In this Book
- Purpose and Necessity in Social Theory
- Book
- 2019
- Published by: Johns Hopkins University Press
- Funder: Mellon/NEH / Hopkins Open Publishing: Encore Editions
- Program:
-
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.
summary
Originally published in 1987. Philosopher Maurice Mandelbaum offers a broad-ranging essay on the roles of chance, choice, purpose, and necessity in human events. He traces the many changes these concepts have undergone, from the analyses of Hobbes and Spinoza, through the eighteenth, nineteenth, and early twentieth centuries. Mandelbaum examines two contrary tendencies in the history of social theories. Some thinkers, he shows, have explained the character of institutions in terms of their individual purposes, whereas others have stressed relationships of necessity among society's institutions. Mandelbaum discusses chance, choice, and necessity at length and reaches some provocative conclusions about the ways in which they are interwoven in human affairs.
Table of Contents
Additional Information
ISBN
9781421431901
Related ISBN(s)
9780801834707, 9781421431918, 9781421431925
MARC Record
OCLC
1117488443
Pages
210
Launched on MUSE
2019-09-12
Language
English
Open Access
Yes
Creative Commons
CC-BY-NC-ND