Hilbert demonstrates the historical connection between the nineteenth-century theory of Emile Durkheim and Max Weber, in which sociology had its origins, and the ethnomethodological approach articulated in the 1960s by Harold Garfinkel. The author rejects the conventional view that draws radical distinctions between the two systems and at the same time provides an intellectual genealogy of ethnomethodology.

Concepts of totalitarianism have undergone an academic revival in recent years, particularly since the breakdown of communist systems in Europe in 1989-91: the totalitarian paradigm, so it seems to many scholars today, had been discarded prematurely in the heat of the Cold War. The demise of communism as a social system is, however, not only an important cause of the recurring attractiveness of the totalitarian paradigm, but provides at the same time new evidence and, correspondingly, new problems of explanation for all approaches in communist studies and totalitarianism theory in particular. This book contains articles by philosophers, social scientists and historians who reassess the validity of the totalitarian approach in the light of the recent historical developments in Eastern Europe. A first group of authors focus on the analytical usefulness and explanatory power of classic concepts of totalitarianism after having observed the failed reforms of the Gorbachev-era and the collapse of Europe's communist systems in 1989-91. In these contributions the totalitarian paradigm is contrasted with other approaches with respect to cognitive power as well as normative implications. In the second group of contributions the focus is on the reassessment of methodological and theoretical problems of the classic concepts of totalitarianism. The authors attempt to reinterpret the classic concepts so as to meet the objections which have been put forward against those concepts during the last decades. The study thereby traces some of the intellectual roots of the totalitarian paradigm that precede the outbreak of the Cold War, such as the work of Sigmund Neumann and Franz Borkenau. It also focuses on the most famous authors in the field: Hannah Arendt and Carl Joachim Friedrich. In addition it discusses theorists of totalitarianism like Juan Linz, whose contributions to totalitarianism theory have too often been overlooked.

Contemporary Sociological Theory and Its Classical Roots: The Basics is a brief survey of sociology′s major theorists and theoretical approaches, from the Classical founders to the present.

In recent decades, the historical social sciences have moved away from deterministic perspectives and increasingly embraced the interpretive analysis of historical process and social and political change. This shift has enriched the field but also led to a deadlock regarding the meaning and status of subjective knowledge. Cultural interpretivists struggle to incorporate subjective experience and the body into their understanding of social reality. In the early twentieth century, philosopher Alfred Schutz grappled with this very issue. Drawing on Edmund Husserl’s phenomenology and Max Weber’s historical sociology, Schutz pioneered the interpretive analysis of social life from an embodied perspective. However, the recent interpretivist turn, influenced by linguistic philosophies, discourse theory, and poststructuralism, has overlooked the insights of Schutz and other phenomenologists. This book revisits Schutz’s phenomenology and social theory, positioning them against contemporary problems in social theory and interpretive social science research. The book extends Schutz’s key concepts of relevance, symbol relations, theory of language, and lifeworld meaning structures. It outlines Schutz’s critical approach to the social distribution of knowledge and develops his nascent sociology and political economy of knowledge. This book will appeal to readers with interests in social theory, phenomenology, and the methods of interpretive social science, including historical sociology, cultural sociology, science and technology studies, political economy, and international relations.

Developing a theory of political culture as consisting of two dimensions, discourse and practice, the book explains how political culture can both inhibit political change and be a source of it. It explores the nature and dynamics of political culture systematically and comprehensively, and suggests numerous new lines of empirical research.

Ethnomethodology is a research strategy that systematically examines the everyday interactions between people. In the past three decades, an impressive body of work has been created under this label by such noted scholars as Garfinkel, Sacks, Cicourel, Schlegloff, Mehan, and Emerson. In this volume, Alain Coulon demystifies the ethnomethodological tradition and its often arcane nomenclature. Coulon explains its history, its major features, and the major criticisms leveled at it in terms that are accessible to students and novices. Covering both the theoretical notions and main ethnomethodological practices and replete with examples of key work in the area, Ethnomethodology is the first accessible, brief introduction to this important qualitative research tradition.