It is entirely possible to be a natural scientist – a biochemist or a pharmacologist, say, without ever really thinking about what you are doing. Although in Dr Johnson's day “chymistry” was naturally included under the heading of philosophy, “Philosophy of Science” is now a quite separate subject from “Science”, and is usually carried out by quite different people. Social scientists, by contrast, do have to think about what they are doing. Philosophy, even in its narrowest sense, permeates the social sciences – most of all in sociology and perhaps least of all in economics. Knowledge of “modern social thought” is important to all practitioners and students in the social sciences.
The first edition of this book, published in 1993 as the Blackwell Dictionary of Twentieth Century Social Thought, was edited by Tom Bottomore – practically his last sociological project. His successor, the professor of sociology at Sussex, has retained the original structure for the 2003 edition entirely, rather than either re‐orientating it towards the individual social sciences or towards a more delimited conception of social theory. It is obviously very difficult for anyone to take over someone else's book, with all the original author's quirks and prejudices.
The alternative risks are either to be overprotective of the original, altering too little, or to be iconoclastic, wiping out all that has gone before except for the title and starting anew. Outhwaite has, if anything, erred on the over‐cautious side. All the previous contributors were invited to update their entries, but the updating varied all the way from a complete re‐writing round to just making minor additions to the bibliographic references.
This 2006 paperback is a reprint of the 2003 edition, with no textual alterations. The decision not to make major alterations in 2003 made a certain amount of sense. The “short” twentieth century, running roughly from the diplomatic prelude to the Great War to the demolition of the Berlin Wall, symbolising the end of the cold war, ended just as Bottomore was completing his work. However, if this is true, then, obviously, the “long twenty‐first century” is well underway by 2006. History did not end in 1989, and entries such as that on Religion – “… religion is also proving to be a remarkably durable and effective medium for the cultivation and expression of ethnic and national identities in countries as different as Russia, Iran and Sri Lanka” are already beginning to look distinctly twentieth‐century, and really need to be rewritten rather than just updated.
Tom Bottomore had a slightly idiosyncratic view of the social sciences, emphasising the close relationships between sociology, philosophy and politics, but was largely uninterested in economic theory. Although I must admit to sharing this line of interest myself, it is a pity that the opportunity was not taken to add more material on economic philosophy to this edition, to render it more balanced.
This is not, of course, a dictionary in the strict sense of the term. It is more of a broad‐ranging encyclopedia of applied moral and political philosophy, with entries consisting of short essays, ranging from a column to two or three pages, by named expert contributors. Libraries which possess the 2003 hardback will not need to buy this paperback, as the text is unchanged. General reference libraries that still hold the first edition may not consider it worth updating, though the paperback price of doing so is not prohibitive. All academic libraries catering for courses in sociology, politics, modern history, cultural studies or philosophy ought to have copies of this book. It really is an excellent introduction, even as it stands, but I hope that it will not be another ten years before the next edition, and that the next edition will be more thoroughly re‐cast than this.
