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Rimmel, Michael S., ed. Classical Sociological Theory. 2d ed. New York: Oxford University Press, 2007. 432 pages. Paper $52.95.
This anthology of selections from original theoretical sources is an update of a 1998 collection more broadly conceived and titled Social and Political Theory: Classical Readings. This text takes the narrower disciplinary approach of examining the sociological theoretical canon explicitly. After decades of jocular self-reflection about our predilection for the writings of "dead white men," Kimmel has broadened not only the demographics of the source writers, but also many of the basic theoretical assumptions from which their works proceed.
But first, a word about the idea of canon as reflected in the word "classical." In the Western tradition, this adjective is usually applied to things of Classical Greece and Rome and the European tradition of concert music of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. As we have globalized our thinking, we have become more accustomed to thinking in terms of classical antiquity of other cultural traditions, such as Classical Chinese language of the Zhou Dynasty which dates...