Enlightenment and Despair

Geoffrey Hawthorn has written a substantial conclusion for the second edition of his widely acclaimed critical history of social theory in England France Germany and the USA from the eighteenth century onwards. Hawthorn begins with the ''prehistory'' of the subject and traces particularly in the thought of Rousseau Kant and Hegel the emergence of certain fundamental distinctions and assumptions whose existence is often overlooked in studies of the traditional ''founding-fathers'' of sociology like Marx Durkheim and Weber.