Through the Past to the Future by Christian Karner

Through the Past to the Future by Christian Karner

Based upon a close reading of the foundational works of Georg Simmel, Max Weber and the Frankfurt School as well as underexplored other works, Karner critically maps the conceptual approaches and theoretical insights of the German language sociological tradition onto various twenty-first-century social and political issues.

Karner demonstrates that a revisiting of classical German-language sociology, combined with a critical engagement with more recent and current contributions, offers vital insights for a globally oriented political sociology for the present and future. In doing so, this book critically interrogates definitions of “the social”, questions of power, public spheres, cultural meanings, the historical particularities of the present, and sociologists’ public roles and responsibilities.

This book will be of interest to students and scholars in the humanities and social sciences with an interest in classical social theory and political sociology.

Christian Karner has previously been a Leverhulme Special Research Fellow, Associate Professor of Sociology at the University of Nottingham and then Professor of Sociology at the University of Lincoln. Most recently, he has held Visiting Professorships at the Universities of Vienna and Athens. Christian Karner’s areas of research and publication focus on political sociology (i.e. nationalism, ethnicity, globalization), urban sociology and memory studies. He currently teaches sociological theory at the University of Innsbruck.