Sue Leigh – författare

Underworlds is a lively account of organized crime and the world of marginal groups in the seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Netherlands. Rural banditry has often been associated with mountainous, poverty-stricken areas located at the peripheries of the European continent or on the borders between states. This book is about bands operating in the countryside of one of the most densely populated, economically developed, and pacified European states. It examines the nature of these criminal bands and the way they changed over time. At the same time Underworlds presents an historical anthropology of marginal groups in the Dutch Republic. Investigating the enormous cultural diversity of organized crime and the prominent role of ethnic minorities, Egmond establishes the existence of a variety of `underworlds' rather than of a single `criminal organization'. Drawing extensively on criminal archives, the author reconstructs the ways of life and activities of people whose existence has remained largely hidden behind the conventional accounts of Dutch society.

In this book Ron Eyerman examines the role of intellectuals in the new modern order, considering the impact of recent social changes on the nature of contemporary intellectual culture.

Published in a thoroughly revised second edition, Venice and Amsterdam is a comparative history of the elites of these two major cities in early modern Europe.

This brilliant and original book sets out to dismantle the idea that movements, crises and other phenomena produced in society must be explained by exclusively social causes, without recourse to psychological explanations. The author argues that we should reassess the significance of psychological causes in human affairs. Whilst psychological causes are undoubtedly distinct from social causes, all social phenomena are events or facts brought about by human beings: it is their passions which stimulate their great political, religious and cultural creations. He discusses the work of Durkehim, Mauss, Weber and Simmel, and argues that only a productive interplay between psychology and sociology will do justice to the interdisciplinary character of their thought. Winner of the European Amalfi Prize for Sociology, The Invention of Sociology will be welcomed by students and researchers in sociology, social psychology, and the social sciences generally.