Forgotten Founders and Other Neglected Social Theorists

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This edited volume highlights the work of ten forgotten and neglected social theorists in the hope of reinvigorating interest in their work and their potential contributions to the analysis of contemporary social issues. Each chapter includes a brief biographical sketch, an overview of the selected theorists work and significance, and the relevance of their work to one or more contemporary social issues. While other similar texts tend to focus primarily on intellectual biography, our emphasis here is on the scholars theories and their application to contemporary social issues. We provide a contextualization of each scholars work, using present-day social issues or problems. Many of these individuals played a significant role in the development of sociology. Our hope is to provide a resource that will help re-integrate these marginalized social theorists, rescuing them from obscurity and elevating their status.

Reviews

Readers of this book are in for a treat. The authors, distinguished scholars themselves, open windows into thework of figureswhose scholarship,overlooked or longneglected, offers surprisinglyfresh insightinto societytodayas well as in the past. Some of the scholars profiledhere were once famous(LutherBernard, PitirimSorokin, Marianne Weber). Others, like Annie Marion Maclean and Radhakamal Mukerjee, were no less accomplished. All deserve our attention today. Pressures to specialize,and thetides of fashion,can inhibitthe wide reading and historical memory modeledby this book. A few hours in the company of the authors presented herewill be a welcome reminder of the benefits ofsuch aneffort. -- David N. Smith, University of Kansas

Author Bio

Christopher T. Conner is visiting assistant professor of sociology at Knox College. Nicholas M. Baxter is acting assistant professor of sociology at Indiana University Kokomo. David R. Dickens is professor of sociology at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas.