Search Results

This chapter explores the connections between war and modernity as well as developments in Anglo-American historical sociology and its emphasis on war. Within American sociology, the turn to “war” was directly connected with the debate on modernization theory. This paradigm had not only forecast that the “underdeveloped countries” would come to resemble the United States and Western Europe both structurally and culturally: that they would become Westernized. Outside of Britain and the United States, historical sociology never managed to play much of a role. As far as Germany and France (as well as other European countries) are concerned, sociologists there either never really took a historical approach (Germany) or adopted a historical perspective molded by the dominant figure of Michel Foucault. This was evident in the debate on the “democratic peace” that took off in the 1980s and early 1990s, a debate of great relevance to social theory.

This book examines the “early history” of social theories on war, beginning with Thomas Hobbes. It explores the key arguments in the debate on war and peace carried on from Hobbes to the Napoleonic Wars between philosophers, political economists, and political thinkers, including Hobbes himself and Carl von Clausewitz, and how the progressive optimism nourished by liberal doctrines gradually began to take hold. It also considers the intellectual prehistory and history of the First World War and how social theory's engagement with the phenomenon of war, which had already begun before the First World War, did not continue in any substantial way after 1918. Furthermore, the book discusses the rise of the subdiscipline of “historical sociology” in the Anglo-American world and concludes with some remarks on what we see as a convincing conception of enduring peace and on the need to move beyond monothematic diagnoses of the contemporary world and of social change.

It would be a fundamental mistake to assume a priori a complete correspondence between the historical sociology of state formation and the conceptual history of the “state,” or, in more general terms, between institutional and intellectual development, and between political reality and political rhetoric. Equally, it would be a mistake to assume that there is no relation whatsoever, and it would have been remarkable if the great expansion of the fiscal and military capacity of central government in Britain in the early modern period had gone unnoticed by contemporaries, so as to leave no mark on historical, political, and social reflection. Shows that the European process of state formation had indeed influenced political commentary in giving rise to arguments analyzing and criticizing the growth of the state, and that these arguments found their way across the Atlantic from Britain to the American colonies in the form of “Country” thought, which gave rise to a complete vocabulary with which to respond to the growth of the British fiscal‐military state in the Anglo‐American world of political discourse. In fact, Antifederalism can be described as an expression of Country thought, although it cannot at the same time be claimed that Federalism was a repetition of the contrasting central Court defense of state expansion.

This chapter begins by clarifying the range of things to which sociologists might refer when they use the word international to mark sociology in America. That provisional clarification is then used to guide an historical review of American sociological internationalism over the past century. It focuses on the last fifty and especially the most recent twenty-five years of disciplinary practice, simultaneously a time of globalization and a new “golden age” of comparative and historical sociology. The chapter also draws on surveys of published materials and correspondence with more than seventy American sociology department members evidently international in their scholarly commitments. According to these sources, the discipline looks more ethnocentric than one might expect, even as it is more global. American sociology faces a double bind—obliged by its location to engage the world, but blinded by its location to recognize the full scope of American power. That double bind is even apparent in the definition of international.

In order to interpret the debate over the ratification of the US Constitution as a debate over state formation, it is necessary to know something both about the development of the European state in the early modern period and about the ideological response that this development generated. The aim of this chapter is therefore to provide a historical sociology of state building. The first three sections discuss the development of the British state after the Glorious Revolution of 1688–89 (the deposition of James II and the accession of William III and Mary II to the English throne), concentrating on Britain not because it was by far the most common point of reference in the ratification debate, but rather because no other government was nearly as successful as the British when it came to raising taxes and mobilizing resources and men. The emphasis on discussion of Britain is not meant to imply that the Constitution was adopted in order to introduce a British “fiscal‐military state” in America, but rather to demonstrate that there were certain limits to the expansion of the central government in the USA that did not apply in Britain. Precisely for this reason, the state created by the Federalists was very different from the contemporary British state, and the last two sections of the chapter address the basis of these differences.

This chapter outlines a historical conceptual framework for understanding how liberal order came to be what it is today and how it has been imagined under different conditions and contexts across four centuries of intermingled liberal ordering practices and liberal ideas about world order. It asks ‘what is “the liberal” in liberal world order?’ and points to the use of narrativity and shared knowledge for constituting otherwise neutral concepts as liberal concepts. The aim is to increase our understanding of the political present by imbuing the past with historical meaning and political interpretation. For this purpose the chapter incorporates insights from constructivist and critical thinking, as well as from historical sociology and practice theory.

Combines network analysis and historical sociology to chart significant changes in patterns of social conflict (in particular, relationships of attack and claim making) among different social groups, including royalty, parliament, local and national officials, trade, and workers, in Britain in the early nineteenth century. Building block models based on the intersection of actors and events, the authors map networks of contention in national politics before and after the passing of the 1832 Reform Act, which increased the centrality of parliament in British politics. They highlight the process by which people, through collective action, not only create new forms of political repertoires but also forge relations to other actors, both at the local and the national level.

