Göran Therborn

Classical liberalism regarded universal suffrage as a mortal threat to property. So what explains the advent of liberal democracy, and how stable today is the marriage between representative government and the continued rule of capital? Across every continent, people think inequality is a ‘very big problem’. Even the Davos Economic Forum and the OECD say they are worried. And yet...

In this succinct and panoramic work—both stimulating for the specialist and accessible to the general reader—one of the world's leading social theorists, Göran Therborn, tackles the question of the trajectory of Marxism in the twentieth century and its legacy for radical thought in the twenty-first. Addressing the history of critical theory from the contemporary vantage-point characterised by postmodernism, post-Marxism and...

In his new book, Göran Therborn—author of the now-standard comparative work on classical sociology and historical materialism, Science, Class and Society—looks at successive state structures in an arrestingly fresh perspective. Therborn uses the formal categories of modern system analysis—input mechanisms, processes of transformation, output flows—to advance a substantive Marxist analysis of state power and state apparatuses. His account of these...

In this brilliant, very original survey of the politics and meanings of urban landscapes, leading sociologist Göran Therborn offers a tour of the world’s major capital cities, and the forces that have shaped them. Through a global, historical lens, and with a thematic range extending from the mutations of modernist architecture to the contemporary return of urban revolutions, Therborn questions...