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Preface | |
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Introduction: Dimensions of the Debate | |
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Social change and social theory | |
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Key issues for theory | |
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Structural Effects: Adam Smith and the Unintended Consequences of Human Action | |
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Adam Smith's influence | |
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Structural individualism | |
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The division of labour and the market | |
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Conflict and classes | |
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The invisible hand and the evolution of commercial society | |
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Evolutionary and Neo-Evolutionary Theories: Necessity and Possibility | |
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Evolution and progress | |
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August Comte: the law of progress | |
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Herbert Spencer: survival of the fittest | |
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Some neo-evolutionists | |
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Sahlins and Service: general adaptive capacity | |
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Smelser: uneven structural change | |
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Parsons: structural differentiation | |
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Rostow: the stages of economic growth | |
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Theories of Revolutionary Change: Marx and Contradiction | |
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Marx's legacy | |
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The intellectual background | |
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The materialist conception of history | |
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Base and superstructure | |
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Contradictions of the capitalist mode of production | |
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Contradictions of Marxist theory | |
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Unfulfilled prophecies | |
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Problems with the past | |
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System inconsistencies | |
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Marxist ideology | |
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Reactionary Theories: The Loss of Community: The Persistence of Elites | |
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Tonnies: gemeinschaft and gesellschaft | |
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Conservative romanticism | |
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Pareto: rational and non-rational action | |
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The circulation of elites | |
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Conservative cynicism | |
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Social Action Theory: Weber | |
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Weber's methodological individualism | |
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Ideas and social change | |
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Power and authority | |
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Rationalization and the modern world | |
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Sociological Realism: Durkheim | |
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Social change and the emergence of individualism | |
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Pathological forms of the division of labour | |
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Social facts as things | |
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Religion and the categories of thought | |
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Systems Theories: Functional Integration and Global Convergence | |
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The functional analogy and the interconnectedness of change | |
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Parsons and the social system | |
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Dependency theory: Frank and Wallerstein | |
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Convergence theory: Kerr and Galbraith | |
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How much more than the sum of its parts? | |
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Modernity, Postmodernity and Postmodernism | |
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Modernity, crisis and change | |
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Jurgen Habermas: the legitimation of capitalism | |
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Daniel Bell: cultural contradictions | |
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Anthony Giddens: consequences of modernity | |
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Postmodernity, postmodernism and after | |
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Jean-Francois Lyotard: language and paralogy | |
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Jean Baudrillard: postconsumerism and hyperreality | |
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Postmodernist theory and continuing change | |
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Continuing Change and Continuing Theory | |
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Bibliography | |
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Index | |