economic process. This is accompanied by Aron's lifelong criticism of those intellectuals above all in the pluralist and liberal democracies who hope that a messianic ideology will abolish all social contradictions. Aron’s sociology of international relations in the age of industrial society and globalization, which for Aron brought about the dawn of universal history, complete the overview of Raymond Aron's sociological work.