Neil J. Smelser Livres

Examining sociology as a vocation and building on the work of Talcott Parsons, this book discusses author's views on the discipline of sociology and shows how his perspective of the field evolved in the postwar era.

Tells the story of how working-class education in nineteenth-century Britain - often paralyzed by class, religious, and economic conflict - struggled forward toward change. This book offers a history of educational development and a theoretical study of social change, at once a case study of Britain and a study of variations within Britain.

This golden anniversary edition revitalizes a classic in sociology and social psychology, featuring a new Preface by the author and an analytical Foreword by Gary Marx from MIT. Unlike typical reprints, this edition is meticulously crafted, ensuring quality formatting with clear figures, a complete subject index, and an extensive bibliography that includes updated references. Original page numbers are preserved for seamless citation and referencing, making it a valuable resource for both students and scholars in the social sciences.

The main purpose of the book is to expand the scope of revisionary studies of the thirties by analyzing novels using recent innovations in critical theory. The book adds to the research of Barbara Foley, Michael Denning, Alan Wald, and others who have challenged Cold-War-era accounts of the decade's socialist and communist culture. The book explores leftist literature from the thirties as balanced between two antithetical philosophical modalities: identity and ideology. Writers create identitarian fiction, he argues, as they attempt to appeal to a mainstream audience using familiar types and patterns culled from mass culture. They engage ideology, on the other hand, when they use narrative as a means of critiquing those same types and patterns using strategies of ideological critique similar to those of their European contemporary Georg Lukács.