Raymond Boudon
A Life in Sociology
Edited by Mohamed Cherkaoui and Peter Hamilton

Autumn 2008, hardback, 4 volumes in slipcase, 1664pp. approx.
ISBN-13: 978-1-905622-18-4

This Festschrift has been prepared to celebrate the life and work of Raymond Boudon (b. 1934). It provides 90 articles by a cross-section of the world's leading sociologists, social scientists and philosophers who offer analytical essays that explore and evaluate aspects of his many contributions to the understanding of contemporary society.

Boudon has been unusual amongst French sociologists in the scope of his grasp of both European sociology and that of the anglophone world, partly at least because he lived and worked in the United States during a key period of his career, and also because he has avoided the anti-Americanism so prevalent in some spheres of French academic life. Though well-versed in European philosophy, he was distinctive among his peers in opting for more practical interests. As he says in the autobiographical essay he has contributed to the first volume, "I wanted to orient myself rather toward a discipline dealing with the concrete human world." Though he hesitated between economics and sociology, his mentor Raymond Aron helped him choose sociology because he thought it offered more to a young man.

Although well-known for his path-breaking studies of the role of education on social mobility which have been translated into many languages, Raymond Boudon has also made critically important contributions across a wide range of intellectual domains with important work on values and beliefs, methodology and social theory, the role of intellectuals, rationality, relativism, and science, political theory, and the future of sociology and the other social sciences. He has written critically important work on the leading figures in sociological thought such as Tocqueville, Weber, Durkheim, Merton and Lazarsfeld, and been tirelessly active as a promoter of sociology as a central field of study for the scientific understanding and analysis of contemporary society.

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