Book contents
- The Cambridge Handbook of Social Theory
- The Cambridge Handbook of Social Theory
- Copyright page
- Contents
- Figures
- Tables
- Contributors
- Preface
- 1 The Emergence of Social Theory
- 2 “What Is a Classic?”
- 3 Karl Marx
- 4 The Marxist Legacy
- 5 Émile Durkheim: Theorist of Solidarity
- 6 What’s in a Name?
- 7 Max Weber
- 8 Weberian Social Theory
- 9 Georg Simmel and the Metropolitization of Social Life
- 10 Pounding on Parsons: How Criticism Undermined the Reputation of Sociology’s Incurable Theorist
- 11 Symbolic Interactionism
- 12 Erving Goffman and Dramaturgical Sociology
- 13 Structuralism
- 14 Norbert Elias, Civilising Processes, and Figurational (or Process) Sociology
- 15 Phenomenology and Social Theory
- 16 Pierre Bourdieu: An Intellectual Legacy
- 17 Developing Ethnomethodology: Garfinkel on the Constitutive Interactional Practices in Social Systems of Interaction
- 18 Jürgen Habermas
- 19 Anthony Giddens, Structuration Theory, and Radical Politics
- Index
- References
3 - Karl Marx
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 03 December 2020
- The Cambridge Handbook of Social Theory
- The Cambridge Handbook of Social Theory
- Copyright page
- Contents
- Figures
- Tables
- Contributors
- Preface
- 1 The Emergence of Social Theory
- 2 “What Is a Classic?”
- 3 Karl Marx
- 4 The Marxist Legacy
- 5 Émile Durkheim: Theorist of Solidarity
- 6 What’s in a Name?
- 7 Max Weber
- 8 Weberian Social Theory
- 9 Georg Simmel and the Metropolitization of Social Life
- 10 Pounding on Parsons: How Criticism Undermined the Reputation of Sociology’s Incurable Theorist
- 11 Symbolic Interactionism
- 12 Erving Goffman and Dramaturgical Sociology
- 13 Structuralism
- 14 Norbert Elias, Civilising Processes, and Figurational (or Process) Sociology
- 15 Phenomenology and Social Theory
- 16 Pierre Bourdieu: An Intellectual Legacy
- 17 Developing Ethnomethodology: Garfinkel on the Constitutive Interactional Practices in Social Systems of Interaction
- 18 Jürgen Habermas
- 19 Anthony Giddens, Structuration Theory, and Radical Politics
- Index
- References
Summary
This chapter traces the trajectory of sociology’s encounter with Marx. A century ago, sociologists saw Marx as outside sociology. Then, during most of the twentieth century, his social theory was tied – unjustly – to monstrous regimes that governed in his name, while sociologists focused upon his dialectical perspective, his theory of the state, his humanistic standpoint, and other aspects ignored by dogmatic Marxism. Recently, social theorists have returned to Marx’s notion of capitalism as a global system, to his theory of class polarization and of economic crisis, and to an interrogation of his theoretical corpus in light of contemporary concerns with race, gender, and the legacies of colonialism.
Kevin B. Anderson is Professor of Sociology at the University of California, Santa Barbara. He is the author of Lenin, Hegel, and Western Marxism (1995), Foucault and the Iranian Revolution: Gender and the Seductions of Islamism (with Janet Afary, 2005), and Marx at the Margins: On Nationalism, Ethnicity, and Non-Western Societies (2010/2016).
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- The Cambridge Handbook of Social Theory , pp. 45 - 64Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2020
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