About
Purpose
The purpose of this site is to develop lists of important contributions to social theory. The idea is to give short, very summary reviews of the most essential contributions in various social theory fields – sociology, political science and economics primarily – and sub-fields – such as political economy, democracy theory, international trade, institutionalism, and so forth.
Then, if the works reviewed have been classified correctly, readers should be able to generate fairly good lists of items that are essential to the understanding of fields or sub-fields simply by listing the posts under a given classification (given, of course, that all essential works have been reviewed, the classification scheme is sound, and contributions have been classified correctly).
A collective effort?
And this is where the interactivity (or the Web 2.0 properties of blogs) becomes important: Through interaction readers/users of this blog can contribute reviews, suggest items for review, help develop the classification scheme, comment on reviews and classifications of items, and so forth.
You are all invited! I cannot possibly do this on my own.
A note on quality
I only want to include essential and important contributions here. I want the list to be as close to Nobel prize quality as possible. My approach to theory is eclectic and exclusive: I do not like to waste time on reading unimportant stuff (I also hate to see for instance students reading commentaries prior to reading the original texts). So I will only include the most important and the best contributions.
Thus, if you want to propose a contribution for inclusion, please also provide strong arguments for why it must (not ought or possibly should) be included.
Goal
My hope is that over time this site can become a valuable tool that can provide interested readers with a great starting point if they want to read up on classical social theory in a new area, generate relatively good starting points for reading lists for courses, and overall be a good bibliographical data base for social theory.
About the site
This site is affiliated with Google and Amazon. You can support the site by using the links provided here. Just to be clear on this issue: This site is not expected to make money! This is a hobby site – I do not expect to be paid for the hours spent on this. However, the very few dollars I may make on these ads will hopefully contribute towards the costs associated with developing the site, software used and the cost of hosting the site.
You can, of course, contribute to and support this site and it’s further development by buying your books or other items from Amazon via the links provided here. Or by donating to the site or placing paid ads here. Your support is extremely welcome and very needed!
