Sociology Categories
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BETWEEN REVOLUTION AND STATE
This book examines the most important writings of a tenth century Islamic theologian and jurist who were one of the most original thinkers of his period. It argues that Qadi al-Nu’man’s works constituted new and vital genres in Ismaili Shi’i literature, an emergence necessitated by the Fatimids’ transition from revolutionary movement to statehood, and by their desire to establish their authority as a Shi’i alternative to the Sunni Abbasid caliphate. Al-Nu’man, already famous in the Fatimid era, produced a legacy which consists of a school of law, historical and biographical works, new interpretations of Ismaili doctrine, and the formulation of a ceremonial language achieved through his work on court protocol.
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THE OBJECTS OF SOCIAL SCIENCE
The philosophy of social science has become one of the battlegrounds of contemporary theory and analysis. At the core of the debate is the central question about the objective capacity of a range of disciplines not explicitly regarded as scientific?
The philosophy of social science employs a rich and complex approach to its object, an approach which explores methodological, epistemological, metaphysical and logical questions. How can such a diverse approach attempt objectivity when faced with the complexity of what is studies, namely the social world? What is the object of social scientific investigation?
The Object of Social Science presents a clear and structured analysis of the philosophy of social science across each of its main disciplines: Anthropology, Sociology, History, Economics and Geography. It both identifies the practical and theoretical procedures involved in the identification of the object and, at the same time, raises questions about the very objectivity of these procedures in analyzing the object.
The book will prove invaluable to students across the social sciences as a guide to the theories and methodologies, which underpin their disciplines.
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BEING MODERN IN THE MIDDLE EAST
In this innovative book, Keith Watenpaugh connects the question of modernity to the formation of the Arab middle class. The book explores the rise of a middle class of liberal professionals, white-collar employees, journalists, and businessmen during the first decades of the twentieth century in the Arab Middle East and the ways its members created civil society, and new forms of politics, bodies of thought, and styles of engagement with colonialism.
Discussions of the middle class have been largely absent from historical writings about the Middle East. Watenpaugh fills this lacuna by drawing on Arab, Ottoman, British, American and French sources and an eclectic body of theoretical literature and shows that within the crucible of the Young Turk Revolution of 1908, World War I, and the advent of late European colonialism, a discrete middle class took shape. It was defined not just by the wealth, professions, possessions, or the levels of education of its members, but also by the way they asserted their modernity.
Using the ethnically and religiously diverse middle class of the cosmopolitan city of Aleppo, Syria, as a point of departure, Watenpaugh explores the larger political and social implications of what being modern meant in the non-West in the first half of the twentieth century.
Well researched and provocative, Being Modern in the Middle East makes a critical contribution not just to Middle East history, but also to the global study of class, mass violence, ideas, and revolution.
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