This comprehensive, multicultural, and cross-disciplinary anthology examines social theory and social thought from the major figures of the Enlightenment in France and England through the Postmodernists of the late Twentieth Century. It contains selections from 144 authors, writing between 1690 and the present, who dealt with issues of equality, social justice, gender relations, political structures, family life, ethnic relations, political-economics, and other perennial questions that confront social actors and the societies in which they exist. Sica, who is a leading social theory scholar, offers greater historical scope than other social theory texts and readers; starts with the origins of the modern worldview in Seventeenth and Eighteenth Century Europe.