Philology, the 'love of the word', is an academic discipline that threatens to turn the texts collected in critical editions into intellectual playgrounds. For the important task that consists in trying to arrive at as coherent an understanding of a text as possible by considering everything its author has written always trails a certain danger in its wake: it can all too easily become an acade...

Emile Durkheim assembled a team to promote his vision for sociology, but he and Mauss were in many ways a double act, like Marx and Engels. There was room for only one leader of the movement, so we speak of the Durkheimians and the Marxists. Mauss and Engels each assumed leadership of the movement they jointly founded after their partner’s death, but the intrinsic inequality of the partnership ...

Two sculptures of Friedrich Engels have recently been installed in Greater Manchester, the city where social philosopher spent most his working life and was focus proto-ethnographic account early industrial city. The first sculpture is a fibreglass ‘fabricated ruin’ set within newly rebuilt section University Salford campus. second former Soviet monument that transported from eastern Ukraine to...