Sociological Lives and Ideas

This text expounds the fundamental ideas of classical sociological theory by examining the body of work in the context of the lives and times of the theorists who developed it: Karl Marx, Emile Durkheim, Max Weber, Georg Simmel, and George H. Mead. Theory is not conveyed as a set of abstract and inherently difficult ideas but is shown to be a personal response to real social issues that can be understood historically and applied across time to contemporary social life.