In his new introduction to The Anarchists, Horowitz points out that anarchism is an ideology in search of a movement, and also a psychology in search of a polity. While this seems to be a paradox, the fact is that anarchism has more than one hundred thousand entries on electronic search engines, but one can search high and low for a society that embraces its essential anti-Statist vision. At the same time, anarchism continues to attract people to its premises, seemingly generation after generation. Despite similarities in values and goals, anarchism seems especially attractive to those for whom individualism rather than collectivism provides a way of life. In this, it stands at the opposite pole from Behemoth, from the gods of political order. The Anarchists is a rich collection of theories and practices in the words of those who have rebelled against the restrictive institutions and oppressive conditions imposed by state power upon the individual. Idealists and self-seekers, saints and assassins, they have often served as the conscience of the world and have expressed with eloquence and convictions, the deep-seated sense of anarchy that resides, to a greater or lesser degree, in most human beings. Anarchism is not simply a European import; it is deeply rooted in the American political experience. The volume gives strong representation to this side of the anarchist tradition. Thomas Paine wrote, "Government even in its best state is but a necessary evil. This was a sentiment echoed by Ralph Waldo Emerson, who said, "the less government we have the better." The Anarchists offers the most thoughtful and comprehensive selection of writings by and about those who protest against all rule by man over man, particularly that embodied in the State. As such, this anthology presents the history and philosophy of anarchism in the words of thirty-five of its greatest students, observers, and proponents.

The Anarchists

Horowitz, Irving

History

Routledge

Veblen's Century: A Collective Portrait

Thorstein Veblen has a place of honor reserved for truly important figures. Economist, iconoclast, social critic, and moral judge of the American way of life, he has continued to attract the attention of students and scholars alike. People from every spectrum of political thought and every branch of the social sciences have been drawn to his work-sometimes in praise, other times in criticism, but always with a sense of measuring what Veblen said and often how he said it. Veblen was, in the final analysis, an anthropologist of America as an advanced culture, as much a figure of the young twentieth century of America triumphant, as Tocqueville was a figure of the young nineteenth century of America ascending. We share with Veblen a sense of the observer peering at the complex foundation of behavior, whether such behavior is defined in terms of attitudes toward work and leisure, wealth and poverty, and finally, global war and peace. An examination of the contributors to the Veblen literature in this masterful volume serves to make clear just how vital Veblen was and remains to our cultural landscape. Whether the reader selects from or reads all of the statements by David Riesman, Douglas Dowd, Max Lerner, E. Digby Baltzell, Wesley Clair Mitchell, C. Wright Mills, Daniel Bell, and the other outstanding participants in Veblen's Century, the pulsating vitality of Veblen himself is well captured. Indeed, a little bit of Veblen is encapsulated in and by his commentators. Veblen's Century originated as a project initiated in 1974 by Professor Horowitz to reissue the entire corpus of Veblen's writings in new editions with introductions written expressly with this larger purpose of bringing the master of economic theory to the attention of a new generation. That the project took more than a quarter century to complete is indicative of the care with which each new essay is crafted. In addition, with Transaction being identified as the "home" of Veblen, books on him were offered to the firm for reissuing. Thus, the inclusion of contemporary masters who knew Veblen, as well as those writing on specific texts enhance the volume.

