Historical and Comparative Sociology

Most ―mainstream accounts of the West-East divergence gain theoretical inspiration from Max Weber and/or Karl Marx, and have therefore traced the ―rise of the West to the unique social processes that apparently fostered capitalism in Europe. Critics have labelled these accounts ―Eurocentric insofar as they imply the inherent superiority of the West over the East,1 and they have offered alternative ―anti-Eurocentric narratives which ostensibly avoid such analytical and normative pitfalls. These critics have succeeded in directing our attention to experiences in the non-European world. However, they have sought to validate these experiences by simply extending (in space and time), rather than transcending, the problematic concepts and assumptions that plagued the ―Eurocentric Weberian and Marxist accounts of the origins of capitalism. This paper argues that a truly non-Eurocentric approach requires a definitive break with these assumptions and the adoption of an alternative historical materialist understanding of the origins of capitalism pioneered by Robert Brenner. While not explicitly conceived as non-Eurocentric, Brenner‘s concept of social-property relations offers the surest foundation for understanding ―the great divergence‖ without doing violence to history or succumbing to European triumphalism.

Sheldon Pollock is the leading North American Indologist and his magnum opus, The Language of the Gods in the World of Men: Sanskrit, Culture, and Power in Premodern India, is a field-defining classic. Pollock takes himself to be a fierce critic of Max Weber, but in fact his comparative historical approach shares much with Weber, and where it is wanting Pollock's text would have benefited from more, not less, Weberian influence. Pollock's vision of language history and his views on religion and legitimation are considered in detail.

Glocal Spirituality:  Consumerism and Heritage in Puerto Rican Brujería
With the recent intensification of the circulation of ritual experts and commodities, folk religions such as Puerto Rican brujería (witch-healing) have entered a transnational arena of ritual experimentation and eclecticism. Concomitantly, the politics of identity, operating at local-political and global-commercial stages, propel the search for origins and the production of essential identities, leading to the revitalization and orthodoxy of folk religions as well as their folklorization, following a local—though globally pervasive—heritage discourse.  Why glocal spirituality? My main argument is that both these forces—the actual insertion into global circulations that promote a high degree of ritual eclecticism and the local demand for an essential Puerto Rican national identity that promote orthodoxy—work in tandem creating a complex set of conditions for ritual practice and meaning.
How can these apparently contradictory processes be theorized within folklore studies? From a historic-pragmatic perspective to ritual and through an intimate ethnographic account that traces the encounters between practitioners, clients and suppliers of ritual goods, I will show how these two processes work in tandem. That is, without an a-priori public recognition of brujos (witch-healers) as repositories of Puerto Rican wisdom (in the context of the unresolved neocolonial political status of the island), the fame and celebrity that enabled the open incorporation of African based rituals, of bureaucratic gestures and interventions, and transnational religious commodities could not have been viable. Critics of the culture industry and consumerism tend to suggest that commercial forces inherently taint the authenticity of culture, and in this case would taint the spiritual effectiveness of brujería. For practitioners and clients, however, material and spiritual progress not only are not at odds but also are intimately connected. Indeed, practitioners are driven by the attainment of “blessings”—defined by material success as well as spiritual power—which presume the spirituality of commodities and the thinghood of spirituality. Especially in a world guided by capitalist modes of production and the sensuous insatiable consumption of life styles and self-images, brujos and their clients take advantage of the opportunities opened up by multiculturalism and identity politics. They openly expand the pantheon of spirits as well as their ritual expertise, protected by the idiom of heritage—yet outside of its constraints, showing that more than endangered species they are active participants in these glocal forces, speaking to them in their own particular modern yet spiritual idiom.

