Alex Callinicos

Med Samhällsteori vill Alex Callinicos ge en bred introduktion av den klassiska samhällsteoretiska traditionen från upplysningen över bland andra Hegel, Comte, Marx, Durkheim, Weber fram till en värdering av samhällsteoretiker som Jürgen Habermas, Pierre Bourdieu och Ulrich Beck. Det är en levande och tillgänglig framställning för den som vill ha en översikt över den moderna samhällsteorins utveckling. Alex Callinicos är professor i statsvetenskap vid University of York.

"The class war is over. But the struggle for true equality has only just begun", Tony Blair has declared. Yet the world enters the 21st century heaving with poverty and inequality. In this book, the author explores the meaning of equality in the contemporary world.

'The class war is over. But the struggle for true equality has only just begun,' Tony Blair has declared. The world indeed enters the 21st century heaving with poverty and inequality. Just three super-rich men have a net worth equal to the income of the 36 poorest countries in the world. The gap between rich and poor is also growing in the advanced economies as well. 14 million people, a quarter of the population of the United Kingdom are currently classified as poor, compared to only four million in 1979. In this important new book, Alex Callinicos explores the meaning of equality in the contemporary world. He traces its origins as a political ideal in the great democratic revolutions of the 17th and the 18th century, and in the efforts of the socialist movement to force capitalism to live up to its promise of liberty, equality and fraternity. Callinicos also shows how the theories of egalitarian justice developed over the past generation by philosophers such as John Rawls, Ronald Dworkin, Amartya Sen and G. A. Cohen have given a much more precise meaning to the ideal of equality. Individuals are entitled to be protected from the consequences of circumstances beyond their control - for example, the socio-economic position and the natural talents they inherit - in order to have equal freedom to pursue their own well-being. The implications of egalitarian justice are radical. Callinicos critically reviews the versions of this ideal - equality of opportunity and social inclusion - by supporters of the Third Way such as Gordon Brown and Anthony Giddens. He argues that the strategy pursued by New Labour to increase equality is riddled with contradictions and contains an underlying authoritarian dimension. Fundamentally, equality and the market are irreconcilable. Any attempt seriously to increase social equality will come into conflict with the logic of the capitalist economic system. Only a socialist society, organized along democratic and decentralized lines, can realize the ideal of equality. This book will be of great interest to students of politics, philosophy and sociology, and all those interested in this key and controversial topic.

The eighteenth-century Enlightenment saw the birth of an era which sought legitimacy not from the past but from the future. No longer would human beings invoke the authority of tradition; instead, modern societies emerging in the West justified themselves by their success at increasing, through the application of scientific knowledge, human control over the world. Ever since this notion of modernity was formulated it has provoked intense debate. In this wide-ranging historical introduction to social theory, Alex Callinicos explores the controversies over modernity and examines the connections between social theory and modern philosophy, political economy and evolutionary biology. He offers clear and accesssible treatments of the thought of Montesquieu, Adam Smith and the Scottish Enlightenment, Hegel, Marx, Tocqueville, Maistre, Gobineau, Darwin, Spencer, Kautsky, Nietzsche, Durkheim, Weber, Simmel, Freud, Lukacs, Gramsci, Heidegger, Keynes, Hayek, Parsons, the Frankfurt School, Levi-Strauss, Althusser, Foucault, Habermas and Bourdieu, and concludes by surveying the state of contemporary social thought. A remarkably comprehensive and lucid primer, Social Theoryis essential reading for students of politics, sociology and social and political thought.

In this book Callinicos explores the relationship between social theory and historical writing drawing on a wide range of theories and theorists in an attempt to establish the contribution that theory can make to understanding the past.

Callinicos's new book is a frontal assault on the widely accepted idea that the East European revolutions of 1989 mark the death of socialism. In an attempt to vindicate the classical Marxist tradition, Callinicos argues that socialism in this tradition can only come from below, through the self-activity of the working class. Stalinism from this standpoint was a 'counter-revolution', erecting at the end of the 1920s a state capitalist regime on the ruins of the radically democratic socialism briefly achieved in October 1917. He further argues that the collapse of Stalinism at the end of the 1980s was only one aspect of a world-wide transition from nationally organized to globally integrated capitalism. The result is likely to be greater economic and political instability. Against this background socialism - in Marx's sense - is all the more necessary. He concludes that the collapse of Stalinism should be less the moment to abandon socialism than to resume unfinished business.

Drawing on philosophy and cultural history, Alex Callinicos argues in this work that post-modernism is best read as a symptom of political frustration and social mobility rather than as a significant intellectual or cultural phenomenon.

The problem of historical change has come to assume central importance among English-speaking social scientists in the past ten to fifteen years. Much attention has been focused on how we relate institutions and institutional change to actions, and how we think of history as the outcome of this process. This book looks at both Marxist and non-Marxist positions in this debate, examining in detail the work of Hobsbawm, Thompson, Cohen, Althusser, Giddens and Habermas amongst others. Callinicos argues that both functionalism and methodological individualism, and the various attempts to reconcile these extremes, are untenable. Drawing on classical Marxism, analytical philosophy and recent historical work, Callinicos has produced a useful contribution to the debate, developing an argument which should affect its terms in the future.