New Critical Writings in Political Sociology Volume One: Power, State and Inequality

The first volume of the series covers the key themes of political sociology as these have emerged in the course of the (sub-)discipline's development: state formation; legitimation; power; regulation, and inequality. The widening of the focus of political sociology from the nation-state and from models of power based on agents' wills and explicit agendas is reflected in the selection. The volume includes both 'standard' and highly-influential contributions - such as Elias on violence, Habermas on legitimation crisis or Lukes on power - and works that are perhaps less well known, but which represent a representative cross-section of themes and debates in the area. The historical formation of the state and its shifting spatial reach are covered in the first and final sections respectively. In between, both substantial issues - e.g. the changing nature of social policy and welfare regimes - and a wide range of theoretical and conceptual issues - are discussed by leading representative of the vying positions within the field.

Contents: Introduction; Part I State Formation: Civilization and violence: on the state monopoly of physical violence and its infringements, Norbert Elias; Entanglements of European cities and states, Charles Tilly; The production of legal identities proper to states: the case of the permanent family surname, James C. Scott, John Tehranian and Jeremy Mathias. Part II Constitutionalism and Legitimation: The constitutional state of the 19th century: an elementary conceptual portrait, Gianfranco Poggi; What does a crisis mean today? Legitimation problems in late capitalism, Jürgen Habermas; Rethinking the state: genesis and structure of the bureaucratic field, Pierre Bourdieu. Part III Power: Power and its 2 faces revisited: a reply to Geoffrey Debnam, Peter Bachrach and Morton S. Baratz; Power and structure, Steven Lukes; The subject and power, Michel Foucault. Part IV Regulation, Governmentality and Governance: The regulation approach, governance and post-Fordism: alternative perspectives on economic and political change, Bob Jessop; Political power beyond the state: problematics of government, Nikolas Rose and Peter Miller; Against 'enterprise' (but not against 'enterprise' for that would make no sense), Paul du Gay; Globalization and the myth of the powerless state, Linda Weiss. Part V Inequality, Social Policy and Class Politics: A genealogy of dependency: tracing a keyword of the US welfare state, Nancy Fraser and Linda Gordon; Soldiers, workers and mothers: gendered identities in early US social policy, Theda Skocpol; When work disappears, William Julius Wilson; Social class in post-democracy, Colin Crouch. Part VI Global Inequalities and Their Effects: A world-system perspective on the social sciences, Immanuel Wallerstein; Global hegemony and the structural power of capital, Stephen R. Gill and David Law; Neoliberalism and the transformation of populism in Latin America: the Peruvian case, Kenneth M. Roberts. Part VII Spatial Aspects of Governance: State Spaces and Reach: Between space and time: reflections on the geographical imagination, David Harvey; Locational policy, state rescaling and the new metropolitan governance in Western Europe, Neil Brenner; Globalization or denationalization?, Saskia Sassen; Name index.

Alan Scott is Professor of Sociology, University of Innsbruck, Austria, Kate Nash is Reader in Sociology, Goldsmiths College, University of London, UK and Anna Marie Smith is Professor of Government at Cornell University, USA.