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Claus Offe

Claus Offe has researched and lectured widely throughout Europe and North America and is Professor in the Faculty of Sociology at the University of Bielefeld.

Titles by This Author

Varieties of Transition

The East European and East German Experience
By Claus Offe

Claus Offe has spent most of his career analyzing the inner workings (and nonworkings) of Western democracies. After the upheavals of the late 1980s, however, his attention was drawn increasingly to the East, and particularly to the transformations occurring in the former German Democratic Republic.

Modernity and the State

East, West
By Claus Offe

Clause Offe, one of the most insightful contemporary theorists of society and politics, has contributed greatly to our understanding of social policy and the odyssey of advanced capitalism in the late twentieth century. Modernity and the State, a dozen essays written over the last decade, develops his earlier lines of interest and extends them to the new societies emerging in Central-Eastern Europe.

Disorganized Capitalism

Contemporary Transformations of Work and Politics
By Claus Offe

Should the Western democracies, contrary to their prevailing self-image as "planned" and "managed," be seen as highly disorganized systems of social power and political authority? If so, what are the symptoms, consequences of, and possible remedies for these disorganizing tendencies?

Contradictions of the Welfare State

By Claus Offe
Edited by John B Keane

Claus Offe is one of the leading social scientists working in Germany today, and his work, particularly on the welfare state, has been enormously influential both in Europe and the United States. Contradictions of the Welfare State is the first collection of Offe's essays to appear in a single volume in English, and it contains a selection of his most important recent work on the breakdown of the post-war settlement.

Titles by This Editor

Cultural-Political Interventions in the Unfinished Project of Enlightenment

Edited by Axel Honneth, Thomas McCarthy, Claus Offe and Albrecht Wellmer

These thirteen essays by noted philosophers and social theorists continue a timely celebration and examination of Jürgen Habermas's unfinished project of reconstructing enlightenment rationality. Focusing on the cultural and political aspects of Habermas's work, the essays take up critical theory and political practice, the sociology of political practice, historical-philosophical reflections on culture, moral development in childhood and society, and the foundations of critical social theory. Essays in a companion volume,

Philosophical Interventions in the Unfinished Project of Enlightenment

Edited by Axel Honneth, Thomas McCarthy, Claus Offe and Albrecht Wellmer

These 11 essays by noted philosophers and social theorists take up the philosophical aspects of Jürgen Habermas's unfinished project of reconstructing enlightenment rationality. They range in subject matter from classical problems to contemporary debates, covering historical perspectives, theoretical issues, and postenlightenment challenges. A companion volume of essays will take up the cultural and political aspects of the work. Together, the two volumes underscore the richness and variety of Habermas's project.