ABSTRACT
Talk about the connections between nations and societies in the social sciences tend to be fairly general, and yet it remains the case that nations have been regarded as providing societal homes for a remarkably long historical period. To define society in purely national terms is to circumscribe its operations in terms of, say, territories, boundaries and geopolitical spaces. Some of the new social theories, by contrast, seek to anchor their preoccupations in less cultural and more institutional concerns. Whilst political analyses of climate change have taken different forms, the large bulk has emphasized that globally catastrophic processes are at work. Social theory has long engaged with feminism, particularly the feminist argument that women’s personal troubles should, in fact, be seen as broader social and political troubles that arise from living in male-dominated societies. Classical social theory by no means sidelined issues of gender and sexuality, although much of the analysis it offered was woefully insufficient.
