The World: A Beginner's GuideISBN: 978-0-7456-4343-4
Hardcover
240 pages
February 2011, Polity
This is a Print-on-Demand title. It will be printed specifically to fill your order. Please allow an additional 10-15 days delivery time. The book is not returnable.
Other Available Formats: Paperback
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Guardian, books of the year 2011
"Therborn's work represents what great comparative/historical
sociology is all about. Essential."
Choice
"[Therborn] compresses a vast and fascinating range of
historical and current world data into a detailed but intelligible
account of the changes in planetary human society."
Morning Star
"At a time when historians and economists tend to retire behind
the barricades of their increasingly specialized professions,
answering the big comparative questions about the pathways into and
out of modernity, the global processes of inequality and the forces
of possible change have been largely left to the sociologists. In
my view, Göran Therborn, probably Sweden's most distinguished
social scientist, has made more essential contributions in these
fields than anyone else, by a combination of analytical lucidity,
common sense and an extraordinary command of international
comparative data. For those who have read any of his earlier works,
the appearance of a new book is inevitably a major intellectual
event."
Eric Hobsbawm
"Göran Therborn has written another of his incredible
empirical surveys, this time of the whole world today, in its
historical context. He calls it a beginner's guide. Every reader
will emerge better equipped to understand the realities of our
world, and hopefully to act intelligently in the light of these
realities."
Immanuel Wallerstein, Yale University
"We are in an unprecedented world, spanned by a joined-up
economy and a global moral community. Professor Therborn - a
practical, craftsmanlike sociologist, who works on a human scale -
is an ideal guide to our unfamiliar present and future, who,
without condescension, makes sense of complexity and turns
bafflement into clarity."
Felipe Fernandez-Armesto, University of Notre Dame