Modern Social Theory

This is a book both for students and for the educated reader who is interested in the present situation in sociological thought. Dr Cohen provides both an exposition and an important and original critique of the present situation. In what is probably the most rapidly growing subject in our universities there is no other book, past or present, which covers the same ground. It is not a text book, for it does not survey the differences between various schools of thought and present the arguments of different theorists for their own sake, nor yet is it a treatise presenting a new body of theory. Its aim is to extract what is of most value from contemporary theories and from the sociological classics of Marx, Durkheim, Weber, and Simmel. Graduate students transferring from other disciplines should find this book particularly valuable, and every reader will be delighted by its lucidity and freedom from jargon. For students of sociology it will quite simply prove essential.