Best of
Sociology

1975

Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison


Michel Foucault - 1975
    This groundbreaking book by the most influential philosopher since Sartre compels us to reevaluate our assumptions about all the ensuing reforms in the penal institutions of the West. For as he examines innovations that range from the abolition of torture to the institution of forced labor and the appearance of the modern penitentiary, Michel Foucault suggests that punishment has shifted its focus from the prisoner's body to the soul — and that our very concern with rehabilitation encourages and refines criminal activity.Lucidly reasoned and deftly marshaling a vast body of research, Discipline and Punish is a genuinely revolutionary book, whose implications extend beyond the prison to the minute power relations of our society.

Sociobiology: The New Synthesis


Edward O. Wilson - 1975
    When this classic work was first published in 1975, it created a new discipline and started a tumultuous round in the age-old nature versus nurture debate. Although voted by officers and fellows of the international Animal Behavior Society the most important book on animal behavior of all time, Sociobiology is probably more widely known as the object of bitter attacks by social scientists and other scholars who opposed its claim that human social behavior, indeed human nature, has a biological foundation. The controversy surrounding the publication of the book reverberates to the present day.In the introduction to this Twenty-Fifth Anniversary Edition, Edward O. Wilson shows how research in human genetics and neuroscience has strengthened the case for a biological understanding of human nature. Human sociobiology, now often called evolutionary psychology, has in the last quarter of a century emerged as its own field of study, drawing on theory and data from both biology and the social sciences.For its still fresh and beautifully illustrated descriptions of animal societies, and its importance as a crucial step forward in the understanding of human beings, this anniversary edition of Sociobiology: The New Synthesis will be welcomed by a new generation of students and scholars in all branches of learning.

Ethnic America: A History


Thomas Sowell - 1975
    This classic work by the distinguished economist traces the history of nine American ethnic groups -- the Irish, Germans, Jews, Italians, Chinese, African-Americans, Puerto Ricans, and Mexicans.

Escape from Evil


Ernest Becker - 1975
    From the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Denial of Death, a penetrating and insightful perspective on the source of evil in our world."A profound, nourishing book…absolutely essential to the understanding of our troubled times." —Anais Nin"An urgent essay that bears all the marks of a final philosophical raging against the dying of the light." —Newsweek

Wages Against Housework


Silvia Federici - 1975
    We say it is unwaged work.They call it frigidity. We call it absenteeism.Every miscarriage is a work accident.Homosexuality and heterosexuality are both working conditions…but homosexuality is workers’ control of production, not the end of work.More smiles? More money. Nothing will be so powerful in destroying the healing virtues of a smile.Neuroses, suicides, desexualization: occupational diseases of the housewife.

The Imaginary Institution of Society


Cornelius Castoriadis - 1975
    First published in France in 1975, it is the major theoretical work of one of the foremost thinkers in Europe today.This is one of the most original and important works of contemporary European thought. First published in France in 1975, it is the major theoretical work of one of the foremost thinkers in Europe today.Castoriadis offers a brilliant and far-reaching analysis of the unique character of the social-historical world and its relations to the individual, to language, and to nature. He argues that most traditional conceptions of society and history overlook the essential feature of the social-historical world, namely that this world is not articulated once and for all but is in each case the creation of the society concerned. In emphasizing the element of creativity, Castoriadis opens the way for rethinking political theory and practice in terms of the autonomous and explicit self-institution of society.

Shantung Compound


Langdon Gilkey - 1975
    This vivid diary of life in a Japanese internment camp during World War II examines the moral challenges encountered in conditions of confinement and deprivation.

The Night is Dark and I Am Far from Home: Political Indictment of US Public Schools


Jonathan Kozol - 1975
    In this fourth edition, a new introduction and epilogue place the book in the context of contemporary issues and attitudes.

Keywords: A Vocabulary of Culture and Society


Raymond Williams - 1975
    Now revised to include new words and updated essays, Keywords focuses on the sociology of language, demonstrating how the key words we use to understand our society take on new meanings and how these changes reflect the political bent and values of society.

