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At the end of the twentieth century, many fear that the bonds holding civil society together have come undone. Yet, as the noted scholar Dennis Wrong shows us, our generation is not alone in fearing a breakdown of social ties and a descent into violent conflict.

This work remains a pioneer sociological treatise on American culture. By understanding the individual not as the product of society but as its mirror image, Cooley concludes that the social order cannot be imposed from outside human nature but that it arises from the self. Cooley stimulated pedagogical inquiry into the dynamics of society with the publication of Human Nature and the Social Order in 1902. Human Nature and the Social Order is something more than an admirable ethical treatise. It is also a classic work on the process of social communication as the "very stuff" of which the self is made.

Tamotsu Shibutani is professor of sociology at the University of California, Santa Barbara. He is the author of Social Processes: An Introduction to Sociology and Improvised News: A Sociological Study of Rumor.

This volume illustrates Melford Spiro's explorations of key relationships among culture, society, and human nature. He addresses such fundamental issues as the limitations of cultural relativism, the problem of explanation in the social sciences, and the importance of a comparative approach to the study of social and cultural system.

This book is a rich interpretation of a rich text, providing a twenty-first century reading of a timeless masterpiece, and, in so doing, it points to the relationship of death and desire as a playing both with body and language. The book confronts readers with the ineluctable patterns which language and time inscribe within the open/closed Shakespearean space: Degree, division, and diversity as the focal points. Emphasis upon the corporeality of the human body links this study's textual interpretation with the corpus of the literary canon, itself seen as a body divided by performance and differed by reading. It prevails over the damaging engagement with the deconstructed text and dominates the conflictual tendencies of the reconstructed drama.

This early work is John Dewey’s 1922 treatise, “Human nature and conduct; an introduction to social psychology”. It is a fascinating and in-depth exploration of habit and its importance in the understanding of social psychology. This volume is highly recommended for students of psychology and sociology, and would make for a worthy addition to collections of allied literature. Contents include: “The Place of Habit in Conduct”, “The Place of Impulse in Conduct”, “The Place of Intelligence in Conduct”, and “Conclusion”. John Dewey (1859–1952) was an American psychologist and philosopher. Many classic books such as this are becoming increasingly rare and expensive. We are republishing this volume now in an affordable, modern, high-quality edition complete with a specially commissioned new biography of the author.

Why do elderly choose to move away from their children so as to not receive their support? Using a number of case studies, contributors explore social support as a tool of mutuality, or maintaining relatedness and sharing feelings, rather than preventing or patching up problems. This book helps correct the dominant framework of deliberate action.