Resumen Este artículo presenta un mapa del giro a la derecha en América Latina en el siglo XXI para luego repensar el con-cepto "derecha" y sus referencias histórico-empíricas más recientes. El concepto ha sido muy utilizado en las ciencias sociales, sin embargo creemos que hay una especificidad en su utilización cuando se le adosa el adjetivo "nueva". Este artículo ofrece una reflexión sobre la novedad que la derecha, o las derechas, en plural, traen desde el fin de las dictaduras institucionales de las Fuerzas Armadas hasta el presente. Desde una perspectiva de sociología histórica de la formación de conceptos, en la coyuntura estudiada se identifican como elementos nuevos de la derecha: la apel-ación a la democracia liberal y a la movilización social (aun-que se observan matices); además se señala como elemen-to de larga duración el combate al igualitarismo. Asimismo, el artículo ofrece una reflexión sobre una posible agenda de investigación acerca de las estrategias no electorales que las derechas emplean para la construcción de hegemonía. Hacia una agenda de investigación en torno a las derechas de América Latina en el siglo XXI

The central contention of this article is that early nineteenth-century Irish landlords were constrained in their ability to control their estates by the prospect of peasant resistance. The apex of that resistance took the form of what are generically known as whiteboy movements, and this article examines the impact of one particular such movement, the Whitefeet, active in the East Midlands and SouthEast in the early 1830s. The article argues that two forms of landlord versus tenant conflicts can be identified: an absolute form, in which landlords (or subletting rentiers called middlemen) behaved as if they had absolute rights over their properties and were the victims of retaliatory violence; and a negotiated form, in which landlords (or their agents) proceeded in a more restrained, and piecemeal fashion, and compromised in the face of opposition. The fact that the magistracy, at least in some instances, condemned the practitioners of absolute conflict would suggest that more measured approaches were the socially accepted norm, precisely because of the potential for retaliatory violence. The article will conclude with a discussion framing the foregoing in terms of moral economy. It will be argued that the balance between landlord power and tenant resistance created a grudging acceptance of respective rights.

A timely analysis of the power and limits of political parties—and the lessons of the Civil War and the New Deal in the Age of Trump.

American voters have long been familiar with the phenomenon of the presidential frontrunner. In 2008, it was Hillary Clinton. In 1844, it was Martin Van Buren. And in neither election did the prominent Democrat win the party's nomination. Insurgent candidates went on to win the nomination and the presidency, plunging the two-party system into disarray over the years that followed.

In this book, Cedric de Leon analyzes two pivotal crises in the American two-party system: the first resulting in the demise of the Whig party and secession of eleven southern states in 1861, and the present crisis splintering the Democratic and Republican parties and leading to the election of Donald Trump. Recasting these stories through the actions of political parties, de Leon draws unsettling parallels in the political maneuvering that ultimately causes once-dominant political parties to lose the people's consent to rule.

Crisis! takes us beyond the common explanations of social determinants to illuminate how political parties actively shape national stability and breakdown. The secession crisis and the election of Donald Trump suggest that politicians and voters abandon the political establishment not only because people are suffering, but also because the party system itself is unable to absorb an existential challenge to its power. Just as the U.S. Civil War meant the difference between the survival of a slaveholding republic and the birth of liberal democracy, what political elites and civil society organizations do today can mean the difference between fascism and democracy.

This is Chapter 1 of the New Handbook of Political Sociology. Andy Clarno and I envision the piece as a three-fold intervention to the theory of power in political sociology. First, as a preliminary point, we document the general drift of the canonical literature from coercion to consent. Second, we argue that this development rests upon the assumption that power under liberal democracy does not operate on exclusion, suppression, and violence. Thus, it becomes necessary to explain how and why we participate in our own subordination, especially the ways in which we internalize dominant discourses and then act against our own interests.  Finally, we challenge this assumption by drawing on theorists who emphasize the violent and exclusionary underpinnings of liberal democracy, especially Critical Race Theorists, post-colonial scholars, and theorists of elimination, death, exploitation, and disposability.

