ABSTRACT
This chapter examines the work of four social theorists. It is not as an authority on education, nor as a sociologist and economist of international stature, that Veblen is best remembered, but as America's most brilliant social critic whose incisive expose of the leisured classes and their pecuniary values has left a legacy of graphic phrases. Weber regarded himself proudly as a German nationalist and as a spokesman for the bourgeois class. In his view German reunification had failed to bring about a proper bourgeois revolution at the political level. If Comte is sometimes regarded as the founding father of modern sociology, Durkheim assuredly deserves his reputation as the sociologist of education, par excellence. Most of Mannheim's earliest work concerned questions of epistemology conducted from within an idealist framework, but not long after his move to Germany he began to investigate more fully the social context of intellectual systems.