Against Our Will: Men, Women and Rape


Susan Brownmiller - 1975
    In lucid, persuasive prose, Brownmiller has created a definitive, devastating work of lasting social importance.Chosen by THE NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW as One of the Outstanding Books of the Year

The Modern World-System I: Capitalist Agriculture and the Origins of the European World-Economy in the Sixteenth Century


Immanuel Wallerstein - 1975
    Countless authors have sung its praises. Aside from splendid surroundings, unlimited library and secretarial assistance, and a ready supply of varied scholars to consult at a moment's notice, what the center offers is to leave the scholar to his own devices, for good or ill. Would that all men had such wisdom. The final version was consummated with the aid of a grant from the Social Sciences Grants Subcommittee of the Faculty of Graduate Studies and Research of McGill University.

The Cunning of History: The Holocaust and the American Future


Richard L. Rubenstein - 1975
    Therefore, in the process of destroying the myth and the preconception, he is making us see that that encampment of death and suffering may have been more horrible than we had ever imagined. It was slavery in its ultimate embodiment. He is making us understand that the etiology of Auschwitz - to some, a diabolical, perhaps freakish excrescence, which vanished from the face of the earth with the destruction of the crematoria in 1945 - is actually embedded deeply in a cultural tradition that stretches back to the Middle Passage from the coast of Africa, and beyond, to the enforced servitude in ancient Greece and Rome. Rubenstein is saying that we ignore this linkage, and the existence of the sleeping virus in the bloodstream of civilization, at risk of our future."From William Styron's Introduction

Body Ritual Among the Nacirema (Reprint Series in Social Sciences)


Horace Miner - 1975
    

One for the Money


Marvin J. Ashton - 1975
    

Hitopadesha: Choice of Friends


Kamala Chandrakant - 1975
    Each chapter contains a string of stories, one emerging from the other, with each designed to render counsel on ethical worldly-wise conduct. The characters are living beings including humans and animals in the wild. The latter too are endowed with the reason and emotions of human beings. Thereby they come to represent types of human nature and behavior and one can draw morals from the stories. In this collection, a tiger finds a gold bangle with which he allures a traveler to cross the river; stuck in mire, the greedy man falls easy prey to the tiger. In another story, a jackal feigns friendship with a deer who despite warnings from a wise crow joins the jackal and meets with a tragedy. An old blind vulture is offered shelter by birds in the hollow of a tree. He protects their fledglings. A cat pleads for living with them and the vulture agrees. The cat finishes the fledglings one by one and goes away. The birds suspecting the vulture kill him. Moral: Do not give shelter to the unknown. This collection is treasure house of such stories.

Damned Whores and God's Police: The Colonization of Women in Australia


Anne Summers - 1975
    A remarkable book of the history of women convicts transported to Australia to keep company with the many more males convicts.

Blood of My Blood (Picas, #7)


Richard Gambino - 1975
    Its data is presented with scholarly precision; yet the author's personalized style, which he peppers with autobiographical tidbits, makes it immensely readable. Unlike most books written by academics, this one compels the reader to feel as well as to know.

The Shaping of Black America: The Struggles and Triumphs of African-Americans, 1619-1990s


Lerone Bennett Jr. - 1975
    Its first section, "Foundations," encompasses black slaves and white indentured servants, the black founding fathers, and the relationship between African-American and Indians. In the second section, "Directions," Bennett traces the growth of black labor and black capital and the development of a system that unites and separates blacks and whites. The result is a bold and literate work that persuasively demonstrates its author's notion that "blacks lived a different time and a different reality in this country."

The Nacirema: Readings on American Culture


James P. Spradley - 1975
    The existence of a national culture is illustrated in a collection of anthropological essays considering social values, beliefs, and practices in the United States.The title is inspired by the essay "Body Ritual Among the Nacirema" by Horace Miner in American Anthropologist, 1956, 58(3), 503-507.