Business & Money

Economics

Tributes: Personal Reflections on a Century of Social Research

In one of his final works, Stephen Jay Gould spoke of the human race "as a wildly improbable evolutionary event well within the realm of contingency." Drawing on his personal knowledge of fifty figures from the world of twentieth-century social science, Irving Louis Horowitz offers commentaries drawn from a variety of public occasions to explain one segment of this improbable event. In the process he reveals how the past century was defined in substantial measure by the rise of social research. Commenting on Tributes, Daniel Mahoney observes, "some pieces are completely authoritative and detailed, others more conversational and informal. That diversity of approaches tied to the special character of these people increases the readability and interest in the book as a whole. In addition to illuminating the life and thought of these major figures, these essays and addresses reveal the impressive catholicity of Horowitz's concerns and his ability to remain open to the widest range of theoretical and practical approaches." In a certain sense, this book is also an intellectual autobiography in the form of an expression of Horowitz's debt to intellectual interlocutors and influences over the years. As a consequence, Tributes will be of the greatest interest to anyone who wishes to come to terms with the intellectual formation of the people who gave substance to new ways of experiencing as well as explaining society. The book is thus a thoughtful guide to the intellectual life of our times. From Arendt and Aron to Veblen and Wildavsky, these essays take shape as a systematic mosaic of the past century. Written by a central participant in social theory, Tributes is both an informal guide and a formal text for readers coming upon social science innovators for the first time. The book breaks the boundaries of conventional discourse and in so doing gives voice to the outstanding figures that helped make the twentieth century "the century of social research."

Tributes

Politics & Social Sciences

Social Sciences

Behemoth: Main Currents in the History and Theory of Political Sociology

The title, Behemoth, derives from the Hebrew word Behemah-a beast, an enormous creature, monstrously huge and vast. It is an apt description of the State on the eve of the twenty-first century. Loved by few, vilified by many from all perspectives, it nonetheless continues to grow; by turns rivaling and co-opting that more pleasant-sounding word: Society. Political sociology aims to define and understand the interrelationship between these two huge terms: State and Society. Continuing in a path begun by Horowitz in the 1950s in The Idea of War and Peace in Contemporary Social and Philosophical Thought, expanded upon in the 1970s with Foundations of Political Sociology, this summing up in the late 1990s is an effort to extract and evolve the canon of political sociology. Starting with Montesquieu, Horowitz proceeds through the European experience of Rousseau, Tocqueville, Hegel, Marx, Durkheim, Sorel, and Weber. He then takes the field on its tangled migration to America with the Frankfurt School in exile, followed by searching chapters on Schumpeter, Mills, Arendt, and Huntington, among others. The result is a stunning revaluation of the intellectual sources of the present day divisions between statists and socialists, welfarists and individualists, advocates of dictatorship and of democracy, mandated rules and voluntary association, hard realists and soft utopians, a world without states and a world with a single state. Horowitz does not offer the usual evolutionary notion of doctrines, but a canon embedded in and embattled with the societies they aim to serve or overthrow in the present as in the past. The result is a major recasting of the theory and practice of social science and normative frameworks. The final chapter offers Horowitz's own prognosis of what we can expect in the recasting of the Welfare State to include the Welfare Society, and its growing nemesis the global economy which threatens to engulf State and Society alike in a return to civilizational concerns. This is an essential text for policy-makers and social scientists interested in macroscopic changes in the political order.

Thorstein Veblen has a place of honor reserved for truly important figures. Economist, iconoclast, social critic, and moral judge of the American way of life, he has continued to attract the attention of students and scholars alike. People from every spectrum of political thought and every branch of the social sciences have been drawn to his work-sometimes in praise, other times in criticism, but always with a sense of measuring what Veblen said and often how he said it.  Veblen was, in the final analysis, an anthropologist of America as an advanced culture, as much a figure of the young twentieth century of America triumphant, as Tocqueville was a figure of the young nineteenth century of America ascending. We share with Veblen a sense of the observer peering at the complex foundation of behavior, whether such behavior is defined in terms of attitudes toward work and leisure, wealth and poverty, and finally, global war and peace.  An examination of the contributors to the Veblen literature in this masterful volume serves to make clear just how vital Veblen was and remains to our cultural landscape. Whether the reader selects from or reads all of the statements by David Riesman, Douglas Dowd, Max Lerner, E. Digby Baltzell, Wesley Clair Mitchell, C. Wright Mills, Daniel Bell, and the other outstanding participants in Veblen's Century, the pulsating vitality of Veblen himself is well captured. Indeed, a little bit of Veblen is encapsulated in and by his commentators.  Veblen's Century originated as a project initiated in 1974 by Professor Horowitz to reissue the entire corpus of Veblen's writings in new editions with introductions written expressly with this larger purpose of bringing the master of economic theory to the attention of a new generation. That the project took more than a quarter century to complete is indicative of the care with which each new essay is crafted. In addition, with Transaction being identified as the "home" of Veblen, books on him were offered to the firm for reissuing. Thus, the inclusion of contemporary masters who knew Veblen, as well as those writing on specific texts enhance the volume.

