Precis: The writings of Manuel Castells are centrally concerned with the development of a Marxist urban sociology. This article provides a critical examination of the central concepts of these writings. The article begins with some preparatory remarks on Castells's critique of conventional urban sociology and on the Althusserian variant of historical materialism which he adopts. This is followe...

IT HAS OFTEN BEEN COMMENTED that the bulk of Weber's sociology represents a prolonged " dialogue with the ghost of Marx " (Giddens, 1971, p. 185). Today it could equally be said that the bulk of contemporary Marxist writing represents a prolonged dialogue with the ghost of Weber. Without always acknowledging the fact (or even necessarily being aware of it), contemporary Marxists have drawn heav...

I will elaborate this contribution by briefly distinguishing three general perspectives on economic inequality, which I will refer to as the individual-centered, exclusionary, and exploitation approaches to inequality. Stratification research in American Sociology is most closely associated with the first of these; Weber-inspired approaches to class and inequality with the second; and Marxist c...

When i began writing about class in the mid-1970s, I viewed Marxist and positivist social science as foundationally distinct and incommensurable warring paradigms. I argued that Marxism had distinctive epistemological premises and methodological approaches which were fundamentally opposed to those of mainstream social science. In the intervening period I have rethought the underlying logic of m...

as european and american countries became industrialized, general sociology was gradually replaced with industrial sociology because the main issues were issues related to the industrial society. in the latter half of the 19th century and the early 20th century there was no clear idea about industrial sociology and its duties. after the second world war, a more exact definition of the field eme...

In the present paper I sketch three genres of sociology of knowledge and trace their roots to Marx and Marxist literature while reconstructing two causal and one hermeneutic strand in this context. While so doing the main focus is set on György Lukács and György Márkus and their interpretation of Marx’s contribution to sociologically minded theories of knowledge. As a conclusion I point out tha...