Full Description
Embattled Reason constitutes an intellectual profile of one of America's preeminent sociologists. This collection of essays, published over the course of thirty years, embodies a series of intellectual choices in response to current concerns and to debates of the past, affording a coherent and unified view of Bendix's work as a whole.
The articles are grouped under three headings. In "Conditions of Knowledge" the author is concerned with the value assumptions basic to the social sciences. Under "Theoretical Perspectives" the author presents the guiding considerations of his own work in a continuing dialogue with such thinkers as Tocqueville, Marx, Durkheim, and Weber. In the last section, "Studies of Modernization," Bendix takes up problems involved in an analysis of social change though a reexamination of evolutionist assumptions.
Reinhard Bendix is professor of sociology and political science at the University of California, Berkeley.
Contents
Part I: Biographical, Introduction 1. A Memoir of My Father 2. How I Became an American Sociologist 3. Emigration, Generations, and Ideas Part II: Intellectual Dialogues: Past and Present Introduction 4. Encounters with Marx 5. A Reading of Tocqueville's Letters 6. Values and Concepts in Max Weber's Comparative Studies 7. Inequality and Social Structure: A Comparison of Marx and Weber 8. Two Sociological Traditions: Durkheim and Weber 9. Max Weber and Jacob Burckhardt Part III: Ideas and Institutions: Ancient and Modern, Introduction 10. Transformations of Personal Charisma in Early Christianity 11. Sociological Reflections on the Early Christian Claim to Absolute Truth 12. The Advocacy of Science: Galileo 13. Advocates of Science and their Perplexities: From Bacon to Turgo 14. Comparative Industrialization: Japan and the Protestant Ethic 15. Comparative Industrialization: Culture and Politics in Western and Eastern Europe 16. The Position of the Social Sciences 17. A Personal Testimony on Twentieth-Century Social Change
