Margaret Levi's wide-ranging theoretical and historical study demonstrates the importance of political relative to economic factors in accounting for revenue production policies.

* Winner of the C. Wright Mills Award of the Society for the Study of Social Problems and the Distinguished Scholarly Publication Award of the American Sociological Association
In a dazzling new interpretation of four hundred years of modern French history, Charles Tilly focuses not on kings and courtiers but on the common people of village and farm buffeted by the inexorable advance of large-scale capitalism and the consolidation of a powerful nation-state. Tilly, author of The Vend�e and many other books, chooses the contention of the masses as his medium in painting this vivid picture of the people's growing ability and willingness to fight injustice, challenge exploitation, and claim their own place in the hierarchy of power.
Contention is not necessarily disorder. The more we look at contention, says Tilly, the more we discover order created by the rooting of collective action in everyday social life through a continuous process of signaling, negotiation, and struggle. In seventeenth-century France, ordinary people did not know how to demonstrate, rally, or strike, but they had standard procedures for expelling a tax collector, undermining a corrupt official, and shaming moral offenders. By the end of the eighteenth century, French people were experimenting with delegations, public meetings, and popular justice. Through the nineteenth century, with the growth of an industrial proletariat, they developed an extensive repertoire of strikes, demonstrations, and direct attacks on landlords and capitalists, as well as conflicts setting worker against worker. In the twentieth century, scenarios of protest expanded to even larger-scale forms such as mass meetings, electoral campaigns, and broad-based social movements.
Rather than arguing these developments in the abstract, The Contentious French provides lively descriptions of real events, with pauses to make sense of their patterns. The result is a view of politics with the common struggle for power at its core and the changing structure of power as its envelope.
The Contentious French is bound to be controversial, and therefore required reading for specialists in European history, social movements, and collective action. Its fresh approach will also appeal to students and general readers.

During the first decade of the twenty-first century, worker resistance in China increased rapidly despite the fact that certain segments of the state began moving in a pro-labor direction. In explaining this, Eli Friedman argues that the Chinese state has become hemmed in by an “insurgency trap” of its own devising and is thus unable to tame expansive worker unrest. Labor conflict in the process of capitalist industrialization is certainly not unique to China and indeed has appeared in a wide array of countries around the world. What is distinct in China, however, is the combination of postsocialist politics with rapid capitalist development.
Other countries undergoing capitalist industrialization have incorporated relatively independent unions to tame labor conflict and channel insurgent workers into legal and rationalized modes of contention. In contrast, the Chinese state only allows for one union federation, the All China Federation of Trade Unions, over which it maintains tight control. Official unions have been unable to win recognition from workers, and wildcat strikes and other forms of disruption continue to be the most effective means for addressing workplace grievances. In support of this argument, Friedman offers evidence from Guangdong and Zhejiang provinces, where unions are experimenting with new initiatives, leadership models, and organizational forms.

The essays in this volume present the view that such collective actions as riots, protests, strikes and rebellions are coherent, if often unsuccessful attempts by working class people to defend or advance well-defined interests. Using as examples a series of case studies from 18th, 19th and 20th century Europe, the contributors present a new perspective on worker reactions to the strategies of the elite.

