Beyond the Enlightenment Lives and Thoughts of Social Theorists

Subjects:

• Sociology » Sociology (General)
• Philosophy » Philosophy (General)

Reviews:

• [R]eaders will find nuggets of new or unfamiliar information about many contemporary theorists. The book can serve as a handy reference tool for professors and as a concise introduction to the history of modern social thought for students. Recommended. All academic levels/libraries.
  —Choice March 2005
• Roger Salerno's Beyond the Enlightenment is clearly an unusual book among the various social theory texts available on the current market. He should be commended merely for taking the venture off the beaten track, and perhaps for more than just that....The general outlay of the work is an amazing 29 brief discussions of the biographical contexts, major works, and key ideas of social theorists....[t]he book will enjoy a limited but faithful adoption in social theory courses and a more circumscribed success elsewhere. It might also be a handy reference for professors who want to spice up their lectures with biographical material on a wide range of social theorists. Salerno has provided a book that is a little offbeat, but not so revolutionary that professors will have difficulty incorporating it with standard teaching practices in social theory courses.
  —Teaching Sociology October 2005

Table of Contents:

• Introduction
• The Enlightenment and Beyond
• Georg Hegel: Foundations of Modern Social Thought
• Auguste Comte: The Origins of Modern European Sociology
• Herbert Spencer: Survival of the Fittest
• Harriet Marineau: Feminist Sociologist
• Karl Marx: Capitalism and Human Exploitation
• Emile Durkheim: The Eclipse of Community
• Max Weber: Reason and Bureaucracy
• Sigmund Freud: The Unconscious Civilization
• Friedrich Nietzsche: The Will to Power
• Georg Simmel: Sociologists as Outsider
• W.E.B. Du Bois: The Double Consciousness of Race
• Antonio Gramsci: Critique of Hegemonic Capitalism
• Adorno and Horkheimer: The Frankfurt School: Critical Theory
• Herbert Marcuse: Eros and Civilization
• Walter Benjamin: Art and Modernity
• Norbert Elias: The Civilizing Process
• Simone de Beauvoir: Otherness
• Hannah Arendt: Banality of Reason
• Claude Levi-Strauss: Structural Anthropology
• Frantz Fanon: Race and Postcolonialism
• Jacques Derrida, Jacques Lacan, and Michel Foucault: Structuralism and Beyond: Poststructuralism
• Talcott Parsons: The Systems Society
• Erving Goffman: The Drama of the Self
• Nancy Chodorow, Judith Butler, and Bell Hooks: Feminist Social Theory
• Jean Baudrillard, Donna Haraway, Zygmunt Bauman: Postmodernism
• Jurgen Habermas: Communicative Action
• Pierre Bourdieu: Habitus
• Anthony Giddens: Structuration Theory