This sociological critique of the ‘philosophy of praxis’ looks at the importance of the concept in the social theory of leading influential Western Marxists such as Lukács, Gramsci, Korsch, Horkheimer, Marcuse and Adorno in the inter-war period. It offers a detailed critique of Marx and Hegel, and explores the validity and implications for sociology of two of Marx’s ideas which the later theorists made the centre piece of their social theory: first, that true theory is authenticated by praxis, and second, its corollary that certain major social transformations should and would in practice render sociology redundant.

Product Description: In the years since the publication of the Prison Notebooks, the interest and importance of Antonio Gramsci’s contribution to Marxist thought and political analysis has become widely recognised. The concern to explore and identify the structures of the capitalist state is both the principal characteristic of Gramsci’s theoretical and political writings and also the inspiration for his writings on Italian history...read more

Product Description: The Symbol Theory, volume 13 in the Collected Works of Norbert Elias, situates the human capacity for forming symbols in the long-term biological evolution of Homo sapiens, showing how it is linked through communication and orientation to group survival...read more

Few sociologists of the first rank have scandalized the academic world to the extent that Elias did. Developed out of the German sociology of knowledge in the 1920s, Elias’s sociology contains a sweeping radicalism which declares an academic ‘war on all your houses’. His sociology of the ‘human condition’ sweeps aside the contemporary focus on ‘modernity’ and rejects most of the paradigms of sociology as one-sided, economistic, teleological, individualistic and/or rationalistic. As sociologists, Elias also asks us to distance ourselves from mainstream psychology, history and above all, philosophy, which is summarily abandoned, although carried forward on a higher level. This enlightening book written by a close friend and pupil of Elias, is the first book to explain the refractory, uncomfortable, side of Elias’s sociological radicalism and to brace us for its implications. It is also the first in-depth analysis of Elias’s last work The Symbol Theory in the light of selected contemporary developments in archaeology, anthropology and evolutionary theory.

By controversially turning away from the current debates which surround social theory, this book provides an historical analysis of the profound burden of sociology and its implications today.