Over the years, many textbooks have been written about the troika of sociological geniuses, Marx, Durkheim, and Weber. Too often, however, these works have been mere distillations of the views of the great thinkers. They did not intend nor could they hope to capture the subtleties and nuances of the original texts.

With the publication of Ian McIntosh's Classical Sociological Theory: A Reader, extracts of the most relevant and noteworthy works of the classical sociological thinkers are available for the first time in a single volume. Here we find lengthy excerpts from Marx's Communist Manifesto and The German Ideology, Weber's Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, Durkheim's The Division of Labour in Society and Suicide: A Study in Sociology. Generous portions of fifteen other texts are included here, as well as selected correspondence of Karl Marx.

Each extract is prefaced by an introduction which provides the reader with essential background information on each author's Weltanschauung, without telling the student what to think or encapsulating the excerpt to follow. Brief biographies of the principals and guides for further reading provide the student with a frame of reference for the texts.

Classical Sociological Theory: A Reader is not a replacement for the full texts in the original. It is, however, an enticement, whetting the appetite for further exploration of the masters of sociological thought.