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This article comments on Michael Burawoy's article "For Public Sociology," in volume 56, issue number 2, of the "British Journal of Sociology." The author has some criticism with Burawoy's call for public sociology but only over conceptual categories and matters of tactics. He is in accord with the broad purposes. Burawoy's call for more public sociology is important and timely. Some differences in approach are urged but like all sociologists seeking at once the ever-greater intellectual vitality for the field and a richer public life informed by sociology, the author is in his debt.

Gerhard Lenski wrote books on religion, stratification and social evolution. The literature is concernedwith the social organization and implications of inequality. "The Religious Factor" is about family life, politics, the relation of religion to science. Likewise, "Power and Privilege" suggests the importance of technology. "Human Societies" has roots in both the empirical, data-driven approach and the concern for an overall explanation of inequality. Lenski demonstrated that there need not always be a forced choice between breadth, depth, creativity and scholarly persistence.

Reports on the life and works of French-born sociologist Pierre Bourdieu. Birth in 1930 in the Pyrenees; Education background; Military service in Algeria; Foundation of Bourdieu's theories; Motivations for Bourdieu's sociology of the scientific and university fields; Bourdieu's approach to sociology; Titles of books written; Awards received; Honors accorded to Bourdieu at his death.

Discusses the concept of globalization in the context of social solidarity. Information on the idea of cosmopolitanism and constitutional patriotism; Conception of public discourse of as a form of social solidarity; Forms of social solidarity.

The article examines historian E. P. Thompson's legacy to social history by reviewing some of the studies that he pursued for the last thirty years of his life. Arguably the most important founder of the new social history, he was a transformative influence on and an inspiration for two generations of historians. His work held up to changing fashions, making sense as much to readers who grew up with the new cultural history of the late 1980s and 1990s as to those more concerned with labor and social organization twenty years before. Thompson helped to offer Marxism with a human face to a New Left anxious to break out of the orthodoxies.

The article presents a contextual analysis of the book Communities of Discourse by Robert Wuthnow. The revival of historical sociology in the last twenty years has focused on class, state, revolution and political mobilization, family and demography. New attention to cultural factors--a central part of earlier historical sociology--is overdue. Wuthnow's book is a major effort to meet this need. It reflects also the rapid growth of the sociology of culture. Especially in the U.S., however, sociology of culture suffers from a strange disciplinary deformation. For some reason, many sociologists think they must repress the interpretation of meaning in order to be rigorous. Sociologists of culture, therefore, often try to study cultural phenomena without attention to the substance or content of culture. Wuthnow is no exception. Simply in terms of scale, Wuthnow's book is major achievement. It reveals a prodigious amount of scholarly labor, not only in amassing historical detail, but in thinking through an analytic scheme broad enough to encompass the diversity of three great movements of cultural production: Reformation, Enlightenment, and European socialism. Wuthnow's book also offers numerous insights into specific historical developments and more general relationships between ideology and social structure. It is, thus, not a book to be dismissed or disregarded.

The article presents information on sociology. The sociology of knowledge has been surprisingly underrepresented in the recent boom of studies in the sociology of culture. Even when attention has turned to science, it has seldom drawn much on the classical tradition in the sociology of knowledge. This is a pity, partly because better use of the sociology of knowledge might have furthered the integration of sociology of culture with general sociological theory. The article will draw students into thinking about knowledge as culture and into asking some of the hard but important questions this entails. One set of such questions is today commonly discussed under the heading "reflexivity." To what extent and in what ways is knowledge dependent on or improved by knowers' understanding of the conditions of the production and dissemination of that knowledge? What obligations do theories and researchers have to turn their analytic lends back on themselves? What difference does it make that the social life we study is one already interpreted by its protagonists, and that what we say and write becomes part of that process of interpretation-potentially for everyone, not just for sociologists? The article seeks not only to show that knowledge is culture, but that because knowledge is culture the sociology of knowledge is not well practiced or understood as a demarcated sub-field of sociology. It is necessarily an interrogation of all the knowledge produced by sociologists and has developed in close relationship to the core traditions of classical sociological theory.

Let me lay my cards on the table. My intention is to convince you 1) that sociology suffers from and fails to live up to its potential because of its disconnection from large parts of philosophy and interdisciplinary social and political theory, 2) that our aversion to moral discourse (in the name of science) has greatly impoverished our understandings of identity and human agency, and 3) that the recent work of Charles Taylor is perhaps the best starting point for recovering a strong and crucial understanding of the self as moral subject. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Three of the classic "founding fathers" of sociology (Comte, Marx and Tocquevile) were contemporary observers of the French Revolution of 1848. In addition, another important theoretical tradition was represented in contemporary observations of 1848 by Pierre-Joseph Proudhon. The present paper summarizes aspects of the views of these theoretically minded observers, notes some points at which more recent historical research suggests revisions to these classical views, and poses three arguments: (1) The revolution of 1848 exerted a direct shaping influence on classical social theory through lessons (some now subject to revision) learned from observation of the revolutionary struggles. (2) The 1848 revolution influenced classical social theory indirectly by contributing to the submergence of the radical French revolutionary tradition (along with utopian socialism) after the defeat of the June insurrectionaries and Bonaparte's coup. (3) Both writers in the classical tradition and current researchers have failed to thematize adequately a basic transformation in effectiveness of national integration, communication and administration which made 1848 in crucial ways much more akin to 1789 than it was direct evidence for the growth of class struggle and the likelihood of further revolution in advanced capitalist countries. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Presents a foreword to the March 1999 issue of the journal "Sociological Theory."