ANOTHER TUTORIAL COMING UP

Judging from the statistical data that Google provides to those who use its blog-making apparatus, some of the folks who dropped in on this blog to read what I had to say about Newt Gingrich's doctoral dissertation have decided to visit the site again just to see whether there is anything else here to tempt their intellects. For them, I should explain that over the past year, from time to time, I have attempted what I call "tutorials" -- multi-part posts stretching over days, or even weeks, in which I systematically explain some subject in a more formal way than is typical of blogs. In this guise, I have discussed The Thought of Karl Marx, The Thought of Sigmund Freud, How to Study Society, The Use and Abuse of Formal Methods in Political Philosophy [that one became a short book], Herbert Marcuse's ONE DIMENSIONAL MAN, Max Weber's THE PROTESTANT ETHIC AND THE SPIRIT OF CAPITALISM, David Ricardo's PRINCIPLES OF POLITICAL ECONOMY AND TAXATION, and Ideological Critique [with special attention to Karl Mannheim's IDEOLOGY AND UTOPIA, among other works.] All of these, and much more besides, can be found on box.net by following the link at the top of this blog.

Tomorrow or the next day [depending on how the quail turn out], I shall do a very short tutorial -- a Micro-Tutorial, as it were -- on the great classic work of early Sociology, Emile Durkheim's SUICIDE. I have been on something of a mission to encourage my readers to re-acquaint themselves with the classics of what might be called the Heroic Age in the study of society -- the writings of Marx, Weber, Mannheim, and others. The Micro-Tutorial on Durkheim is part of that effort.