This paper is organized around a body of authors who still form the basis of our thinking about politics and society today. Later 20th-century thinkers may have gone beyond Marx and Weber (for example), but they have not yet managed to present their ideas except as developments of what was said by their nineteenth- and early twentieth-century forebears. We still live in a world dominated by the polarities of Liberalism and Socialism, and reports of Marx’s ‘death’ at the end of the Cold War have been greatly exaggerated. The many themes running through these texts include serious engagement with the problems raised by a strongly historical view of social and political evolution: should one believe in ‘progress’, and if so why? If one chose not to believe, did this mean that history was meaningless and that, by the end of our period, the world was ‘disenchanted’? Another major trend lay in the increasing predominance of theories which were ‘critical’ of established modes of social and political behaviour, whilst those which were ‘positive’ and reconstructive were more and more at a discount. Why should this be? The decline of ‘positivist’ thought in this sense was also linked to a set of estimates about the role of natural scientific models in analysing human society: French thinkers rather preferred them, whereas German and British ones did not. Again, why so? The earliest serious modern discussion of the role of gender in political and social life forms another significant theme. You will enjoy taking this paper if you enjoy the careful reading of texts, and if you have an interest in decoding the meaning of apparently abstract concepts – such as ‘ideology’, ‘class’, ‘charisma’ and ‘liberty’ – by looking not only at texts but at the historical contexts from which they emerged.