American Working Class Today: Prospects for the 1980's

The study of continuities and discon-tinuties in American working-class life represents a central concern in the literature on stratification and equality. This book, based on a 1975 Ford Foundation conference and updated to take into account the most recent developments, offers a sobering appraisal of the American working class, revealing the continuing gap between organized and unorganized workers despite the huge increase in the work force; the emergence of subclass structures between factory workers at one end and workers engaged in marginal occupations at the other; and the durability of pluralistic, multiclass politics within this large and amorphous working class. The volume is unique for several reasons: it focuses directly on the role of women in the labor force, ethnic and racial divisions within the working class, and the place of organized labor in international affairs. The American Working CJass Today offers a penetrating and wide-ranging examination by leading social and political researchers of a range of problems — from how data are collected and manipulated to what the future holds for American workers. Contents and Contributors: THE THEORY OF AN AMERICAN WORKING CLASS John H.M. Laslett, S.M. Miller, Martha Bush, Irving Louis Horowitz CLEAVAGES AND CHANGES WITHIN THE WORKING CLASS Edna Bonacich, Gabriel Kolko, Edna E. Raphael. Robert Bibb, Martin Oppenheimer, Frank Riessman, John C. Leggett THE WORKING CLASS IN AN INTERNATIONAL CONTEXT Henry Berger. William H. Form, Helen Icken Safa, Elizabeth Jelin

The American Working Class: Prospects for the 1980s

Persuasions and Prejudices: An Informal Compendium of Modern Social Science, 1953-1988

Review essays and statements written for special occasions may reveal as much about the writer as those written about; this is the presumption undergirding this collection of thirty-five years of criticism and commentary by Irving Louis Horowitz. For this volume, he selected his comments on famous, near famous, and infamous sociologists, political scientists, and assorted literary figures in between. Taken as a whole, this volume will surprise and delight readers who are acquainted with Horowitz’s other works as well as those who are interested in the people he writes about. The book covers notable social scientists, from Arendt to Zetterberg, and such major figures in between as Becker, Bell, de Jouvenel, Mills, Parsons, Solzhenitsyn, and more than eighty others who have had an effect on the contemporary social and political landscape. Each is critically examined, sometimes positively, other times negatively. Horowitz was a major figure in his own right, and his writing here displays the kind of refreshing frankness experts will expect and the general reader will appreciate. The underlying assumption behind the volume, giving its disparate parts a unified characteristic, is that together these observations on others amount to a general perspective on social science held by the author. Whether his larger ambition is accepted or disputed, there is no doubt that the volume provides a standard against which to measure the literary quality of writing in the world of professional social research.

Hannah Arendt: Radical Conservative

Hannah Arendt: Radical Conservative paints a broad picture of the personal traits and professional achievements in the work of an extremely complex iconographic figure in twentieth-century intellectual life. Writing about Hannah Arendt is an exercise in the biographic intersecting with the academic. It is an effort to bring together contexts of work with contents of thought. This volume was written in response to continuing interest in her work and also to the bitter and sometimes emotional attacks of her toughest critics. Horowitz emphasizes her unique contributions to political philosophy.Hannah Arendt has been described in many ways. She has been called a feminist, a dedicated worker for and writer about Jewish causes, a German advocate of its highest aspirations and assumed superiority to just about any other linguistic and national tradition, and a person whose very name is identified with anti-Nazism. Irving Louis Horowitz conveys the passion Hannah Arendt's scholarship has elicited as well as the diversity of her writings.Hannah Arendt's career is a lesson in the life of the human mind. Her reflections on our political universe are both interesting and compelling. Those who identify themselves firmly within a single tradition or culture may escape the problem of relativism, but they also suffer the problem of absolutism. This long-standing tension between traditions, cultures, and systems is what Horowitz has taken from Arendt's writings. Her sense of nuance has made her a compelling figure in twentieth-century ideas and a controversial voice well into the twenty-first century.

