Bücher der Reihe Classical and Contemporary Social Theory

Bringing social theory and philosophy to bear on popular movies, novels, myths, and fairy tales, The Gift and its Paradoxes explores the ambiguity of the gift: it is at once both a relation and a thing, alienable and inalienable, present and poison. Challenging the nature of giving as reciprocal.

Challenging the mainstream orthodoxy of social scientific methodology, which closely guards the boundaries between the social sciences and the arts and humanities, this volume reveals that authors and artists are often engaged in projects parallel to those of the social sciences and vice versa.

This book explores the place of art in the modern world. Engaging with a broad range of theory, the author draws on the thought of Max Weber to offer an account of art¿s widespread appeal in terms of its constituting a self-contained value-sphere of meaning, which provides a feeling of salvation from the senseless routines of modern life.

This collection invites inquiry into the complexities of the social life of walls, observing urban spaces as veritable laboratories of wall-making - places where their consequences become most visible.

This book examines the 2008 global economic crisis as a complex social phenomenon or "social hieroglyphic", arguing that the crisis is not fundamentally economic, but instead a symptom of a long-standing, multifaceted, and endemic crisis of capitalism which has effectively become permanent.