The Rape of the APE (American Puritan Ethic): The Official History of the Sexual Revolution


Allen Sherman - 1975
    

Social Amnesia: A Critique Of Contemporary Psychology


Russell Jacoby - 1975
    In this book, Jacoby excavates the critical and historical concepts that have fallen prey to the dynamic of a society that strips them both of their historical and critical content. Social Amnesia is an effort to remember what is perpetually lost under the pressure of society. It is simultaneously a critique of present practices and theories in psychology. Jacoby's new self-evaluation has the same sharp edge as the book itself, offering special insights into the evolution of psychological theory during the past two decades.In his probing, self-critical new introduction, Jacoby maintains that any serious appraisal of psychology or sociology, or any discipline, must seek to separate the political from the theoretical. He discusses how in the years since Social Amnesia was first published society has oscillated from extreme subjectivism to extreme objectivism, which feed off each other and constitute two forms of social amnesia: a forgetting of the past and a pseudo-historical consciousness. Social Amnesia contains a forceful argument for "thinking against the grain - an endeavor that remains as urgent as ever." It is an important work for sociologists, psychologists, and psychoanalysts.

Platform for Change


Stafford Beer - 1975
    His writing is as much art as it is science. He is the most viable system I know." Dr Russell L Ackoff, The Institute for Interactive Management, Pennsylvania. USA. This is a highly original book both in content and format. It presents thirteen `arguments for change', these are linked by a personal commentary, and by a deeper, `metalinguistic', commentary. Platform for Change is completely self-contained, does not deal at all with the nature of viable systems, but is directed towards the hope that our planet may yet remain viable--and the human race survive.

December's Child: A Book of Chumash Oral Narratives


Thomas C. Blackburn - 1975
    Anderson, University of California, Riverside in The Journal of California Anthropology, Vol. 2, No. 2 (WINTER 1975), pp. 241-244:A child born in December is "like a baby in an ecstatic condition, but he leaves this condition" (p. 102). The Chumash, reduced by the 20th century from one of the richest and most populous groups in California to a pitiful remnant, had almost lost their strage and ecstatic mental world by the time John Peabody Harrington set out to collect what was still remembered of their language and oral literature. Working with a handful of ancient informants, Harrington recorded all he could--then, in bitter rejection of the world, kept it hidden and unpublished. After his death there began a great quest for his scattered notes, and these notes are now being published at last. Thomas Blackburn, among the first and most assiduous of the seekers through Harrington's materials, has published her the main body of oral literature that Harrington collected from the Chumash of Santa Barbara and Ventura Counties. Blackburn has done much more: he has added to the 111 stories a commentary and analysis, almost book-length in its own right, and a glossary of the Chumash and Californian-Spanish terms that Harrington was prone to leave untranslated in the texts.

Unearthing Seeds of Fire: The Idea of Highlander


Frank Adams - 1975
    We work with people fighting for justice, equality and sustainability, supporting their efforts to take collective action to shape their own destiny. Through popular education, participatory research, and cultural work, we help create spaces -- at Highlander and in local communities -- where people gain knowledge, hope and courage, expanding their ideas of what is possible. We develop leadership and help create and support strong, democratic organizations that work for justice, equality and sustainability in their own communities and that join with others to build broad movements for social, economic and restorative environmental change.

An Introduction to Models in the Social Sciences


Charles A. Lave - 1975
    The book describes models of individual choice, exchange, adaptation, and diffusion. Throughout, student participation in analytical thinking is encouraged. Originally published in 1975 by HarperCollins Publishers.

