Published in 1998, The Fundamental Forms of Social Thought is a valuable contribution to the field of Sociology and Social Policy.

Published in 1998, The Fundamental Forms of Social Thought is a valuable contribution to the field of Sociology and Social Policy.

While focusing on social thought, this book draws on many disciplines, including philosophy, anthropology, and political science. It demonstrates the profound difficulties social thinkers - including liberals, socialists, and those intellectuals who could be regarded as the sociologists - had in coming to terms with the phenomenon of war.

This book proposes, for the first time, an in-depth analysis of the Philosophie sociale, published in Paris in 1793 by Moses Dobruska (1753-1794). Dobruska was a businessman, scholar, and social philosopher, born into a Jewish family in Moravia, who converted to Catholicism, gained wide recognition at the Habsburg court in Vienna, and then emigrated to France to join the French Revolution. Dobruska, who took on the name Junius Frey during his Parisian sojourn, barely survived his book. Accused of conspiring on behalf of foreign powers, he was guillotined on April 5, 1794, at the height of The Terror, on the same day as Georges Jacques Danton. From Dobruska's ideas, which were widely used between the late eighteenth century and the first decades of the nineteenth century without attribution to their author, emerge some of the key concepts of the social sciences as we know them today. An enthusiastic and unfortunate revolutionary and sometimes a brilliant theorist, Moses Dobruska deserves a role of his own in the history of sociology.

We must, he argues, frame our questions in a way which encompasses both enchantment and critical reason, and he offers an outline here for doing so. A passionate plea for a fundamental reexamination of the entrenched assumptions of the modern era, this book deals with issues of vital concern to modern societies and should be read by scholars across disciplines.

After several decades in which it became a prime target for critique, universalism remains one of the most important issues in social and political thought. Daniel Chernilo reassesses social theory's universalistic orientation and explains its origins in natural law theory, using an impressive array of classical and contemporary sources that include, among others, Habermas, Leo Strauss, Weber, Marx, Hegel, Rousseau and Hobbes. The Natural Law Foundations of Modern Social Theory challenges previous accounts of the rise of social theory, recovers a strong idea of humanity, and revisits conventional arguments on sociology's relationship to modernity, the enlightenment and natural law. It reconnects social theory to its scientific and philosophical roots, its descriptive and normative tasks and its historical and systematic planes. Chernilo's defense of universalism for contemporary social theory will surely engage students of sociology, political theory and moral philosophy alike.