Biographies & Memoirs

Community & Culture

In one of his final works, Stephen Jay Gould spoke of the human race "as a wildly improbable evolutionary event well within the realm of contingency." Drawing on his personal knowledge of fifty figures from the world of twentieth-century social science, Irving Louis Horowitz offers commentaries drawn from a variety of public occasions to explain one segment of this improbable event. In the process he reveals how the past century was defined in substantial measure by the rise of social research.Commenting on Tributes, Daniel Mahoney observes, "some pieces are completely authoritative and detailed, others more conversational and informal. That diversity of approaches tied to the special character of these people increases the readability and interest in the book as a whole. In addition to illuminating the life and thought of these major figures, these essays and addresses reveal the impressive catholicity of Horowitz's concerns and his ability to remain open to the widest range of theoretical and practical approaches." In a certain sense, this book is also an intellectual autobiography in the form of an expression of Horowitz's debt to intellectual interlocutors and influences over the years. As a consequence, Tributes will be of the greatest interest to anyone who wishes to come to terms with the intellectual formation of the people who gave substance to new ways of experiencing as well as explaining society. The book is thus a thoughtful guide to the intellectual life of our times.From Arendt and Aron to Veblen and Wildavsky, these essays take shape as a systematic mosaic of the past century. Written by a central participant in social theory, Tributes is both an informal guide and a formal text for readers coming upon social science innovators for the first time. The book breaks the boundaries of conventional discourse and in so doing gives voice to the outstanding figures that helped make the twentieth century "the century of social research."

Culture and Civilization

Debates on the meaning of religious belief in an advanced technological age have established the emergence of religion as a fact of daily life. The nineteenth-century imagery of "warfare" between science and religion is long dismissed. Emphasizing this fact of the continuing relevance and importance of religion as a driving force in contemporary life is the stunning emergence on the world scene of militant Muslim beliefs in a period of relatively inactive religious belief elsewhere. In this volume of Culture and Civilization, religion is examined in the context of post-modern societies.The collection of essays is divided by themes: religions, civilizations, cultures, and the history of ideas. The contributors William Donohue, Simon Kuznets, A. L. Kroeber, Greg Mills, Yoani Sanchez, Murray Weidenbaum, Andreas Herberg-Rothe, Daniel Bell, John W. Gardner, John Charles, and Liu Xiaobo's discuss a variety of topics, with titles including "The Catholic Church and Sexual Abuse," "Why is Africa Poor?," "Freedom and Exchange in Communist Cuba," and the "Economic Structure and the Life of the Jews."This volume concludes with a grouping of review essays on famous figures ranging from Crane Brinton and Herbert Spencer to Max Gluckman and Hannah Arendt. The volume as a whole projects a sense of the future and avoids hysteria about the past. The contributors have a sharp edge and speak in a critical voice to the dilemmas of the present world order.

Culture and Civilization: Volume 4, Religion in the Shadows of Modernity

Religion & Spirituality

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Horowitz, Irving. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Books by Horowitz, Irving

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Horowitz, Irving. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

The Anarchists

Veblen's Century: A Collective Portrait

Tributes

Behemoth: Main Currents in the History and Theory of Political Sociology

Veblen's Century: A Collective Portrait

The American Working Class: Prospects for the 1980s

Persuasions and Prejudices: An Informal Compendium of Modern Social Science, 1953-1988

Hannah Arendt: Radical Conservative

Tributes: Personal Reflections on a Century of Social Research

Culture and Civilization: Volume 4, Religion in the Shadows of Modernity