In his book Suicide, French sociologist Emile Durkheim discussed the nature and the consequences of economic crisis. Steven Lukes, Professor of Sociology at New York University, debates Durkheim’s ...

In general, death is a social taboo in post-industrial, consumerist society. Nobody is supposed to talk about it in public. It is anathema – though, in comparison, pornography is not. This evasion is ...

Postmodern social theory is often seen as entirely distinct from and even antagonistic to modern sociological thought. This article endeavors to challenge this framing by tracing the emergence of ...

150 years ago, a French-Jewish teenager told his father, a rabbi in the town of Épinal, that he had decided against entering rabbinical school, thus breaking with a family tradition that stretched ...

Galen Watts receives funding from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRC) and the Ontario Confederation of University Faculty Associations (OCUFA). Queen's University, ...

Defining Deviancy Down (DDD) was an expression coined by the late Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan in 1993. Moynihan based his phrase on the theory of Emile Durkheim that there is a limit to the bad ...

A few years ago I was planning a book on market capitalism—one that would demonstrate its inestimable virtues. But in a moment of candour it occurred to me that I had not exposed myself sufficiently ...