Introducing Social Theory traces the development of social theorizing from the classical ideas about modernity of Durkheim, Marx and Weber, through twentieth-century debates around structure and agency and developments in feminist thinking, to a uniquely accessible review of contemporary theoretical controversies in sociology. Focusing on relativism, post-modernity and postmodernism and their critics, this final section of the book provides a cogent and highly readable account of the debates at the heart of social theorizing today.