This is a work of social theory and philosophy which seeks to make the constitution of social theory a ‘social’ activity. It is essentially a collaborative text, by five authors, committed to a re-awakening of some of the forgotten dimensions of social theorizing. The collaborative work was originally occasioned by an attempt to analyse the notion of social stratification and its treatment in the sociological tradition. The authors’ main concern here is with the nature of social theorizing, and in particular the ‘difference’ between Self and Other, being and beings, Language and Speech. The papers in the book focus on themes that are fundamental to the sense of inquiry and tradition which they are concerned to display. The themes discussed include speech, Language, Identity, Difference, Critical Tradition, Community, Metaphor, Dialectics, Observing and Reading.

This book, first published in 1991, demonstrates that Marx is the legitimate founder of what was to become the critical theory of society. It argues that in order to justify a new conception of humans as collective, cultural and historical beings, Marx undertook a radical critique of the theoretical/analytical method of his predecessors and his contemporaries in political economy, philosophy and the natural sciences. While elements of the methods of some of these thinkers – most conspicuously from the work of Aristotle, Kant and Hegel – were present in Marx’s thought, he achieved a new synthesis of procedural, epistemological and ontological methods.

CSA Sociological Abstracts abstracts and indexes the international literature in sociology and related disciplines in the social and behavioral sciences. The database provides abstracts of journal articles and citations to book reviews drawn from over 1,800+ serials publications, and also provides abstracts of books, book chapters, dissertations, and conference papers.