Mike Gane

Selected Interviews

Baudrillard Live

Terry Johnson

This major collection brings Foucault's later work into sharp focus and illustrates some of the ways in which it is informing developments in the social sciences. Concise, clear and wide-ranging it provides an essential accessory to the understanding one of the key thinkers in the twentieth century.

Foucault's New Domains

Auguste Comte is widely acknowledged as the founder of the science of sociology and the 'Religion of Humanity'. In this fascinating study, the first major reassessment of Comte’s sociology for many years, Mike Gane draws on recent scholarship and presents a new reading of this remarkable figure. Comte’s contributions to the history and philosophy of science have decisively influenced positive methodologies. He coined the term ‘sociology’ and gave it its first content, and he is renowned for having introduced the sociology of gender and emotion into sociology. What is less well known however, is that Comte contributed to ethics, and indeed coined the word ‘altruism’. In this important work Gane examines Comte's sociological vision and shows that, because he thought sociology could and should be reflexive, encyclopaedic and utopian, he considered topics such as fetishism, polytheism, fate, love, and the relations between sociology, science, theology and culture. This fascinating account of the birth of sociology is an unprecedented introductory text on Comte. Gane’s work is an essential read for all sociologists and students of the discipline.

Auguste Comte

Nicholas Gane

Umberto Eco is arguably best known for his novel The Name of the Rose yet there is much more to him than simply being an exemplary novelist. Semiotician, literary and media critic, philosopher and historian, Umberto Eco is one of the greatest and most original thinkers working today. He has contributed to many fields and is one of a handful of writers who can claim to be a key public intellectual in Europe. This has made it extraordinarily difficult for commentators to place him in the Western tradition of social thought. This is especially so, because there is a playful quality in his work, exemplified above all by his use of skills and techniques from semiotics, the philosophy of language, medieval life and thought and aesthetics and techniques that he employed to great affect in The Name of the Rose. He has also made seminal contributions in thinking on postmodern developments in culture and epistemology. This collection provides an unrivalled overview of his writings and includes a selection from considerations of his contribution to semiotics, literary theory, philosophy of language, the analysis of fiction and narratives, his novels, his critiques of mass culture and communication and his contributions to the theory of laughter, politics and ethics. The result is the most complete assessment of Eco's contribution and its impact on social, cultural and critical thought. Mike Gane is Professor of Sociology at the University of Loughborough; Nicholas Gane is Senior Lecturer in Sociology and Communications at Brunel University, London.

Umberto Eco

This book examines the interconnections of gender theory and lived gender relationships of some of the key social theorists of the classical period (1789 - 1920): Wollstonecraft, Godwin, Enfantin, Comte, Marx, Engels, Mill, Nietzsche, Durkheim and Weber. By recounting the confrontations of these theorists with the spectre of the new woman, and women's emancipation, it opens up new questions for the way we percaive the questions of 'the new man' today.

Gender, Theory, and Personal Relationships

Harmless Lovers?

Mike Gane provides an introduction to Baudrillard's cultural theory: the conception of modernity and the complex process of simulation. He examines Baudrillard's literary essays: his confrontation with Calvino, Styron, Ballard and Borges. Gane offers a coherent account of Baudrillard's theory of cultural ambience, and the culture of consumer society. And it provides an introduction to Baudrillard's fiction theory, and the analysis of transpolitical figures. The book also includes an interesting and provocative comparison of Baudrillard's powerful essay against the modernist Pompidou Centre in Paris and Frederic Jameson's analysis of the Bonaventure Hotel in Los Angeles. An interpretation of this encounter leads to the presentation of a very different Baudrillard from that which figures in contemporary debates on postmodernism.

Baudrillard and Culture

Baudrillard's Bestiary

This radical appraisal of Durkheim's method, first published in 1988, argues that fundamental errors have been made in interpreting Durkheim. Mike Gane argues that to understand The Rules it is necessary also to understand the context of the French society in which the book was written. He explores the cultural and philosophical debates which raged in France during the period when Durkheim prepared the book and establishes the real and unsuspected complexity of Durkheim's position: its formal complexity, its epistemological complexity, and its historical complexity.

On Durkheim's Rules of Sociological Method

Roland Barthes (1915-80) was one of the leading post-structuralist authors of his day as well as making many important contributions to semiotics. These three volumes provide a complete overview of his achievement. They provide an unparalleled critical assessment of his work in semiotics, structuralism and post-structuralism. The development and contradictions in Barthes' thought are addressed and elucidated. His role in 'the cultural turn' is pinpointed. What emerges most powerfully, is a picture of a culturally engaged critic of contemporary life, who was prepared to make radical innovations in theory and method in order to illuminate his quest for truth. These volumes provide a high water mark in Barthes' studies and are indispensable for any serious scholar interested in the sociology of culture and the cultural turn.

Roland Barthes

Baudrillard is widely recognised as a powerful new force in cultural and social criticism, and is often referred to as the ‘High Priest of Postmodernism’. This study presents a detached assessment of his social thought and his reputation, challenging the way his work has been received in postmodernism and proposing a new reading of his contribution to social theory. Using many sources currently available only in French, Mike Gane provides the keys to understanding Baudrillard’s project and reveals the extent and scope of Baudrillard’s challenge to modern social theory and cultural criticism. He looks at the sources of Baudrillard’s ideas, analysing how Baudrillard has turned these sources against themselves. He describes Baudrillard’s dramatic encounter with critical Marxist theory and psychoanalysis, showing how Baudrillard’s post-Marxist writings define, through the exploration of fatal theory, a new episode in cultural history: a period of cultural implosion. This balanced account of Baudrillard’s social theory emphasises the originality of his work and argues that his significance can only be understood by grasping the paradoxes of his project – Baudrillard’s work is poetic, yet, at the same time, critical and fatal.

Critical and Fatal Theory

Baudrillard (RLE Social Theory)

The work of Michel Foucault, one of the most influential of modern French social theorists and philosophers, has had a dramatic and far-reaching effect on many disciplines. The essays in this reissued collection, originally published in 1986, present Foucault's work as an important contribution to the theoretical analysis of history, language and power. They also represent a critical response to this contribution, encouraging readers not only to read Foucault for themselves, but to think about some new problems in a new way.

Foucault, Lacan and the question of ethics.

Towards a critique of Foucault

Studie over de Franse sociaal filosoof (1929- ).

Baudrillard

Michael Gane

Outstanding contributors include Pierre Macherey, Charles Wolfe, Alex Callinicos and Judith Revel

Mike Gane

About

Books

Join the club