The Antinomies Of Classical Thought

This volume challenges prevailing understanding of the two great founders of sociological thought. In a detailed and systematic way the author demonstrates how Marx and Durkheim gradually developed the fundamental frameworks for sociological materialism and idealism. While most recent interpreters of Marx have placed alienation and subjectivity at the centre of his work, Professor Alexander suggests that it was the later Marx’s very emphasis on alienation that allowed him to avoid conceptualizing subjectivity altogether. In Durkheim’s case, by contrast, the author argues that such objectivist theorizing informed the early work alone, and he demonstrates that in his later writings Durkheim elaborated an idealist theory that used religious life as an analytical model for studying the institutions of secular society.

This book is a masterful account of the social science enterprise by one of its most accomplished practitioners. Moving from the origins of systematic knowledge in ancient Greece to the present day, Donald Levine offers a richly detailed, ingeniously organized introduction to the cornerstone works of Western social thought.

In this volume the author maintains that sociology must learn to combine the insights of both Durkheim and Marx and that it can only do so on the presuppositional ground that Weber set forth. Alexander maintains that the idealist and materialist traditions must be transformed into analytic dimensions of multidimensional and synthetic theory. This volume focusses on the writing of Talcott Parsons, the only modern thinker who can be considered a true peer of the classical founders, and examines his own profoundly ambivalent attempt to carry out this analytic transformation.

The limits of one-dimensional theory are strikingly revealed in the schools that the founders of the major sociological traditions established. In this volume Max Weber is presented as the theorist who laid out new starting points and the author considers his work as a response, in part, to the idealist tradition which (in Volume 2), he maintains that Durkheim represents. As Weber was less able to avoid ambiguity, the author examines the weaknesses and efforts at ‘paradigm revision’.