Hans Joas is the Max Weber Professor and Director of the Max Weber Center for Advanced Cultural and Social Studies at the University of Erfurt. He is also Professor of Sociology and a member of the Committee on Social Thought at the University of Chicago.

Introduction; 1. What is theory?; 2. The classical attempt at synthesis: Talcott Parsons; 3. Parsons on the road to normativist functionalism; 4. Parsons and the elaboration of normativist functionalism; 5. Neo-utilitarianism; 6. Interpretive approaches (1): symbolic interactionism; 7. Interpretive approaches (2): ethnomethodology; 8. Conflict sociology and conflict theory; 9. Habermas and critical theory; 10. Habermas' 'theory of communicative action'; 11. Niklas Luhmann's radicalization of functionalism; 12. Anthony Giddens' theory of structuration and the new British sociology of power; 13. The renewal of Parsonianism and modernization theory; 14. Structuralism and poststructuralism; 15. Between structuralism and theory of practice: the cultural sociology of Pierre Bourdieu; 16. French anti-structuralists (Cornelius Castoriadis, Alain Touraine and Paul Ricoeur); 17. Feminist social theories; 18. A crisis of modernity? New diagnoses (Ulrich Beck, Zygmunt Bauman, Robert Bellah, and the debate between liberals and communitarians); 19. Neopragmatism; 20. How things stand; Bibliography.