philosophy sociology

Softcover. UK, Cambridge University Press, reprint, 1996, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Softcover, 141 pages. This volume contains the essential points of Jean Bodin's theory of sovereignty, a landmark in legal theory and royalist ideology. The four chapters presented form the core of Bodin's classic work, Six Livres de la Republique. Bodin was primarily responsible for introducing the seductive but erroneous notion that sovereignty is indivisible, that the entire power of the state had to be vested in a single individual or group. This thesis, combined with the prevailing crisis of authority during the French religious wars, led Bodin to a systematically absolutist interpretation of the French and other European monarchies. This is the first complete translation of this material into English since 1606, and is accompanied by a lucid introduction, chronology, and bibliography. Clean copy.

Softcover. New York, Oxford University Press, 1st, 1997, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, 297 pages. Softcover. In very good condition, clean and bright inside. Wrapper has a slight yellowing at top edge, barely visable. Binding tight.

Hardcover. NY, Macmillan, reprint, 1929, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Hardcover, blue cloth with gilt letterng on spine and front cover, 242 pages. Does Civilization Need Religion? sets out from the fact that religion's inability to make its ethical and social resources available for the solution of the moral problems of modern civilization is one, and the neglected one, of the two chief causes responsible for its debilitated condition. It is convinced that if Christian idealists are to make religion socially effective they will be forced to detach themselves from the dominant secular desires of the nations as well as from the greed of economic groups. It aims to show that though neither the orthodox nor the modern wing of the Christian Church seems capable of initiating a genuine revival which will evolve a morality capable of challenging and maintaining itself against the dominant desires of modern civilization's needs, there are resources in the Christian religion which make it the inevitable basis of any spiritual regeneration of Western civilization. Does Civilization Need Religion? maintains that the task of redeeming Western society rests in a peculiar sense upon Christianity, which has reduced the eternal conflict between self-assertion and self-denial to the paradox of self-assertion through self-denial and made the Cross the symbol of life's highest achievement. It is persuaded that the idea of a potent but yet suffering divine ideal which is defeated by the world but gains its victory in the defeat must continue to remain basic in any morally creative worldview. Names on front fly leaf otherwise a clean copy.

Hardcover. NY, Teachers College Press, 1st, 1968, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Good, Hardcover in a lightly worn, unclipped dust jacket, 140 pages. A collection of essays by the German sociologist and philosopher concerning man's relationship to culture. Clean copy, minor wear to dust jacket.

Hardcover. London, England, Routledge & Kegan Paul Limited, 1st Editions, 1950, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, International Library of Sociology and Social Reconstruction. Two Volumes: Vol. 1: 352 pages. Vol. 2: 706 pages plus publisher ads. Previous owner's name on front flyleafs. Green cloth cover boards, gilt title on spine, fading to boards, especially to spines. Binding tight. Spines straight. Pages/edges have light tanning, otherwise clean. Appearing in isolation as they do, autobiographies demand for their description and appreciation, a comprehensive view of the development of the human mind. DOMESTIC SHIPPING ONLY.

Softcover. Boulder, CO, Westview Press, 1st, 1997, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, 278 pages. Softcover. Clean inside, tight binding, wrapper shows a touch of age/shelf wear. In very good condition.

Hardcover. Cambridge MA, Harvard University Press, 1st, 2014, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright dust jacket, 337 pages. America's criminal justice system is broken. The United States punishes at a higher per capita rate than any other country in the world. In the last twenty years, incarceration rates have risen 500 percent. Sentences are harsh, prisons are overcrowded, life inside is dangerous, and rehabilitation programs are ineffective. Police and prosecutors operate in the dark shadows of the legal process--sometimes resigning themselves to the status quo, sometimes turning a profit from it. The courts define punishment as "time served," but that hardly begins to explain the suffering of prisoners. Looking not only to court records but to works of philosophy, history, and literature for illumination, Robert Ferguson, a distinguished law professor, diagnoses all parts of a now massive, out-of-control punishment regime. He reveals the veiled pleasure behind the impulse to punish (which confuses our thinking about the purpose of punishment), explains why over time all punishment regimes impose greater levels of punishment than originally intended, and traces a disturbing gap between our ability to quantify pain and the precision with which penalties are handed down. Clean copy.

Softcover. Stanford CA, Stanford University Press, 1988, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Softcover, 230 pages. Jean Baudrillard is one of the most topical and controversial theorists in France today. He has played a major role in the development of critical social theory and cultural sociology, and his writings are currently at the center of the 'post-modernism' debate. This volume makes his most important work widely available in English for the first time. It includes selections from the entire range of his writings, from his early work on advertising and commodity culture to his most recent writings on simulation and desire. Throughout the selections Baudrillard stresses the ways in which our lives are embedded in a world if images which have no clear reference and which are reproduced by the new mechanisms of cultural production in contemporary societies. Clean copy.

