“Göran Therborn’s The World: A Beginner’s Guide, a survey of the present state, problems and outlook of the globe by a Swedish master sociologist, is one of the rare books that lives up to its title. It is lucid, intelligent about the future and admirably researched.”
http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2011/nov/25/books-of-the-year”
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
What is the world of the twenty-first century like now that the centrality of the West can no longer be taken for granted? How were the societies and cultures of today’s world together with their interconnections forged, and what is driving human society in our times? In short, what is the state of the world today as we enter the second decade of the twenty-first century?
This is the first book to deal with planetary human society as a whole. It is a beginner’s guide to the world after the West and after globalization, compact, portable and jargon-free.
It lays bare the sociocultural geology of the world, its major civilizations, its historical waves of globalization, its family-sex-gender systems and its pathways to modernity. It traces the life-courses of men and women on all the continents, from their birth and childhood to their old age and their funeral. It is aimed at everybody who, even with experience, has kept a beginner’s curiosity of the world, to everybody who does not know everything they want to know about it and has the desire to know more.
From the Back Cover
What is the world of the twenty-first century like now that the centrality of the West can no longer be taken for granted? How were the societies and cultures of today’s world together with their interconnections forged, and what is driving human society in our times? In short, what is the state of the world today as we enter the second decade of the twenty-first century?
This is the first book to deal with planetary human society as a whole. It is a beginner’s guide to the world after the West and after globalization, compact, portable and jargon-free.
It lays bare the sociocultural geology of the world, its major civilizations, its historical waves of globalization, its family-sex-gender systems and its pathways to modernity. It traces the life-courses of men and women on all the continents, from their birth and childhood to their old age and their funeral. It is aimed at everybody who, even with experience, has kept a beginner’s curiosity of the world, to everybody who does not know everything they want to know about it and has the desire to know more.
About the Author
Göran Therborn is Professor of Sociology at University of Cambridge.
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