Fifty years ago, the two leading German philosophers and sociologists since the Second World War, Jürgen Habermas and Niklas Luhmann, embarked on a sweeping and contentious debate that would continue for decades. Their coauthored 1971 book Theory of Society or Social Technology laid out their opposing positions on meaning, communication, consensus, and dissent—and ultimately the foundations of modern social thought. Habermas and Luhmann would elaborate their disagreement in the ye...

Fifty years ago, the two leading German philosophers and sociologists since the Second World War, Jürgen Habermas and Niklas Luhmann, embarked on a sweeping and contentious debate that would continue for decades. Their coauthored 1971 book Theory of Society or Social Technology laid out their opposing positions on meaning, communication, consensus, and dissent—and ultimately the foundations of modern social thought. Habermas and Luhmann would elaborate their disagreement in the ye...

With contributions from experts in the field of sociology of law, this book provides an overview of current perspectives on socio-legal studies. It focuses particularly on the relationship between law and society described in recent social systems theory as ’structural coupling’. The first part of the book presents a reconstruction of theoretical tendencies in the field of socio-legal studies, characterised by the emergence of a transnational model of legal systems no longer connected to t...

A watershed event in the field of sociology, this text introduced "a major breakthrough in the sociology of knowledge and sociological theory generally" (George Simpson, American Sociological Review ).In this seminal book, Peter L. Berger and Thomas Luckmann examine how knowledge forms and how it is preserved and altered within a society. Unlike earlier theorists and philosophers, Berger and Luckmann go beyond intellectual history and focu...

A general and systematic account of the role of knowledge in society aimed to stimulate both critical discussion and empirical investigations.This book is concerned with the sociology of ‘everything that passes for knowledge in society’. It focuses particularly on that ‘common-sense knowledge’ which constitutes the reality of everyday life for the ordinary member of society.The authors are concerned to present an analysis of knowledge in everyday life in the context of a th...

This volume considers the two most important philosophers of the modern age. Today, the philosophies of Marx and Heidegger are still extremely relevant—provided one adapts them to the current socio-historical context and adjusts each to the implicit criticisms of the other—as indicated in this book. In particular, Marx countered the ideology of individualism by analyzing social structures and interpersonal interactions at different units of analysis than the individual person. Heidegger al...

In this book Anthony Giddens addresses a range of issues concerning current developments in social theory, relating them to the prospects for sociology in the closing decades of the twentieth century.Composed of closely integrated papers, all written over the past few years, the book includes seven essays not previously published, plus two have not appeared in English before.In assessing the likely future evolution of sociology in particular, and the social sciences in gene...

Many educational practices are based upon ideas about what it means to be human. Thus education is conceived as the production of particular subjectivities and identities such as the rational person, the autonomous individual, or the democratic citizen. Beyond Learning asks what might happen to the ways in which we educate if we treat the question as to what it means to be human as a radically open question; a question that can only be answered by engaging in education rather than as a que...

Here, for the first time in English, is volume one of Jurgen Habermas's long-awaited magnum opus: The Theory of Communicative Action. This pathbreaking work is guided by three interrelated concerns: (1) to develop a concept of communicative rationality that is no longer tied to the subjective and individualistic premises of modern social and political theory; (2) to construct a two-level concept of society that integrates the 'lifeworld' and 'system' paradigms; and (3) to sketch o...

This study offers a systematic reconstruction of the theoretical foundations and framework of critical social theory. It is Habermas' "magnum opus", and it is regarded as one of the most important works of modern social thought. In this second and final volume of the work, Habermas examines the relations between action concepts and systems theory and elaborates a framework for analyzing the developmental tendencies of modern societies. He discusses in detail the work of Marx, Durkheim, G.H...

What are systems? What is society? What happens to human beings in a hypermodern world? This book is an introduction to Niklas Luhmann's social system theory which explains specific functions like economy and mass media from a cybernetic perspective. Integrating various schools of thought including sociology, philosophy and biology Luhmann Explained results in an overall analysis of "world society". Special attention is given to the present-day relevance of Luhmann's theory with respect to...

In this book Axel Honneth re-examines arguments put forward by Hegel and claims that the 'struggle for recognition' should be at the centre of social conflicts.