Softcover. Cambridge UK, Cambridge University Press, 1st, 1990, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Softcover, 217 pages. Emotions have long been a central concern in philosophy, psychological and sociological studies. When anthropologists began to study emotion, they challenged many assumptions shared by Western academics and lay persons by exposing the cultural variability of emotional meanings. In this collection of original essays by anthropologists concerned with the relationship of language and emotion, it is argued that the key focus to the study of emotion might be the politics of social life rather than the psychology of the individual. Through close studies of talk about emotion and emotional discourses in social contexts from poetry and song to therapeutic narratives, scholars who have worked in India, Fiji, the United States, Egypt, Senegal and the Solomon Islands show how emotion is tied to politics of everyday interaction. Their arguments and cross-cultural findings will intrigue and provoke anyone who has thought about the relationship between emotion, language and social life. The book will be of special interest to those who find the boundaries between cultural, psychological and linguistic anthropology, sociology, cross-cultural psychiatry, and social psychology too confining. Clean, bright copy.

Softcover. NY, Columbia University Press, 2nd pr., 1986, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Softcover, 353 pages. The only available collection of Ricoeur's lectures on ideology and utopia, this seminal collection discusses the work of Althusser, Marx, Habermas, Geertz, Mannheim, and Weber. Clean copy.

Softcover. NY, Doubleday, 1st, 2004, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Softcover, 866 pages. In a masterful exploration of how Western civilizations have defined the afterlife, Alan F. Segal weaves together biblical and literary scholarship, sociology, history, and philosophy. A renowned scholar, Segal examines the maps of the afterlife found in Western religious texts and reveals not only what various cultures believed but how their notions reflected their societies' realities and ideals, and why those beliefs changed over time. He maintains that the afterlife is the mirror in which a society arranges its concept of the self. The composition process for Judaism, Christianity, and Islam begins in grief and ends in the victory of the self over death.

Hardcover. Burlington VT, Ashgate, 1st, 2005, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Hardcover, black cloth stamped in gilt, 263 pages. (Early Modern Englishwoman: a Facsimile Library of Essential Works) Name on front fly leaf otherwise clean.

Hardcover. Evanston IL, Northwestern University Press, 1st, 1966, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Good, Hardcover in a lightly worn dust jacket with mild tanning, 220 pages. Lowith is probably most known for his two books From Hegel to Nietzsche, which describes the decline of German classical philosophy, and Meaning in History, which discusses the problematic relationship between theology and history.

Hardcover. Athens GA, University of Georgia Press, 1st, 2001, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright dust jacket, 168 pages. This work tells how the first generation of Protestant fundamentalists embraced the modern business and entertainment techniques of marketing, advertising, drama, film, radio, and publishing to spread the gospel. Clean copy.

Hardcover. London, Geoffrey Bles, 1st, 1943, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Fair, Hardcover, black cloth with gilt title on spine, 268 pages. In an edgeworn dust jacket with a crease lengthwise. Copy of literary critic and historian Roger Shattuck with his pencil signature and "Mindoro, Philippines 1945" (presumed where he served in WW2) on the front fly leaf. Some pencil markings and notations in text.

Hardcover. Albany, NY, SUNY, 1st, 2017, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, 312 pages. Hardcover. Decorated covers, high gloss finish. In excellent condition, super clean and bright inside. Small spot of soil on foreedge. Covers are very good.

Hardcover. NY, Viking, 1st, 2022, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright dust jacket, 346 pages. In Status and Culture, W. David Marx weaves together the wisdom from history, psychology, sociology, anthropology, economics, philosophy, linguistics, semiotics, cultural theory, literary theory, art history, media studies, and neuroscience to demonstrate exactly how individual status seeking creates our cultural ecosystem. Marx examines three fundamental questions: Why do individuals cluster around arbitrary behaviors and take deep meaning from them? How do distinct styles, conventions, and sensibilities emerge? Why do we change behaviors over time and why do some behaviors stick around? The answers then provide new perspectives for understanding the seeming "weightlessness" of internet culture. Clean copy.

Hardcover. London, Reaktion Books, 2013, 2013, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, 336 pages. Hardcover with dust jacket. Profusely illustrated in full color & black & white throughout. Clean, tight copy.

