Donald N. Levine is the Peter B. Ritzma Professor of Sociology and former dean of the College at the University of Chicago. For nearly half a

century he has been devoted to Ethiopia & ndash; as a scholar, in university teaching, in providing expert assistance to various government bodies, and in community service on behalf of Ethiopians at home and abroad.

Levine's publications on Ethiopia include dozens of articles, parts of The Flight from Ambiguity: Essays in Social and Cultural Theory (1985), and two books, Wax and Gold: Tradition and Innovation in Ethiopian Culture (1965), now reprinted by Tsehai Publishers and Greater Ethiopia: The Evolution of a Multiethnic Society (1974), a second edition of which, with a new preface was published, in 2001. An Amharic translation of this book (Tiliqitu Etyopya) was published in 2001 by the Addis Ababa University Press.

Other publications include Visions of the Sociological Tradition (1995) and, most recently, Powers of the Mind: The Reinvention of Liberal Learning.

In this work, Don Levine moves from the origins of systematic knowledge in ancient Greece to the present day in order to present an account that is at once a history of the social science enterprise and an introduction to the cornerstone works of Western social thought. "Visions" has three meanings, each of which corresponds to a part of the book. In Part 1, Levine presents the ways previous sociologists have rendered accounts of their discipline, as a series of narratives - or "life stories" - that build upon each other, generation to generation, a succession of efforts to envisage a coherent past for the sake of a purposive present. In Part 2, the heart of the book, Levine offers his own narrative, reconnecting centuries of voices into a dialogue among the varied strands of the sociological tradition: Hellenic, British, French, German, Marxian, Italian and American. Here, he tracks the formation of the sociological imagination through a series of conversations across generations. From classic philosophy to pragmatism, Aristotle to W.I. Thomas, Levine maps the web of visionary statements - confrontations and oppositions - from which social science has grown. Throughout each stage, Levine demonstrates how social knowledge has grown in response to three recurring questions: How shall we live? What makes humans moral creatures? How do we understand the world? He anchors the creation of social knowledge to ethical foundations, and shows how differences in those foundations disposed the shapers of modern social science - among them, Marshall and Spencer, Comte and Durkheim, Simmel and Weber, Marx and Mosca, Dewey and Park - to proceed in vastly different ways. In Part 3, Levine offers a vision of the contemporary scene, setting the crisis of fragmentation in social sciences against the fragmentation of experience and community. By reconstructing the history of social thought as a series of fundamentally moral engagements with common themes, he suggests new uses for sociology's intellectual resources: not only as insight about the nature of modernity, but also as a model of mutually respectful communication in an increasingly fractious world.