This chapter explores the evolving relationship between organization studies and history, specifically business and management history during the first decade of the 21st century. The front end provides a descriptive investigation on the status of historical research in the management field and the nature of interdisciplinary discourse in related fields such as sociology and economics. The second part explores possible reasons behind the limited expansion of interdisciplinary work by bringing various arguments about the nature of explanation, description, and causal arguments developed in different disciplines. A strong integration between these cultures of inquiry requires not only understanding but also appreciating the epistemological and ontological foundations of the other side in order to make such integration possible. The concluding section provides a short catalogue of alternatives for a more productive cooperation between these two fields and suggests that a more fruitful solution is to focus on transdisciplinary rather that interdisciplinary research.

This concluding chapter shows how it is impossible to ignore that the political, economic, social, linguistic, and cultural relations between center and periphery are to this day the single most important issue in Spain while they hardly appear in the political debates. The real issue is that important parts of the political economy and historical sociology that are used to trace the emergence of early modern European nation-states and nationally integrated markets becomes questionable in light of Spanish early modern history. The first casualty is the lopsided focus of political economy on the predatory state. The unfinished construction site of the creation of the Spanish early modern nation and market was that the state never became autonomous enough.

This chapter argues that global history is not a self-contained field but one in need of theoretical and terminological support from various parts of the systematic social sciences. A strong candidate for conceptual inputs is historical sociology—an old discourse that originated with the founding fathers of sociology and can in turn profit from a close attachment to global history. Different kinds of global history require their respective conceptual tools many of which can be provided by a historical sociology that keeps a balance between the richness of anthropological description and the formalism of network analysis. A particularly fruitful topic of mutual interest is that of time and temporalities.

This chapter explores the implications of postcolonial thought for social science. Rather than only charging social science for its practical complicity with imperialism, postcolonial thought offers an epistemic critique. It illuminates social science’s persistent Orientalism, analytic bifurcation, occlusion of colonial agency and Eurocentric metrocentrism. These are the legacies of social science’s metropolitan–imperial standpoint. They are imprints of empire upon the sociological body, and they weaken the analytic power and scope of the sociological imagination. Simply put, they mean that social science is not always as good as it should be. In answering the postcolonial challenge, we are left with a choice. We may dismiss the critique from postcolonial thought as irrelevant or quaint and then move on. Or we can accept it, engage it, and see where it takes us. This chapter places us in position to adopt the latter approach.

This chapter differentiates state and society and examines the state-society relationship. It analyzes the historical sociology of state formation, as well as its tremendous advances in the last quarter century. It also examines the relationship between science and the state, and therefore science and society, through the idea of a “science-state plexus”. It notes that the plexus subsists in three boundary objects that are key to how science and government intersect and network in the modern period—land, people, and the built environment. It discusses that the triangulation which operations at the heart of the cartography illustrates the role of the most abstract form of knowledge—mathematics, specifically geometry—in the formation of the modern state.

This concluding chapter summarizes the book’s historical argument, presents a more schematic version of its pragmatist approach to repertoire change, and considers the implications of this approach for students of historical sociology and contentious politics. It closes with a few brief remarks of how the theoretical considerations that have shaped this book might inform continuing research into the problem of populism.

Exploring sociological literature across almost three-quarters of a century, this chapter maps the origins and trajectory of sociologists’ exploration of the parish from the 1950s to today. From its contentious start to its largely applied orientation today, the chapter highlights several eras of parish research and argues that our current lack of sociological research on Catholic parishes can be traced to the tenuous relationship between the academy and the institutional Catholic Church. The chapter concludes by asserting that parish studies can be simultaneously good for the academy and good for the church. The future of sociological studies of the parish rest upon the willingness of both the academy and the church to accept this proposition.

This introductory chapter provides an overview of the book's main themes. It contrast to the long held view of revolution scholars that regimes are normally stable and coherent, it sets out the notion that regimes are inherently volatile, regardless of how long they survive. In other words, instead of treating stability as unproblematic and piling up sets of conditions that lead to revolution, stability is treated as the problem. The chapter presents the reasons for conceiving regimes in this way, and offers suggestions for how they should be studied. It demonstrates how internally differentiated ruling blocs work together to maintain their regimes while at the same time compete for control over them. The result is ongoing power struggles, muted most of the time and explosive during times of crisis. It is those silent manoeuvres and explicit battles between the military, security, and political institutions that propel regimes down specific pathways, and ultimately determine the direction and pace of regime change.

This chapter appraises the postwar habitualization of personalized repression characterized by a complex dialectic that arose between the exercise of power in controlling people's conducts and the imbrication of power within the structured ways people feel about themselves and the kind of world they live in. The one does not determine the other; rather, each conditions the other's possibility. A historical sociology makes possible the exploration of specific forms of power in constituting subjectivities because it describes instituted practice and structured feeling as mutually constituting. The practice of favoring one person or family over another must be understood as more than just the conscious intentions of the patrón or the docility it produces in the character of the aniaguero. The chapter seeks to analyze it in terms of a set of power-inflected institutionalized practices, which over time becomes habitualized over certain swathes of social landscape while being resisted in others.