Blackwell Reference Online

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This dictionary first appeared in 1993, as The Blackwell Dictionary of Twentieth-Century Social Thought . It was one of Tom Bottomore's last projects; he died in December 1992, at the early age of 72, just as the Dictionary was printing. Tom's many books and articles have served and still serve as a uniquely lucid and reliable guide for generations of students of sociology and the other social sciences, and his contributions to this Dictionary, as well as its overall conception, display his characteristic sense of the range and diversity of social concerns. Social thought, as we both conceived it, is empirical as well as normative or speculative, cultural as well as economic and political. In revising the dictionary for the present edition, I have retained this broad focus, rather than reorienting it towards the individual social sciences on the one hand, or a more delimited conception of social theory on the other. Many contributors accepted the invitation to revise their entries, though as many replied that they had nothing to change, or only minor bibliographic details. This is in part, of course, because the original dictionary went to press when what J. H. Hexter, in his entry on history, called the ‘short’ twentieth century, running from 1914 to 1989, was already over. The dust of state socialism, symbolized in microcosm by that of the Berlin Wall, had already settled. The ... log in or subscribe to read full text