In the The Confucian-Legalist State, Dingxin Zhao offers a radically new analysis of Chinese imperial history from the eleventh century BCE to the fall of the Qing dynasty. This study first uncovers the factors that explain how, and why, China developed into a bureaucratic empire under the Qin dynasty in 221 BCE. It then examines the political system that crystallized during the Western Han dynasty, a system that drew on China's philosophical traditions of Confucianism and Legalism. Despite great changes in China's demography, religion, technology, and socioeconomic structures, this Confucian-Legalist political system survived for over two millennia. Yet, it was precisely because of the system's resilience that China, for better or worse, did not develop industrial capitalism as Western Europe did, notwithstanding China's economic prosperity and technological sophistication beginning with the Northern Song dynasty.
In examining the nature of this political system, Zhao offers a new way of viewing Chinese history, one that emphasizes the importance of structural forces and social mechanisms in shaping historical dynamics. As a work of historical sociology, The Confucian-Legalist State aims to show how the patterns of Chinese history were not shaped by any single force, but instead by meaningful activities of social actors which were greatly constrained by, and at the same time reproduced and modified, the constellations of political, economic, military, and ideological forces. This book thus offers a startling new understanding of long-term patterns of Chinese history, one that should trigger debates for years to come among historians, political scientists, and sociologists.
本书旨在对中国历史的范式进行社会学分析。我用“中国”一词来指代一个随着时间而发生变化的区域。在这一区域中，汉字是书面交流的主要形式，而生活在其中的居民对尽管变动但可认知的文化复合体表现出认同。这也就是中华文明。本书由四部分组成，其中，第一部分由简介和理论组成。第2章和第3章则构成了全书的第二部分，它详述了中华文明中形成阶段中的西周时期之政治、社会、知识和经济背景（大约1045-771BCE），并讨论了西周时期的地理和气候条件。第三部分（第4-8章）是本书的核心，涵盖了中国从春秋战国时期到西汉王朝（206BCE-8CE）前期的历史。在时间段上，春秋战国时期与东周时期（770-249BCE）大体相当，周室的权力和影响力逐渐式微的这一时期便是东周时期，而后群雄并起的战国乱世最终为秦所统一。组成第三部分的章节审视了这一时期被激发起来或至少发挥了作用的力量：分别是随着秦统一中国和西汉儒法国家的奠基这一时期形成的中国哲学、市场关系和官僚制帝国。
同蒂利（Charles Tilly）一致，本书将“国家”定义为“一种与家庭和亲缘团体不同，且在某些方面明显强于其实际领土内所有其他组织的强制性组织”。本书对“帝国”定义的使用则更具限制，它指的是一种对许多都城中心和巨大内陆腹地实行统治的前现代农业国家，帝国有效的将其统治的法律适用于不同的族群，而且由于在前现代社会中，国家的基础能力有限，帝国仅能对地方群落和边境地区实施间接统治。
自中国西汉时期出现的儒法政治体系延续了两千年。这里的“延续”绝不是说这一政治体系在两千年的历史中一成不变，而是说在某种程度上，这一政治体系的特质对统治者和精英有着持续的吸引力，而且这一体系本身是足够灵活的，使得自汉代以降的中国历代王朝的统治者和精英可以对其加以改造而不是完全抛弃它。正是由于这一适应性的存在，且不论优劣，尽管中国繁荣的经济和发达的科技发端于北宋时期（960-1127），然而中国后来并没有发展出像西欧那样的工业资本主义。由于儒法政治体系的持续存在和中国工业资本主义发展出现的可能性已经广为各个学科领域的研究者所详述，因此我决定在第四部分的四个简短章节（第10-13章）中探讨一个更有扩展性结论：儒法国家是如何从本书所述的理论框架中规范中国历史的？
我在本书的写作中，亦是为了通过在迈克尔·曼（Michael Mann）的韦伯式理论中引入竞争和冲突的逻辑来发展一种解释历史变迁的理论：通过整合结构性分析和以机制为基础的解释，并且将历史时间性作为一个关键组成部分引入本书的叙述、说明和解释当中，以此寻求建构出一种新的社会学研究。

《为什么美国没有社会主义》一书是20世纪初驰名世界的德国国民经济学家、社会学家桑巴特的代表作之一。首次以德文出版后，几十年内又相继出现了法、西、英、日等译本。本书是“美国例外论”这个领域的开山之作，一方面，本书有关美国的政治制度（主要指普选制和宪政民主）和企业制度（主要 指计件工资和利益分享）促进了美国工人对美国资本主义持善意态度的观点，得到了后继者的发扬；另一方面，本书关于美国工人的生活水平高于欧洲大陆工人从而安于现状、不倾向社会革命的观点，得到了社会的强烈反响。无论如何，只要涉及美国例外论的讨论，就必须向本书寻找思想资源。

Few discussions in modern social science have occupied as much attention as the changing nature of welfare states in Western societies. Gosta Esping-Andersen, one of the foremost contributors to current debates on this issue, here provides a new analysis of the character and role of welfare states in the functioning of contemporary advanced Western societies. Esping-Andersen distinguishes three major types of welfare state, connecting these with variations in the historical development of different Western countries. He argues that current economic processes, such as those moving toward a postindustrial order, are shaped not by autonomous market forces but by the nature of states and state differences. Fully informed by comparative materials, this book will have great appeal to all those working on issues of economic development and postindustrialism. Its audience will include students of sociology, economics, and politics.

