信任网络由网状的人际联系构成，涉及社会生活的各个方面。网络成员共同承担着一些重大而长期的事业，比如结婚、抚育孩子、维护宗教信仰和长途贸易等。那么它是如何建立，又是为何运作的？面对政治掠夺者和贪婪的统治者，信任网络借助各种方式力图免遭政治控制。非政治性的信任网络是如何躲避政权、向政权妥协，或是寻求与政权建立联系的？本书通过时间上和空间上的广泛比较，对上述行为的过程及后果进行了考察，描绘了信任网络和政权中心之间不同的关系类型，为民主化和去民主化提供了不可或缺的阐释背景。

What is the nature of the modern state? How did it come into being and what are the characteristics of this distinctive field of power that has come to play such a central role in the shaping of all spheres of social, political and economic life?<br /><br />In this major work the great sociologist Pierre Bourdieu addresses these fundamental questions. Modifying Max Weber’s famous definition, Bourdieu defines the state in terms of the monopoly of legitimate physical and symbolic violence, where the monopoly of symbolic violence is the condition for the possession and exercise of physical violence. The state can be reduced neither to an apparatus of power in the service of dominant groups nor to a neutral site where conflicting interests are played out: rather, it constitutes the form of collective belief that structures the whole of social life. The ‘collective fiction’ of the state Ð a fiction with very real effects - is at the same time the product of all struggles between different interests, what is at stake in these struggles, and their very foundation.<br /><br />While the question of the state runs through the whole of Bourdieu’s work, it was never the subject of a book designed to offer a unified theory. The lecture course presented here, to which Bourdieu devoted three years of his teaching at the Collège de France, fills this gap and provides the key that brings together the whole of his research in this field. This text also shows ‘another Bourdieu’, both more concrete and more pedagogic in that he presents his thinking in the process of its development. While revealing the illusions of ‘state thought’ designed to maintain belief in government being oriented in principle to the common good, he shows himself equally critical of an ‘anti-institutional mood’ that is all too ready to reduce the construction of the bureaucratic apparatus to the function of maintaining social order.<br /><br />At a time when financial crisis is facilitating the hasty dismantling of public services, with little regard for any notion of popular sovereignty, this book offers the critical instruments needed for a more lucid understanding of the wellsprings of domination.

Over forty years after it first appeared, T.H. Marshall's seminal essay on citizenship and social class in postwar Britain has acquired the status of a classic. His lucid analysis of the principal elements of citizenship - namely, the possession of civil, political and social rights - is as relevant today as it was when it first appeared. It is reissued here with a new and complementary monograph by Tom Bottomore in which the meaning of citizenship is re-examined, in very different historical circumstances. In asking how far the prospects for class equality have been realised, Bottomore continues the discussion in a context that encompasses the restoration of civil and political rights in Eastern Europe, problems of welfare capitalism, citizenship and the nation state and the broader issues of equality and democratic institutions.

Caring for Our Own inverts an enduring question of social welfare politics. Rather than ask why the American state hasn't responded to unmet social welfare needs by expanding social entitlements, this book asks: Why don't American families view unmet social welfare needs as the basis for demands for new state entitlements? The answer, Sandra Levitsky argues, lies in a better understanding of how individuals imagine solutions to the social welfare problems they confront and what prevents new understandings of social welfare provision from developing into political demand for alternative social arrangements. Caring for Our Own considers the powerful ways in which existing social policies shape the political imagination, reinforcing longstanding values about family responsibility, subverting grievances grounded in notions of social responsibility, and in some rare cases, constructing new models of social provision that transcend existing ideological divisions in American social politics.