Stephen Mennell acted as General Editor for the entire series of 18 volumes published between 2006 and 2014 by University College Dublin Press (www.ucdpress.ie), on behalf of the Norbert Elias Foundation, Amsterdam. An account of the editorial policies and practices adopted for the work can be found in vol.188, pp. ix–xiv.

This list gives the basic bibliographical details of each of the volumes, including the names of the collaborating editors for each volume. A separate file contains the details contents of all the volumes. In a third document can be found a list of all the previously unpublished works by Elias that were included for the first time in the Collected Works.

Finally, The Genesis of the Naval Profession was compiled by René Moelker and edited by him and Stephen Mennell from Elias’s papers, was published as a Supplementary Volume by UCD Press.

The paper focuses on the (re)emergence in the late twentieth century of a specific form of cross-border labour migration--viz. guest-work or circular/managed migration--that is designed to keep migrants from settling in receiving countries. The paper is part of a larger project that situates this form of transnational work-mobility regimes within the larger historical debates over the slippery line between free labour and forced labour. Specifically, it traces the genealogy of guest-work, and makes some preliminary observations about the specificity of contemporary circular / managed migration as it becomes incrementally normalized as a desirable policy tool across the world.

I et interview kommenterede den tysk-britiske sociolog Norbert Elias (1897-1990) engang en bemærkning, som Zygmunt Bauman havde knyttet til hans værk. Bemærkningen gik ud på, at Elias måske var ”den sidste repræsentant for den klassiske sociologi, en forsker, der stræber efter den store syntese”. Elias var rasende over denne karakteristik, fordi han hellere ville være ”den første, der bryder en ny vej”.

De to udsagn tydeliggør ikke alene forskellen mellem Elias’ selvopfattelse og den måde, mange kommentatorer har betragtet ham på, men fastholder også et vigtigt kendetegn ved hans værk: Elias kombinerer nemlig på den ene side en syntese af de vigtigste elementer i det sene 1800-tals og det tidlige 1900-tals sociologiske tænkning med på den anden side en yderst selvstændig og intellektuel stringent anvendelse af denne syntese i forhold til et bredt spektrum af empiriske data.

Det er med andre ord i spændingsfeltet mellem tradition og nytænkning, Elias’ sociologiske arbejde udfolder sig; og det er blandt mange andre ting dette forhold, Robert van Krieken klarlægger i sin engagerede, men langt fra ukritiske introduktion til Elias og hans indsats og placering inden for det 20. århundredes sociologi.

Bogen henvender sig primært til et fagpublikum, men i og med, at den så levende beskæftiger sig med en samfundsforsker, der gennem hele sit værk søgte at besvare spørgsmålet: Hvad det i grunden vil sige at være et ’moderne’, ’civiliseret’ menneske, har den relevans for en langt bredere, samfundsinteresseret læserskare.

Oversat fra engelsk efter Norbert Elias af Tom Havemann.

Recent years have seen renewed interest in the study of revolution. Spurred by events like the 2011 uprisings in North Africa and the Middle East, the rise of Islamic State, and the emergence of populism, a new age of revolution has generated considerable interest. Yet, even as empirical studies of revolutions are thriving, there has been a stall in theories of revolution. Anatomies of Revolution offers a novel account of how revolutions begin, unfold and end. By combining insights from international relations, sociology, and global history, it outlines the benefits of a 'global historical sociology' of revolutionary change, one in which international processes take centre stage. Featuring a wide range of cases from across modern world history, this is a comprehensive account of one of the world's most important processes. It will interest students and scholars studying revolutions, political conflict and contentious politics in sociology, politics and international relations.

"Postface au rapport:
La gestion de la diversité ethnique dans les armées. Le cas du Royaume-Uni, des Etats-Unis, de la Belgique et des Pays-Bas, par Anaïs Reding, Matt Bassford, Claire Celia, Kristin Weed, Emmanuel Hassan (Rand Europe), 2012"

There has been a continuous attack on education, particularly alternative, progressive, democratic and liberatory forms of education that seek social justice and an equality of opportunity for all to develop.  In the UK this has led to an attack on educators as 'the enemies of promise' by the Secretary of State for Education.  However, what is being proposed by policy makers are the old 'know your station in life' strategies of managing inequality.  These have always resulted in a violation of the intelligence of people.