Love as Passion: The Codification of Intimacy


Niklas Luhmann - 1975
    By this, I mean that not only is he smart, extremely productive, and amazingly erudite, though all this is true enough, but also that he has, in the course of an improbable career, elaborated a theory of the social that completely reinvents sociology and destroys its most cherished dogmas." So wrote Stephen Fuchs in his Contemporary Sociology review of Luhmann's major theoretical work, Social Systems (Stanford, 1995). In this volume, Luhmann analyzes the evolution of love in Western Europe from the seventeenth century to the present.Reviews"Luhmann's unique, monumental, theory-building effort is best described as a consistent attempt to deploy the tools and the inspirations of three strategies: modern information theory, structuralism, and evolutionary theory. . . . Perhaps nothing conveys more poignantly Luhmann's unusual blend of scientific precision with artistic sensibility than his replacement of Parson's 'reciprocity of perspective' with his own 'interpersonal interpenetration.' The first is cool, calculating, cognitive, and dispassionate; the second connotes a richness of relationship that leaves no human faculty unmoved. . . . Luhmann's work is important because, arguably, it comes closer than all other sociological strategies to restoring the lost link between academically reputable social theorizing and the subjective experience of life." —American Journal of Sociology"There is a dearth of analytical writing about the emotions and sentiments that seem to motivate most human action, at least in everyday discussion, although some researchers are making some efforts to remedy this situation. Luhmann's Love as Passion is an outstanding contribution to this emerging trend . . . full of novel information and fascinating ideas." —Contemporary Sociology

Conflict Sociology: A Sociological Classic Updated


Randall Collins - 1975
    The first edition represented the most powerful and comprehensive statement of conflict theory in its time. Here, Sanderson has retained the core chapters and added discussions on Collins's and others' work in recent years. An afterword summarizes Collins's latest forays into microsociological theorizing and attempts to demonstrate how his newer microsociology and older macrosociology are connected.

A Realist Theory Of Science


Roy Bhaskar - 1975
    In this analysis of the natural sciences, with a particular focus on the experimental process itself, Roy Bhaskar provides a definitive critique of the traditional, positivist conception of science and stakes out an alternative, realist position. Since it original publication in 1975, a movement known as ‘Critical Realism’, which is both intellectually diverse and international in scope, has developed on the basis of key concepts outlined in the text. The book has been hailed in many quarters as a ‘Copernican Revolution’ in the study of the nature of science, and the implications of its account have been far-reaching for many fields of the humanities and social sciences.

Implicit Meanings: Selected Essays in Anthropology


Mary Douglas - 1975
    This book provides a splendid answer as to why anthropology goes on mattering and also to why no surgery can separate it from sociology '-The Economist from the reviews of the first edition This new edition of a classic work provides an excellent introduction to the thought of anthropologist Mary Douglas. First published to great acclaim in 1975, Mary Douglas has now revised the text to include additional chapters and a new introduction.Implicit Meanings includes writings on the key themes which are associated with Mary Douglas's work and which have had a major influence on anthropological thought, such as: *food *pollution *risk *animals *myth. Among the new pieces inluded in this edition are: The Lele of the Kasai * Techniques of Socrcery Control in Central Africa * The Lele Revisited * Obituary of Godfrey Lienhardt * The Depolitzation of Risk * Rightness of Categories

Twilight of Authority


Robert A. Nisbet - 1975
    Now we are not so sure.” So wrote Robert Nisbet in the first edition of Twilight of Authority , published by Oxford University Press in 1975. “The centralization and, increasingly, individualization of power is matched in the social and cultural spheres by a combined hedonism and egalitarianism, each in its own way a reflection of the destructive impact of power on the hierarchy that is native to the social bond,” he writes.Robert Nisbet (1913–1996) taught at Columbia, the University of California at Berkeley, Smith College, and the University of Bologna.Robert G. Perrin is Professor of Sociology at the University of Tennessee at Knoxville.

The Broken Covenant: American Civil Religion in Time of Trial


Robert N. Bellah - 1975
    In his 1967 classic essay "Civil Rights in America," Bellah argued that the religious dimensions of American society—as distinct from its churches—has its own integrity and required "the same care in understanding that any religion." This edition includes his 1978 article "Religion and the Legitimation of the American Republic," and a new Preface.

