Foreword

Summary

This valuable volume brings together in one place for the first time a number of essays by one of India's (and indeed international sociology's) most innovative thinkers, and one moreover who is committed to erasing the boundaries between social theory and practice. Essentially what is suggested in the following pages is an approach to social knowledge and to positive social transformation that transcends the normal boundaries that so commonly separate sociology from philosophy and both from religion and spirituality. To a great extent the social sciences have failed to deliver on their Enlightenment promises. Perhaps this was too much to expect from them, but then as Karl Marx so effectively demonstrated, ideas do have power – they not only reflect but also shape social reality, and as we know from the history of revolutions in the past, ideas of liberatory potential can have enormous effects as the driving force of social movements that in turn transform political, economic, cultural and gendered structures, institutions and patterns of everyday practice.

While social movement theorists have largely concentrated their attentions on the material and resource mobilization basis of such movements, it is equally important to recognize that the ideas that stimulate them and motivate people to action need foregrounding. Knowledge itself in other words can be liberatory if it is of a certain kind and if it is recognized as the basis and stimulus for transformative action.