A state-of-the-field survey of historical sociology, Remaking Modernity assesses the field’s past accomplishments and peers into the future, envisioning changes to come. The seventeen essays in this collection reveal the potential of historical sociology to transform understandings of social and cultural change. The volume captures an exciting new conversation among historical sociologists that brings a wider interdisciplinary project to bear on the problems and prospects of modernity.

The contributors represent a wide variety of theoretical orientations and a broad spectrum of understandings of what constitutes historical sociology. They address such topics as religion, war, citizenship, markets, professions, gender and welfare, colonialism, ethnicity, bureaucracy, revolutions, collective action, and the modernist social sciences themselves. Remaking Modernity includes a significant introduction in which the editors consider prior orientations in historical sociology in order to analyze the field’s resurgence. They show how current research is building on and challenging previous work through attention to institutionalism, rational choice, the cultural turn, feminist theories and approaches, and colonialism and the racial formations of empire.

Contributors
Julia Adams
Justin Baer
Richard Biernacki
Bruce Carruthers
Elisabeth Clemens
Rebecca Jean Emigh
Russell Faeges
Philip Gorski
Roger Gould
Meyer Kestnbaum
Edgar Kiser
Ming-Cheng Lo
Zine Magubane
Ann Shola Orloff
Nader Sohrabi
Margaret Somers
Lyn Spillman
George Steinmetz

Julia Adams is Professor of Sociology at Yale University. She is the author of The Familial State: Ruling Families and Merchant Capitalism in Early Modern Europe. Elisabeth Clemens is Associate Professor of Sociology at the University of Chicago. She is the author of The People’s Lobby: Organizational Innovation and the Rise of the Interest Group. Ann Shola Orloff is Professor of Sociology at Northwestern University. Her most recent book is States, Markets, Families: Gender, Social Policy, and Liberalism in Australia, Canada, Great Britain, and the United States (with Julia O’Connor and Sheila Shaver).

  

  

  

  

Acknowledgments xi
Julia Adams, Elisabeth S. Clemens, and Ann Shola Orloff; Introduction: Social Theory, Modernity and the Three Waves of Historical Sociology 1
Part I Historical Sociology and Epistemological Underpinnings
Richard Biernacki; The Action Turn? Comparative-Historical Inquiry beyond the Classical Models of Conduct 75
Zine Magubene; Overlapping Territories and Intertwined Histories: Historical Sociology's Global Imagination 92
George Steinmetz; The Epistemological Unconscious of U.S. Sociology and the Transition to Post-Fordism: The Case of Historical Sociology 109
Part II State Formation and Historical Sociology
Philip S. Gorski; The Return of the Repressed: Religion and the Political Unconscious of Historical Sociology 161
Ann Shola Orloff; Social Provision and Regulation: Theories of States, Social Policies, and Modernity 190
Edgar Kiser and Justin Baer; The Bureaucratization of States: Toward an Analytical Weberianism 225
Part III History and Political Contention
Meyer Kestnbaum; Mars Revealed: The Entry of Ordinary People into War among the States 249
Roger V. Gould; Historical Sociology and Collective Action 286
Nader Sohrabi; Revolutions as Pathways to Modernity 300
Part IV Capitalism, Modernity, and the Economic Realm
Bruce G. Carruthers; Historical Sociology and the Economy: Actors, Networks, and Context 333
Rebecca Jean Emigh; The Great Debates: Transitions to Capitalisms 355
Ming-Cheng M. Lo; The Professions: Prodigal Daughters of Modernity 381
Part V Politics, History, and Collective Identities
Lyn Spillman and Russell Faeges; Nations 409
Margaret R. Somers; Citizenship Troubles: Genealogies of Struggle for the Soul of the Social 438
Rogers Brubaker; Ethnicity without Groups 470
Elisabeth S. Clemens; Afterword: Logics of History? Agency, Multiplicity, and Incoherence in the Explanation of Change 493
References 517
Contributors 599
Index 603