Arguing that every scientific concept and theory—including his own—is culturally conditioned, Fleck was appreciably ahead of his time. And as Kuhn observes in his foreword, "Though much has occurred since its publication, it remains a brilliant and largely unexploited resource.""To many scientists just as to many historians and philosophers of science facts are things that simply are the case: they are discovered through properly passive observation of natural reality. To such views Fleck replies that facts are invented, not discovered. Moreover, the appearance of scientific facts as discovered things is itself a social construction, a made thing. A work of transparent brilliance, one of the most significant contributions toward a thoroughly sociological account of scientific knowledge."—Steven Shapin, Science

    Tracing the evolution of religious and political systems and their relation to the authoritarian state, Rocker analyses concepts of ‘Nation’ as alleged communities of race, culture, language,and common interest.

    Includes a 1936 speech on the People's front and a short speech to Young Communist International. Foreword by James West, then a U.S. youth delegate to the 7th Congress. Index.

    Recalling work by Walter Benjamin and the Frankfurt School, Ernst Bloch's study of everyday life and politics during the Weimar Republic and Nazi Germany is a brilliant historical analysis of the cultural conditions leading to German fascism.A half-century later, Bloch's prescient meditations on culture and politics still retain their explosive power and are certain to provoke controversy and discussion among cultural critics, philosophers, social theorists, and historians. In their Introduction, the translators contextualize the book within the political and intellectual tendencies of the period and Bloch's other work.

    A documentary and analytical record, the book presents the classical background of primitivism and anti-primitivism in modern literature, historiography, and social and moral philosophy, and comprises chapters that center around particular ancient concepts and authors, including cynicism, stoicism, epicureanism, Plato, Aristotle, Lucretius, and Cicero. According to the authors in their preface, "there is some reason to think that this background is not universally familiar to those whose special field of study lie within the period of the Renaissance to our own time"; this book, in which the original Greek and Latin sources stand side by side with their English translations, will prove useful to scholars from a variety of disciplines who study this period.

    J. Rose provides a fascinating account of the origin and growth of religion and in particular the theory that the earliest religion was in fact monotheistic (the worship of the High God). Fr. Wilhelm Schmidt was a German Roman Catholic Jesuit priest who performed valuable work in linguistics and anthropology and was perhaps most famous for maintaining that the earliest worship was that of the High God (monotheism). This book examines the comparative history of religion, showing the role of various theories of religion and the development of worship amongst the world's most primitive peoples, and extrapolating from this the origin of religion in monotheism. This book remains important because whereas other theories had focused on the origin of religion in magic, polytheism, etc., this theory remained the first to consider monotheism as the source of all religion. Schmidt's work came to be respected even by non-Catholic and even non-Christian anthropologists (including atheists) for his thorough research.By New Age of Barbarism "zosimos" (EVROPA.)