'Reconsidering the classics' is the theme of this selection of papers, from the 1997 Cologne conference of the International Institute of Sociology. This does not imply going back to their answers, but to their topics. Some of the issues covered in this volume are: freedom of societies; the privatisation of belief, ethnicity, and globalisation; East-West relations; and institutional rehabilitation.
The book includes articles by major contemporary sociologists, including Raymond Boudon, Samuel Eisenstadt, William D'Antonio, Saskia Sassen, Pierpaolo Donati, Eugeen Roosens, Nikolai Genov, Mattei Dogan, Gisela Trommsdorff, Margaret Archer, Erwin Scheuch, Friedrich F]rstenberg, Takashi Usui, Erich Weede and M. Munakata.
The International Institute of Sociology, the oldest sociological association in the world, was founded in 1893, and has had distinguished members like Ferdinand Tvnnies, Thorstein Veblen, Georg Simmel, Pjotr Sorokin and J.M. Schumpeter.

Erwin K. Scheuch (1928) is Emeritus Professor in Sociology at the University of Cologne (Germany). He was lecturer at Columbia University, Berkeley, Harvard and had guest professorships at Princeton, in Auckland, Paris, Stockholm, Berlin, China and Manchuria. He was the founder and director of the Kölner Institut für Angewandte Sozialforschung (Institute for Comparative Social Research), one of the major sociological institutes in Germany. From 1989 until 1997 he was vice-president and later president of the International Institute of Sociology. Professor Scheuch is a member of many academic organizations and wrote dozens of books about technologies of empirical research, mass communications, political sociology and social issues. His latest book was about the donation crisis in German political parties (Rowohlt 2000).
David Sciulli is Professor of Sociology at Texas A&M University and the author of Corporate Power in Civil Society: An Application of Societal Constitutionalism (NYU Press, 2001). His earlier publications include Corporations vs. Court: Private Power, Public Interests (Lynne Reinner Publishers, 1999) and Theory of Societal Constitutionalism: Foundations of a Non-Marxist Critical Theory (Cambridge University Press, 1992).