Summary
Contents
Subject index
This comprehensive book provides an indispensable introduction to the most significant figures in contemporary social theory. Grounded strongly in the European tradition, the profiles include Michel Foucault, J[um]urgen Habermas, Roland Barthes, Jean Baudrillard, Pierre Bourdieu, Zygmunt Bauman, Martin Heidegger, Frederic Jameson, Richard Rorty, Nancy Chodorow, Anthony Giddens, Stuart Hall, Luce Irigaray and Donna Haraway. In guiding students through the key figures in an accessible and authoritative fashion, the book provides detailed accounts of the development of the work of major social theorists and charts the relationship between different traditions of social, cultural and political thought.
Walter Benjamin
Walter Benjamin
Biographical Details and Theoretical Context
After a substantial period of neglect, Walter Benjamin (1892–1940) is now widely recognized as one of the most original and insightful thinkers of his generation and as perhaps the most important German literary theorist of the twentieth century. Like several of the other figures profiled in this book, Benjamin would not have thought of himself as a social theorist as such. Nevertheless, his idiosyncratic and frequently enigmatic writings on literature, aesthetics, philosophy, and historiography are increasingly seen to have a special resonance with, and relevance for, contemporary social and cultural analysis. A close friend of the Judaic scholar Gershom Scholem, the Marxist playwright Bertolt Brecht, and the philosopher Theodor Adorno, Benjamin became an associate of the Frankfurt Institute ...
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