War in Social Thought

Hans Joas is professor of sociology and social thought at the University of Chicago and a permanent fellow at the Freiburg Institute for Advanced Studies at the University of Freiburg. Wolfgang Knobl is professor of sociology at Gottingen University. They are the authors of many books and the coauthors of Social Theory: Twenty Introductory Lectures.

One of Choice's Outstanding Academic Titles for 2013 "This excellent book is the best in its field, and it deserves and will surely gain wide readership."--Choice "War in Social Thought issues a provocative warning to those who engage in theoretical and political debates without taking account of the history of ideas. Indeed, Hans Joas and Wolfgang Knobl demonstrate that seemingly new structural ideas about war and peace in fact have antecedents in the past and are discredited by the bloody history of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries."--Ingo Trauschweizer, Michigan War Studies Review "That this book provides a good recounting of the effects of warfare within the world stage of competing nation-states bound by their own domestic dilemmas of economics and politics is what makes it useful."--Jerome Braun, Society (Springer) "This book is an excellent synthesis of the literature on war, and the authors' own perspective on the debates is often incisive."--Michael Mann, American Journal of Sociology

• Preface vii * Introduction 1 * War and Peace before Sociology: Social Theorizing on Violence from Thomas Hobbes to the Napoleonic Wars 16 * The Long Peace of the Nineteenth Century and the Birth of Sociology 65 * The Classical Figures of Sociology and the Great Seminal Catastrophe of the Twentieth Century 116 * Sociology and Social Theory from the End of the First World War to the 1970s 156 * After Modernization Theory: Historical Sociology and the Bellicose Constitution of Western Modernity 194 * After the East-West Conflict: Democratization, State Collapse, and Empire Building 217 * Conclusion 252 Notes 257 Bibliography 277 Name Index 315 Subject Index 323