The second edition of this remarkably lucid text, provides a wide–ranging historical introduction to social theory. The new edition preserves, and further enhances, the book’s striking qualities – its clarity, reliability, comprehensiveness and scholarship. The theorists treated include 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, Bourdieu, Beck, and Giddens. Callinicos examines the ways in which social theory grew out of the eighteenth century Enlightenment, a time when societies emerging in the West ceased to invoke the authority of tradition to validate themselves, instead looking to scientific knowledge to justify their mastery of the world. He traces social theory’s connections with central themes in modern philosophy, with the...