Great Minds: Encounters with Social Theory - Softcover

"Poggi and Sciortino provide a fresh, lively encounter with sociology's major thinkers. The book is effortlessly engaging and conveys the complexity of sociological thinking with ease. Readers are given the chance to both deepen their knowledge and revisit authors in a new and stimulating way. A great achievement!" -- Delia Baldassarri "Through a series of highly engaging encounters with the great contributors to our tradition, Poggi and Sciortino do much to advance the critical self-reflection of sociology. Never content with mere exposition, they probe the 'great minds' of the discipline for fresh guidance and insight into the problems still open in sociological inquiry. Even with its focus on the past, this is an inspiringly present- and future-oriented work." -- Mustafa Emirbayer "Sociologists Poggi and Sciortino (both, Univ. of Trento, Italy) have written brief interpretative essays for nine classical and contemporary sociological theorists: Karl Marx, Emile Durkheim, Max Weber, Georg Simmel, George Herbert Mead, Talcott Parsons, Erving Goffman, Harold Garfinkel, and Niklas Luhmann. This book, translated from Italian, provides crisp, elegant prose that will assist students in grappling with complex topics and becoming familiar with each theorist's key concepts and methodology." -- J. H. Rubin * Choice *

Great Minds revisits key social thinkers that have made significant, distinctive, and controversial contributions to the development of modern social theory.