Writing about ideas, John Maynard Keynes noted that they are "more powerful than is commonly understood. Indeed the world is ruled by little else." One would expect, therefore, that political science--a discipline that focuses specifically on the nature of power--would have a healthy respect for the role of ideas. However, for a variety of reasons--not least of which is the influence of rational choice theory, which presumes that individuals are self-maximizing rational actors--this is not the case, and the literature on the topic is fairly thin. As the stellar cast of contributors to this volume show, ideas are in fact powerful shapers of political and social life. In Ideas and Politics in Social Science Research, Daniel Beland and Robert Henry Cox have gathered leading scholars from a variety of subdisciplines in political science and sociology to provide a general overview of the theoretical, empirical, and methodological issues raised by social science research on ideas and politics. Throughout, they hone in on three central questions. What is the theoretical basis for studying ideas in politics? What are the best methods? What sort of empirical puzzles can be solved by examining ideas and related phenomena such as discourse, policy paradigms, and framing processes? In sum, this is a state-of-the-art academic work on both the role of ideas in politics and the analytical utility that derives from studying them.

It is a commonplace that the United States lagged behind the countries of Western Europe in developing modern social policies. But, as Theda Skocpol shows in this startlingly new historical analysis, the United States actually pioneered generous social spending for many of its elderly, disabled, and dependent citizens. During the late nineteenth century, competitive party politics in American democracy led to the rapid expansion of benefits for Union Civil War veterans and their families.
Some Americans hoped to expand veterans’ benefits into pensions for all of the needy elderly and social insurance for workingmen and their families. But such hopes went against the logic of political reform in the Progressive Era. Generous social spending faded along with the Civil War generation.
Instead, the nation nearly became a unique maternalist welfare state as the federal government and more than forty states enacted social spending, labor regulations, and health education programs to assist American mothers and children. Remarkably, as Skocpol shows, many of these policies were enacted even before American women were granted the right to vote. Banned from electoral politics, they turned their energies to creating huge, nation-spanning federations of local women’s clubs, which collaborated with reform-minded professional women to spur legislative action across the country.
Blending original historical research with political analysis, Skocpol shows how governmental institutions, electoral rules, political parties, and earlier public policies combined to determine both the opportunities and the limits within which social policies were devised and changed by reformers and politically active social groups over the course of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.
By examining afresh the institutional, cultural, and organizational forces that have shaped U.S. social policies in the past, Protecting Soldiers and Mothers challenges us to think in new ways about what might be possible in the American future.

Claus Offe is one of the leading social scientists working in Germany today, and his work, particularly on the welfare state, has been enormously influential both in Europe and the United States. Contradictions of the Welfare State is the first collection of Offe's essays to appear in a single volume in English, and it contains a selection of his most important recent work on the breakdown of the post-war settlement.The political writings in this book are primarily concerned with the origins of the present difficulties - what Offe calls the 'crises of crisis management' - of welfare capitalist states. He indicates why in the present period, these states are no longer capable of fully managing the socio-political problems and conflicts generated by late capitalist societies and discusses the viability of New Right, corporatist, and democratic socialist proposals for restructuring the welfare state.The book also offers fresh and penetrating insights into a range of other subjects, including social movements, political parties, law, social policy, and labor markets. There is an interview with Claus Offe, prepared especially for this volume, and a substantial introductory chapter by John Keane which links the essays and explores Offe's central themes.Claus Offe has researched and lectured widely throughout Europe and North America and is Professor in the Faculty of Sociology at the University of Bielefeld. John Keane is an editor of Telos and Senior Lecturer in Political Theory and Sociology at the Polytechnic of Central London. This book is included in the series, Studies in Contemporary German Social Thought, edited by Thomas McCarthy.

