Franco Ferrarotti offers a series of profiles on sociology's most important classical social and political thinkers, covering eighteenth and nineteenth-century writers and concluding with the American economist Thorstein Veblen. This is a general introduction to the history of modern social thought as well as a study of each of these thinkers within his social and historical context. It is also an interpretation of them from a distinctly European social and philosophical perspective, treating as major thinkers some, such as Ferguson and Veblen, who are not typically included in the canon of classical social thinkers. Ferrarotti hopes to reinvigorate interest in classical theoretical concerns and to spark a discussion about the important legacy that sociology brings to bear on our understanding of human social action.