...one day you set foot in someone else's country and your world turned upside down. These people were *weird*, really off the wall. The neighbours back home might be slack, but at least you could talk to them. In this new place, it was, well, eerie. A bit dangerous too. You were 100% outnumbered, and they called you a foreigner. You kept a low profile, and sort of adapted. Maybe you changed a bit too. After living on Mars for a few years, when you went home for a holiday the old family reckoned you'd gone native. Well, come to think of it, *they* looked sort of silly now...

The question of why students think there are two kinds of American history taught—one in the K—12 system and one in the university system—can be examined critically using Emile Durkheim's (1973) description of the sacred and the profane. The history taught in K—12 classrooms often focuses on idealized accounts of the past that protect the status quo. K—12 history emphasizes the underlying values that Durkheim calls the sacred, which are reproduced through the development of a triumphal history. The sacred values in K—12 history emphasize selfless acts of people who sacrificed on behalf of society. In contrast, the curriculum emphasized in college courses often focuses on failings that do not reflect the highest ideals of society, which Durkheim calls the profane. The dissonance between these types of history is important for understanding why different types of history are taught and why social change can be difficult to accomplish.

History's epistemological dilemma equally applies to sociology: how can we make claims about persons, events, and processes on the basis of archival records? This article develops a framework called Life on File that combines sociological strengths in qualitative methodologies and an interest in how states shape populations, with library and information sciences' attention to documentary production and anthropological and historical insights into the intersections of archives, knowledge, and power. The framework has three components: the act of recovery of life, processes, and events; the turning of life into a record; and the movement of a file from collection to preservation and use. The result is a methodologically rigorous and globally mobile theory. Empirically, the piece draws on comparative historical fieldwork on state-led racial classification and naturalization practices preserved in Japanese and German archives. While the framework is grounded in research on state archives, its utility extends across types of archives and records. In addition, it provides sociologists with a roadmap on how to use archives in single case as well as comparative and transnational research. The archive is like a raw material, which is not the same as saying that it is an originary material or an unworked-upon material; rather it is what has been made available, what has been thus presented to us, a kind of gift, which is to say also-for future constituencies, future publics-a kind of debt. (Osborne 1999, 57) Cast in the image of the humans who create them, archives are mortals with aspirations to immortality. (Daston 2017, 329)

Mainstream historical accounts of the development of capitalism describe a process which is fundamentally European - a system that was born in the mills and factories of England or under the guillotines of the French Revolution. In this groundbreaking book, a very different story is told.

How the West Came to Rule offers a unique interdisciplinary and international historical account of the origins of capitalism. It argues that contrary to the dominant wisdom, capitalism’s origins should not be understood as a development confined to the geographically and culturally sealed borders of Europe, but the outcome of a wider array of global processes in which non-European societies played a decisive role. Through an examination of the uneven histories of Mongolian expansion, New World discoveries, Ottoman-Habsburg rivalry, the development of the Asian colonies and bourgeois revolutions, Alexander Anievas and Kerem Nisancioglu provide an account of how these diverse events and processes came together to produce capitalism.

Table of Contents

Introduction

The Problem of Eurocentrism

Confronting the Problematic of Sociohistorical Difference

What is Capitalism?

What Is Geopolitics? 