The notion of the developmental state has come under attack in recent years. Critics charge that Japan's success in putting this notion into practice has not been replicated elsewhere, that the concept threatens the purity of free market economics, and that its shortcomings have led to financial turmoil in Asia. In this informative and thought-provoking book, a team of distinguished scholars revisits this notion to assess its continuing utility and establish a common vocabulary for debates on these issues. Drawing on new political and economic theories and emphasizing recent events, the authors examine the East Asian experience to show how the developmental state involves a combination of political, bureaucratic, and moneyed influences that shape economic life in the region.
Taking as its point of departure Chalmers Johnson's account of the Japanese developmental state, the book explores the interplay of forces that have determined the structure of opportunity in the region. The authors critically address the argument for centralized political involvement in industrial development (with a new contribution by Johnson), describe the historical impact of colonialism and the Cold War, consider new ideas in economics, and compare the experiences of East Asian countries with those of France, Brazil, Mexico, and India.

Nationalism is one of the most powerful forces in the modern world, yet it is surprisingly little studied and only imperfectly understood, either by its adherents or its opponents. Its irruption into the modern world is often explained as a resurgence of primitive, atavistic instincts, or as a delusion fostered by a few theoreticians, politicians or propagandists.
The present volume interprets nationalism in terms of its social roots, which it locates in industrial social organization. A society that aims for affluence and economic growth, Professor Gellner argues, depends on innovation, occupational mobility, mass media, universal literacy, and education in a shared, standard idiom. Taken together these transform the relationship between culture and the state. The functioning of the society depends on an all-embracing educational system, tied to one culture and protected by a state identified with that culture. The principle one state, one culture makes itself felt, and political units which do not conform to it feel the strain in the form of nationalist activity. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
Table of Contents
About the Authors vii
About this Edition viii
Editor's Preface to the First Edition R. I. Moore, Founding Editor ix
Acknowledgements for the First Edition xi
Introduction John Breuilly xiii
1 Definitions 1
State and Nation 3
The Nation 5
2 Culture in Agrarian Society 8
Power and Culture in the Agro-literate Polity 9
Culture 11
The State in Agrarian Society 13
The Varieties of Agrarian Rulers 14
3 Industrial Society 19
The Society of Perpetual Growth 23
Social Genetics 29
The Age of Universal High Culture 34
4 The Transition to an Age of Nationalism 38
A Note on the Weakness of Nationalism 42
Wild and Garden Cultures 48
5 What is a Nation? 52
The Course of True Nationalism Never did Run Smooth 57
6 Social Entropy and Equality in Industrial Society 62
Obstacles to Entropy 63
Fissures and Barriers 72
A Diversity of Focus 73
7 A Typology of Nationalisms 85
The Varieties of Nationalist Experience 94
Diaspora Nationalism 98
8 The Future of Nationalism 106
Industrial Culture - One or Many? 110
9 Nationalism and Ideology 118
Who is for Nuremberg? 125
One Nation, One State 128
10 Conclusion 131
What is not being Said 131
Summary 133

In this major contribution to contemporary political theory, Jean Cohen and Andrew Arato argue that the concept of civil society articulates a contested terrain in the West that could become a primary locus for the expansion of democracy and rights.

Social Democracy in the Global Periphery focuses on social-democratic regimes in the developing world that have, to varying degrees, reconciled the needs of achieving growth through globalized markets with extensions of political, social, and economic rights. The authors show that opportunities exist to achieve significant social progress, despite a global economic order that favors core industrial countries. Their findings derive from a comparative analysis of four exemplary cases: Kerala (India), Costa Rica, Mauritius, and Chile (since 1990). Though unusual, the social and political conditions from which these developing-world social democracies arose are not unique; indeed, pragmatic and proactive social-democratic movements helped create these favorable conditions. The four exemplars have preserved or even improved their social achievements since neoliberalism emerged hegemonic in the 1980s. This demonstrates that certain social-democratic policies and practices – guided by a democratic developmental state – can enhance a national economy's global competitiveness.

Over a decade has passed since the collapse of communism, yet post-communist citizens are still far less likely to join voluntary organizations than people from other countries. Why do post-communist citizens mistrust public organizations? What explains this pattern of weak civil society? And what does this mean for democracy in the region? This engaging study addresses these questions with a provocative argument about the enduring impact of the communist experience on its countries and citizens. Howard argues that the experience of mandatory participation in state-controlled organizations and vibrant private networks during the communist period, combined with the disappointment with post-communist developments, have left most citizens with a lasting aversion to public activities. Howard analyzes the findings from over 30 democratic countries on the World Values Survey and also presents extensive and original evidence from his own research, focused on Eastern Germany and Russia.