Hardcover. NY, Verso, 1st, 2021, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright dust jacket, 241 pages. In essays that range from ancient Greece to the end of the Anthropocene, Bull addresses questions central to contemporary political theory in novel readings of texts by Aristotle, Machiavelli, Marx, and Arendt, and shows how classic philosophical problems have a bearing on issues like political protest and climate change. The result is an entirely original account of political agency for the twenty-first century in which uncertainty and idleness are limned with utopian promise. Clean, bright copy.

Hardcover. Cambridge MA, Harvard University Press, 1st, 2016, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright dust jacket, 592 pages. Alexander Herzen-philosopher, novelist, essayist, political agitator, and one of the leading Russian intellectuals of the nineteenth century-was as famous in his day as Tolstoy and Dostoevsky. While he is remembered for his masterpiece My Past and Thoughts and as the father of Russian socialism, his contributions to the history of ideas defy easy categorization because they are so numerous. Aileen Kelly presents the first fully rounded study of the farsighted genius whom Isaiah Berlin called "the forerunner of much twentieth-century thought." In an era dominated by ideologies of human progress, Herzen resisted them because they conflicted with his sense of reality, a sense honed by his unusually comprehensive understanding of history, philosophy, and the natural sciences. Following his unconventional decision to study science at university, he came to recognize the implications of early evolutionary theory, not just for the natural world but for human history. In this respect, he was a Darwinian even before Darwin. Clean, bright copy.

Hardcover. Duke University Press, 1st, 2003, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Hardcover, 440 pages. Black cloth, no dust jacket. The Edge of Surrealism is an essential introduction to the writing of French social theorist Roger Caillois. Caillois was part of the Surrealist avant-garde and in the 1930s founded the College of Sociology with Georges Bataille and Michel Leiris. He spent his life exploring issues raised by this famous group and by Surrealism itself. Though his subjects were diverse, Caillois focused on concerns crucial to modern intellectual life, and his essays offer a unique perspective on many of twentieth-century France's most significant intellectual movements and figures. Including a masterful introductory essay by Claudine Frank situating his work in the context of his life and intellectual milieu, this anthology is the first comprehensive introduction to Caillois's work to appear in any language. These thirty-two essays with commentaries strike a balance between Caillois's political and theoretical writings and between his better known works, such as the popular essays on the praying mantis, myth, and mimicry, and his lesser-known pieces. Presenting several new pieces and drawing on interviews and unpublished correspondence, this book reveals Caillois's consistent effort to reconcile intellectual rigor and imaginative adventure. Perhaps most importantly, The Edge of Surrealism provides an overdue look at how Caillois's intellectual project intersected with the work of Georges Bataille and others including Breton, Bachelard, Benjamin, Lacan, and Levi-Strauss.

Hardcover. New Haven CT, Yale University Press, 1st, 1992, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright dust jacket, 238 pages. Jaroslav Pelikan provides a unique perspective on the university today by reexamining it in light of John Henry Cardinal Newman's 150-year-old classic The Idea of a University and showing how Cardinal Newman's ideas both illuminate and differ from current problems facing higher education. Pelikan begins by affirming the validity of Newman's first principle: that knowledge must be an end in itself. He goes on to make the case for the inseparability of research and teaching on both intellectual and practical grounds, stressing the virtues--free inquiry, scholarly honesty, civility in discourse, toleration of diverse beliefs and values, and trust in rationality and public verifiability--that must be practiced and taught by the university. He discusses the business of the university--the advancement of knowledge through research, the extension and interpretation of knowledge through undergraduate and graduate teaching, the preservation of knowledge in libraries, museums, and galleries, and the diffusion of knowledge through scholarly publishing. And he argues that by performing these tasks, by developing closer ties with other schools at all levels, and by involving the community in lifelong education, the university will make its greatest contribution to society. Clean copy.

Softcover. Berkeley CA, University of California Press, reprint, 1987, Book: Good, Dust Jacket: None, Softcover, 242 pages. Scholars have only recently discovered that the human body itself has a history. Not only has it been perceived, interpreted, and represented differently in different epochs, but it has also been lived differently, brought into being within widely dissimilar material cultures, subjected to various technologies and means of control, and incorporated into different rhythms of production and consumption, pleasure and pain. The eight articles in this volume support, supplement, and explore the significance of these insights. They belong to a new historical endeavor that derives partly from the crossing of historical with anthropological investigations, partly from social historians' deepening interest in culture, partly from the thematization of the body in modern philosophy (especially phenomenology), and partly from the emphasis on gender, sexuality, and women's history that large numbers of feminist scholars have brought to all disciplines. Lightly worn copy, clean, solid binding.