Chapter 1 The Transition Debate: Theories and Critique

Introduction

The ‘Commercialization Model’ Revisited: World- Systems Analysis and the Transition to Capitalism
The Making of the Modern World- System: The Wallerstein Thesis
The Problem of Eurocentrism
The Problem of Historical Specificity

The Spatio-Temporal Limits of Political Marxism
The Brenner Thesis: Explanation and Critique
The Geopolitical in the Making of Capitalism
The Political Marxist Conception of Capitalism

The Problematic of Sociohistorical Difference: Postcolonial Studies Engaging Capital
The Eurocentrism of Historicism
The Violence of Abstraction
The Lacuna of Postcolonial Theory

Conclusion

Chapter 2 Rethinking the Origins of Capitalism: The Theory of Uneven and Combined Development

Introduction

The Theory of Uneven and Combined Development: Exposition and Critiques
Unevenness
Combination
Seeing Through a Prism Darkly? Uneven and Combined Development beyond the Eurocentric Gaze

Trotsky beyond Trotsky? Uneven and Combined Development before Capitalism
More Questions than Answers: Method, Abstraction, and Historicity in Marx’s Thought
Modes of Production Versus Uneven and Combined Development? A False Antithesis

Conclusion: Towards an ‘Internationalist Historiography’ of Capitalism

Chapter 3 The Long Thirteenth Century: Structural Crisis, Conjunctural Catastrophe

Introduction

Pax Mongolica as a Vector of Uneven and Combined Development
The Nomadic Mode of Production and Uneven and Combined Development
The World-Historical Significance of the Mongol Empire
Trade, Commerce, and Socio-Economic Development under the Pax Mongolica

Apocalypse Then: The Black Death and the Crisis of Feudalism
Class Struggle and the Changing Balance of Class Forces in Europe
Peasant Differentiation in the Age of the Black Death
Development of the Productive Forces

Conclusion

Chapter 4 The Ottoman-Habsburg Rivalry over the Long 16th Sixteenth  Century

Introduction

Unevenness: A Clash of Social Reproduction
Ottoman–European Relations
The Tributary and Feudal Modes of Production: Unevenness Combined
Ottoman ‘Penalties of Progressiveness’ – European ‘Privileges of Backwardness’

Combination: Pax Ottomana and European Trade
The Ottoman ‘Whip of External Necessity’
The Breakdown of Christendom
The Ottoman Blockade and the Emergence of the Atlantic
The Ottoman Buffer and English Primitive Accumulation

Conclusion: The Ottoman Empire as a Vector of Uneven and Combined Development

Chapter 5 The Atlantic Sources of European Capitalism, Territorial Sovereignty and the Modern Self

Introduction

Imagining Europe in the Atlantic Mirror: Rethinking the Territorialised Sovereign, Self and Other
Tearing Down the Ideological Walls of Christendom: From Sacred to Secular Universalism in the Construction of the European Self and non-European Other
Legitimising Colonialism: The Historical Sociological Foundations of Eurocentrism
Culture Wars in the Americas
The Colonial Origins of the Modern Territorialised States Systems

1492 in the History of Uneven and Combined Development
The Smithian Moment: American Treasures and So-Called Primitive Accumulation
Sublating the Smithian Moment: From Smith to Marx via ‘the International’
Primitive Accumulation Proper: From ‘Simple’ to ‘Expanded’ Reproduction

The Uneven and Combined Development of Plantation Slavery
The Sociological Unevenness of the Atlantic
Sociological Combination in the Plantation System

New World Slavery and the Rise of Industrial Capitalism
Contributions to the Sphere of Circulation
Contributions to the Sphere of Production

Conclusion: Colonies, Merchants and the Transition to Capitalism

Chapter 6 The ‘Classical’ Bourgeois Revolutions in the History of Uneven and Combined Development

Introduction

The Concept of Bourgeois Revolution
Reconceptualising Bourgeois Revolutions: A Consequentialist Approach
Reconstructing Consequentialism through Uneven and Combined Development

The Origins of Capitalism and the Bourgeois Revolution in the Low Countries
The Rise of Dutch Capitalism: An International Perspective
The Making of the Dutch Revolt

The English Revolution in the History of Uneven and Combined Development
Rediscovering the British Revolution
Social Forces in the Making of the British Revolution

