Embattled Reason

Embattled Reason constitutes an intellectual profile of one of America's preeminent sociologists. This collection of essays, published over the course of thirty years, embodies a series of intellectual choices in response to current concerns and to debates of the past, affording a coherent and unified view of Bendix's work as a whole. The articles are grouped under three headings. In "e;Conditions of Knowledge"e; the author is concerned with the value assumptions basic to the social sciences. Under "e;Theoretical Perspectives"e; the author presents the guiding considerations of his own work in a continuing dialogue with such thinkers as Tocqueville, Marx, Durkheim, and Weber. In the last section, "e;Studies of Modernization,"e; Bendix takes up problems involved in an analysis of social change though a reexamination of evolutionist assumptions.