Political Sociology

Note: Students are expected to do the common readings each week and to report on three of the optional books over the course of the seminar. This is a departmental mini-seminar, open to graduate students only.

Where to find the readings:
Free:

= Firestone Reserve/Graduate Reading Room (paper).
= Electronic reserve/Blackboard course documents or xerox.
= World Wide Web (hyperlink from syllabus).

February 6. Power: theoretical debates

Common reading
Max Weber, Economy and Society (Bedminster Press, 1968), v. 3, 941-955 ("Domination and Legitimacy"), 956-963 and 980-994 ("Bureaucracy"), 1006-1015 ("Patriarchalism and Patrimonialism"), 1111-1135 and 1148-1156 ("Charisma and Its Transformations").
Nelson W. Polsby, "How to Study Community Power: The Pluralist Alternative," Journal of Politics 22 (Aug., 1960), 474-484.
Steven Lukes, Power: A Radical View, 2nd ed. (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005). [Note: Second edition is drastically different from the first.]

• Option 1:
  
  Michel Foucault, Power/Knowledge ((New York: Pantheon, 1980).
  
• Option 2:
  
  James C. Scott, Domination and the Arts of Resistance: Hidden Transcripts (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1990).

February 13. States and state-building

Common reading
Gianfranco Poggi, The Development of the Modern State (Stanford University Press, 1978), 1-15, 86-116.
Michael Mann, “The Autonomous Power of the State: Its Origins, Mechanisms, and Results,” in John A. Hall, ed., States in History (Oxford: Blackwell, 1986). 109-36
Charles Tilly, "War Making and State Making as Organized Crime," in Peter R. Evans, Dietrich Ruesdchemeyer, and Theda Skocpol, eds., Bringing the State Back In (Cambridge University Press, 1985), 169-191.
Paul Starr, Freedom's Power (Basic Books, 2007), Chs. 1-2.


• Option 1
  
  Charles Tilly, Coercion, Capital, and European States, AD 990-1990 (Basil Blackwell, 1990).
• Option 2
  
  Phillip Gorski, The Disciplinary Revolution: Calvinism and the Rise of the State in Modern Europe (University of Chicago Press, 2003).
• Option 3
  
  Theda Skocpol, States and Social Revolutions (Cambridge University Press, 1979).
  
• Option 4
  
  Bruce D. Porter, War and the Rise of the State: The Military Foundations of Modern Politics (Free Press, 1994).

February 20. Origins and consequences of democracy

Common reading
Seymour Martin Lipset, Political Man: The Social Bases of Politics (Doubleday, 1960), Ch. 2.
Adam Przeworski, Democracy and Development: Political Institutions and Material Well-Being in the World, 1950-1990 (Cambridge University Press, 2000), Chs. 1-3.
Carles Boix, Democracy and Redistribution (Cambridge University Press, 2003), pages 1-11.
• Option 1
  
  Barrington Moore, Social Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy (Beacon Press 1966).
  
• Option 2
  
  Dietrich Rueschemeyer, Evelyne Huber Stephens, and John D. Stephens, Capitalist Development and Democracy (University of Chicago Press, 1992).
• Option 3
  
  Samuel Huntington, The Third Wave: Democratization in the Late Twentieth Century (University of Oklahoma Press, 1991).
  

February 27. Capitalism and the welfare state

Common reading
Joseph Schumpeter, Capitalism, Socialism, and Democracy, 3d ed. (Harper & Row, 1950 [orig. ed. 1942]), Ch. 7 (81-86), Ch. 11-12 (120-55).
T.H. Marshall, "Citizenship and Social Class," in Citizenship and Social Class, and Other Essays (Cambridge University Press, 1950), 1-85.
• Option 1
  
  Karl Polanyi, The Great Transformation (Beacon Press, 1965).
  
• Option 2
  
  Gosta Esping-Andersen, The Three Worlds of Welfare Capitalism (Princeton University Press, 1990).
• Option 3
  
  Jonas Pontusson, Inequality and Prosperity: Social Europe vs. Liberal America (Cornell University Press, 2005).

March 6. American politics and state formation in comparative perspective

Common reading
Seymour Martin Lipset, Continental Divide: The Values and Institutions of the United States and Canada (Routledge, 1990), Chs. 1-3.
Stephen Skowronek, Building a New American State (Cambridge University Press, 1982), 3-33 (Chs. 1-2).
Ira Katznelson, "Rewriting the Epic of America," in Ira Katznelson and Martin Shefter, eds., Shaped by War and Trade: International Influences on American Political Development (Princeton University Press, 2002), 3-23.

• Option 1
  
  Gordon Wood, The Radicalism of the American Revolution (Random House, 1991).
  
• Option 2
  
  Richard Bensel, Yankee Leviathan: The Origins of Central State Authority in America 1859-1877 (Cambridge University Press, 1990), Chs. 1-3.
• Option 3
  
  Aaron L. Friedberg, In the Shadow of the Garrison State: America's Anti-Statism and Its Cold War Grand Strategy (Princeton University Press, 2000), Introduction, Chs. 1-3, 9.
• Option 4
  
  Alberto Alesina and Edward Glaeser, Fighting Poverty in the U.S. and Europe (Oxford University Press, 2004).

March 13. States, nations, and civil society

Common reading
Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America, vol. 1, ch. 12 ("Political Associations in The United States"); vol. 2, Sec. 2, Ch. 2 ("Of Individualism in Democratic Countries"), Ch. 4 ("That the Americans Combat the Effects of Individualism with Free Institutions"), Ch. 5 ("Of the Uses which the Americans Make of Public Associations").
Robert Putnam, Bowling Alone (Simon and Schuster, 2000), Chs. 1-3.
Philippe C. Schmitter, " Still the Century of Corporatism?" Review of Politics 36 (1974): 85-131.
Robert H. Salisbury, " Why No Corporatism in America? " in Skocpol and Campbell, eds., American Society and Politics, pp. 271-280.
• Option 1
  
  Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities rev. ed (London: Verso, 1991).
• Option 2
  
  Robert Putnam, Making Democracy Work: Civic Traditions in Modern Italy (Princeton University Press, 1993).
  
• Option 3
  
  Michael Schudson, The Good Citizen (New York: Free Press, 1998), 1-10; 90-132; 144-187; 294-314.