1789 in the History of Uneven and Combined Development
Peculiarities of the French Revolution?
Capitalism and the Absolutist State in France
The Origins of the Capitalist Revolution in France
Capitalist Consequences of the French Revolution

Conclusion

Chapter 7 Combined Encounters: Dutch Colonisation in South-East Asia and the Contradictions of ‘Free Labour’

Introduction

The Specificity and Limits of Dutch Capitalism
Dutch Institutional Innovations
The Limits of Dutch ‘Domestic’ Capitalism

Unevenness and Combination in the Pre-Colonial Indian Ocean Littoral
The Intersocietal System of the Indian Ocean
South Asia beyond the Eurocentric Gaze

The Dutch Encounter: A Policy of Combination
The Specificities and ‘Success’ of Dutch Strategies of Integration and Domination in
South-East Asia
The Moluccas
The Banda Islands
Indian Textiles

Conclusion

Chapter 8 Origins of the Great Divergence over the Longue Durée: Rethinking the ‘Rise of the West’

Introduction

Rethinking the ‘Rise of the West’: Advances and Impasses in the Revisionist Challenge
Points of Agreement: European ‘Backwardness’ and the Role of the Colonies
Late and Lucky: Contingences, the Eurasian Homogeneity Thesis, and the Great Divergence

Structure and Conjuncture in the ‘Rise of the West’
The Geopolitical Competition Model and Its Limits
Feudalism, Merchants, and the European States System in the Transition to Capitalism
Unevenness Combined: North-South Interactions in the ‘Rise of the West’

The Conjunctural Moment of ‘Overtaking’: Britain’s Colonisation of India
The Significance of India’s Colonisation to the ‘Rise of the West’
The Mughal Empire and the Tributary Mode of Production
The Imperial Revenue System and Agricultural Decline in the Mughal Empire
European Trade and Colonial Conquest: Towards 1757

Conclusion

Conclusion

Notes
Index

Norbert Elias, What is Sociology? London: Hutchinson, and New York: Columbia University Press, 1978, 187 pp. Translated from German by Grace Morrissey and Stephen Mennell, from Was ist Sociologie? (Munich: Juventa, 1970).

Note that although the title of Elias's book may suggest that it is intended as a first-year introductory textbook (and both the German and British publishers probably hoped to sell it as such, it is in fact the nearest Elias ever came to a systematic exposition of his general theoretical stance. It is probably too demanding for most beginning students of sociology, although it is interesting to note that the German edition has remained in print and continues to sell.

Este trabajo –parafraseando a Descartes- es un discurso sobre el método y la necesidad de reposicionar el sujeto en el proceso de construcción de conocimiento. Para ello nos proponemos esbozar algunas consideraciones que esperamos sirvan como disparadores para abrir horizontes de un debate urgente. Con este objetivo planteamos el documento en tres ámbitos que procuran articularse: El primero llama la atención sobre la necesidad de pensar el método en tanto postura y su relación con lo que podemos llamar la “subjetividad epistémica”. El segundo avanza en esta perspectiva con la intensión de presentar algunas reflexiones sobre la construcción de los objetos de estudios, específicamente de los sujetos sociales qua objetos y algunos procesos metodológicos involucrados. Finalmente exponemos el esqueleto metodológico de una investigación realizada sobre el Movimiento de Desocupados en Argentina.

This article discusses the transformation of the Moroccan state under contemporary neoliberal globalization, and considers what this transition means for the ways in which scholars view state-society interplay in Morocco and the Arab world more generally. Specifically, it examines the protest of unemployed graduates in Morocco, suggesting that public demonstrations are not only a means to communicate and mobilize demands, but also a technology to reclaim and reproduce a particular “truth” in public. This truth does not necessarily equate with the reality of the neoliberal state as a dispersed material force. As such, by looking at the case of Morocco, we hope to instigate further debate on the nature of the state and its specific relation to phenomena as globalization, society and social protest.