Social Change Theories in Motion

Explaining the Past, Understanding the Present, Envisioning the Future
1. Auflage 2018
ISBN: 978-0-8153-5295-2
Verlag: Routledge

Buch, Englisch, 318 Seiten, Format (B × H): 152 mm x 229 mm, Gewicht: 463 g

This book assesses how 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 others commentators, living and dead. Some repeated earlier views; others built on those perspectives; a few changed the way we think. While surveying earlier writers, the author’s primary concerns are theorists who sought to explain industrialization, imperialism, and the consolidation of nation-states after 1840. Marx, Durkheim, and Weber still shape our understandings of the past, present, and future. Patterson focuses on explanations of the unsettled conditions that crystallized in the 1910s and still persist: the rise of socialist states, anti-colonial movements, prolonged economic crises, and almost continuous war. After 1945, theorists in capitalist countries, influenced by Cold War politics, saw social change in terms of economic growth, progress, and modernization; their contemporaries elsewhere wrote about underdevelopment, dependency, or uneven development. In the 1980s, theorists of postmodernity, neoliberalism, globalization, innovations in communications technologies, and post-socialism argued that they rendered earlier accounts insufficient. Others saw them as manifestations of a new imperialism, capitalist accumulation on a global scale, environmental crises, and nationalist populism.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Patterson, Thomas C.

Fachgebiete

• Sozialwissenschaften Soziologie | Soziale Arbeit Soziologie Allgemein

Inhaltsverzeichnis

Preface Introduction Chapter 1. The Language of Change: Motion in Time Chapter 2. Modern Industrial Capitalist Society, 1820-1914 Chapter 3: Imperialism and the National, Colonial, and Agrarian Questions, 1890-1929 Chapter 4: Capitalism in Crisis and the Search for Social Order, 1918-1945 Chapter 5: The Cold War, Decolonization, and the Third World, 1945-1970 Chapter 6: The World in Crisis, 1970-2017

Über Autor(innen)

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.