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Case Studies and Theory Development in the Social Sciences

By Alexander L. George and Andrew Bennett

The use of case studies to build and test theories in political science and the other social sciences has increased in recent years. Many scholars have argued that the social sciences rely too heavily on quantitative research and formal models and thus have attempted to develop and refine rigorous methods for using case studies. This text presents a comprehensive analysis of research methods using case studies and examines the place of case studies in social science methodology.

Whither Socialism?

By Joseph E. Stiglitz


The Society of the Spectacle

By Guy Debord

Few works of political and cultural theory have been as enduringly provocative as Guy Debord's The Society of the Spectacle. From its publication amid the social upheavals of the 1960s up to the present, the volatile theses of this book have decisively transformed debates on the shape of modernity, capitalism and everyday life in the late twentieth cenlury.

Moral Consciousness and Communicative Action

By Jürgen Habermas

This long-awaited book sets out the implications of Habermas's theory of communicative action for moral theory. "Discourse ethics" attempts to reconstruct a moral point of view from which normative claims can be impartially judged. The theory of justice it develops replaces Kant's categorical imperative with a procedure of justification based on reasoned agreement among participants in practical discourse.

Looking Awry

An Introduction to Jacques Lacan through Popular Culture
By Slavoj Žižek

Slavoj

Techniques of the Observer

On Vision and Modernity in the Nineteenth Century
By Jonathan Crary

Jonathan Crary's Techniques of the Observer provides a dramatically new perspective on the visual culture of the nineteenth century, reassessing problems of both visual modernism and social modernity. This analysis of the historical formation of the observer is a compelling account of the prehistory of the society of the spectacle."

Jonathan Crary is Assistant Professor of Art History at Columbia University. He is a founding editor of Zone and Zone Books.

The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere

An Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society
By Jürgen Habermas

This is Jurgen Habermas's most concrete historical-sociological book and one of the key contributions to political thought in the postwar period. It will be a revelation to those who have known Habermas only through his theoretical writing to find his later interests in problems of legitimation and communication foreshadowed in this lucid study of the origins, nature, and evolution of public opinion in democratic societies.

The Dialectics of Seeing

Walter Benjamin and the Arcades Project
By Susan Buck-Morss

Walter Benjamin's magnum opus was a book he did not live to write. In The Dialectics of Seeing, Susan Buck-Morss offers an inventive reconstruction of the Passagen-Werk, or Arcades Project, as it might have taken form.

On the Logic of the Social Sciences

By Jürgen Habermas

In a provocative argument that ends with his own sharply profiled position, Jürgen Habermas considers the main lines of thought pursued by epistemologists and methodologists of the social sciences - from NeoKantianism to behaviorism. For two decades, the German edition of this classic has been a standard reference point for discussions of the social sciences.

Jürgen Habermas is Professor of Philosophy at the University of Frankfurt.

The Automobile Age

By James J. Flink

In this sweeping cultural history, James Flink provides a fascinating account of the creation of the world's first automobile culture. He offers both a critical survey of the development of automotive technology and the automotive industry and an analysis of the social effects of "automobility" on workers and consumers.

James J. Flink is an affiliate of the Institute of Transportation Studies and Professor of Comparative Culture at the University of California, Irvine.

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