Thomas C. Patterson

Gebundenes Buch

Social Change Theories in Motion

Explaining the Past, Understanding the Present, Envisioning the Future

Beschreibung

This book assesses how major social theorists explained processes of change set in motion by the rise of capitalism. It situates them in the milieu in which they wrote. They were never neutral observers standing outside the conditions they were trying to explain. Their arguments were responses to those circumstances and to the views of other commentators, living and dead. Some repeated earlier views; others elaborated subtle differences; and a few changed the way we think. While Patterson surveys earlier writers, his primary focus is on the legacies of theorists writing after the 1840s, who sought to explain the consequences of industrialization, imperial expansion, and the consolidation of nation-states. The theories of Marx, Durkheim, and Weber still shape our understandings of the past and present, and our visions for the future. The author pays particular attention to explanations of the unsettled conditions that appeared after World War I and persist to today: the rise of socialist states, anti-colonial movements, prolonged economic crises, and almost continuous war. After World War II, theorists in capitalist countries, influenced by Cold War politics, saw social change in terms of economic growth, progress, and modernization; their contemporaries in less-industrialized countries wrote about the development of underdevelopment, dependency, or uneven development. In the 1980s, theorists of postmodernity, neoliberalism, globalization, innovations in communications technologies, and the collapse of socialist countries argued that these processes rendered earlier accounts insufficient. Others viewed social change as manifestations of a new imperialism, capitalist accumulation on an increasingly global scale, environmental crises, and the rise of nationalist populism.

Autor

Thomas C. Patterson is Distinguished Professor of Anthropology Emeritus at the University of California, Riverside, and the author of a number of books, including Karl Marx, Anthropologist; From Acorns to Warehouses: The Historical Political Economy of Southern California's Inland Empire, and Inventing Western Civilization.

Produktdetails

• Verlag: Routledge
• Seitenzahl: 318
• Erscheinungstermin: 7. Februar 2018
• Englisch
• Abmessung: 235mm x 157mm x 22mm
• Gewicht: 613g
• ISBN-13: 9780815352990
• ISBN-10: 0815352999
• Artikelnr.: 57053723

Rezensionen

This book is a valuable explanation and critique of explanations of social change in the last three centuries. The theme is how power influences, and is influenced by, theories of social change - a fascinating angle for examining the structural changes that have occurred in the modern world-system since the 18^th century. **
Christopher Chase-Dunn, Institute for Research on World-Systems, University of California, Riverside

For the past five decades, Tom Patterson has been one of the most stimulating and original thinkers in the field of anthropology. This excellent book reflects such exciting thinking, as it critically examines many of the explanations for global change that have been advanced in the last

two centuries. Moreover, it can be profitably read not only by anthropologists but by all social scientists.
Jeremy A. Sabloff, Santa Fe Institute

Tom Patterson makes today's crises more intelligible by taking a long-term perspective, exploring how social theorists with different ideological orientations diagnosed the changes that capitalism produced in their own eras. Supremely lucid and richly contextualised accounts of ideas and debates provide readers with a truly worldwide vision of modern history, combined with the strongest intellectual incentives to continue thinking not only about how to understand our world but also about how to change it.
John Gledhill, FBA, FAcSS, Emeritus Professor of Social Anthropology, The University of Manchester

In this far-ranging and erudite work, Patterson carries out a dialogue among a wide array of theorists within the Marxian and social science traditions, from Rousseau and Smith to Marx, and from Weber and Luxemburg to Fanon and Foucault. Throughout, he considers not only Western Europe and North America, but also theories and theorists connected to the Global South and to agrarian societies. Far from a history of social thought for its own sake, Social Change Theories in Motion speaks to a twenty-first century world riven by economic, social, and cultural crisis.
Kevin B. Anderson, University of California, Santa Barbara

This book is a welcome, timely contribution to our collective understandings of what can be learned from by placing key theorists of social change in relationship to the historical conjunctures that they were observing and analyzing. As such the book is a reminder and guide for how to think about and speak to the contemporary crises and efforts to erase historical memories of critique.
Nina Glick Schiller, Emeritus Professor, Social Anthropology, University of Manchester and the University of New Hampshire.