Environment and Social Behaviour


Irwin Altman - 1975
    

The Admirable Crichton, And Other Plays


J.M. Barrie - 1975
    A play in 4 acts by the author of Peter Pan

Bad: The Autobiography of James Carr


James Carr - 1975
    Originally released in 1972, BAD remains a harsh indictment of the American penal system and a primer for the seeds of institutionalized racism in this country. BAD goes where no other book has ever gone before and so did James Carr. After years in and out of prison (mostly in) Carr wound up bunking with George Jackson (Soledad Brother) in Folsom Prison where they fought their way to a position of strength along the radical stream of the 1960s. As Carr notes, “I’ve been struggling all my life to get beyond the choice of living on my knees or dying on my feet. It’s time we lived on our feet.” A book that strips the system bare, Carr’s memoir is revealing as a part of Black Panther history, and as a telling document in the battle for prison reform that continues to this day.

The Liberated Man: Beyond Masculinity; Freeing Men And Their Relationships With Women


Warren Farrell - 1975
    

The German Tradition of Self-Cultivation: 'Bildung' from Humboldt to Thomas Mann


W.H. Bruford - 1975
    The idea of the true freedom which comes to the man who lives as much as possible in the invisible world of culture and accepts as a kind of fate his social, political and material circumstances was indeed at the heart of the German idealism of Goethe's day, and unworldliness went along with very great achievements in literature, scholarship and philosophy. Bildung, self-cultivation, came to be as natural a requirement of educated, middle-class life as sport was in England. In this book, originally published in 1975, Professor Bruford provides a sequel to Culture and Society in Classical Weimar 1775-1806 and shows how the ideal of self-cultivation entered into the thought of a number of highly individual German philosophers, theologians, poets and novelists, each in his own corner of the rapidly changing world of the nineteenth century.

Limits of Reason


Modris Eksteins - 1975
    

The Great Peace: An Asian's Candid Report On Red China


Raja Hutheesing - 1975
    

Women in Chinese Society


Margery Wolf - 1975
    

Principles of Visual Anthropology


Paul Hockings - 1975
    The book covers ethnographic filming and its relations to the cinema and television; applications of filming to anthropological research, the uses of still photography, archives, and videotape; subdisciplinary applications in ethnography, archeology, bio-anthropology, museology and ethnohistory; and overcoming the funding problems of film production.

Literacy in Traditional Societies


Jack Goody - 1975
    It objectifies speech, provides language with a material correlative, and in this material form speech can be transmitted over space and preserved over time. In this book the contributors discuss cultures at different levels of sophistication and literacy and examine the importance of writing on the development of these societies. All the articles except the first were specially written for this book and the extensive introduction unites and synthesizes the material.

Religion and Alienation: A Theological Reading of Sociology


Gregory Baum - 1975
    In this penetrating reading of the classics of sociology, Bum offers an essential guide for students of theology, social theory, and anyone interested in the vital, if ambivalent, relation between religion and society.

Generating Inequality: Mechanisms of Distribution in the US Economy


Lester Carl Thurow - 1975
    

Anthropopolis: City for Human Development


Constantinos Apostolou DoxiadisSpyros A. Doxiadis - 1975
    C. A. Doxiadis, an architect, and one of the planners of the symposium, prepared a set of goals and a proposal for discussion. His main concern was how to make the city more human, that is, how to make citizens happy and safe and help them in their human development. Doxiadis proposal faced this problem from the point of view of a builder of houses and cities who wishes to develop them in a responsible manner. Therefore, it was decided to bring together a few scientists interested in the fate of man who would discuss whether it was possible to create a city which would ensure man s happiness and security and which would also help him to develop in a more satisfactory manner. This book contains Doxiadis report and the symposium.

The Scientific Community


Warren O. Hagstrom - 1975
    

The Churches and the Chaplaincy


Richard G Hutcheson - 1975
    

Albion's Fatal Tree


Douglas Hay - 1975
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