Full Description
Until recently, dominant theoretical paradigms in the comparative social sciences did not highlight states as organizational structures or as potentially autonomous actors. Indeed, the term 'state' was rarely used. Current work, however, increasingly views the state as an agent which, although influenced by the society that surrounds it, also shapes social and political processes. The contributors to this volume, which includes some of the best recent interdisciplinary scholarship on states in relation to social structures, make use of theoretically engaged comparative and historical investigations to provide improved conceptualizations of states and how they operate. Each of the book's major parts presents a related set of analytical issues about modern states, which are explored in the context of a wide range of times and places, both contemporary and historical, and in developing and advanced-industrial nations. The first part examines state strategies in newly developing countries. The second part analyzes war making and state making in early modern Europe, and discusses states in relation to the post-World War II international economy. The third part pursues new insights into how states influence political cleavages and collective action. In the final chapter, the editors bring together the questions raised by the contributors and suggest tentative conclusions that emerge from an overview of all the articles. As a programmatic work that proposes new directions for the analysis of modern states, the volume will appeal to a wide range of teachers and students of political science, political economy, sociology, history, and anthropology.
Contents
Preface; Introduction; 1. Bringing the state back in: strategies of analysis in current research Theda Skocpol; Part I. States as Promoters of Economic Development and Social Redistribution: 2. The state and economic transformation: toward an analysis of the conditions underlying effective intervention Dietrich Rueschemeyer and Peter B. Evans; 3. The state and Taiwan's economic development Alice H. Amsden; 4. State structures and the possibilities for 'Keynesian' responses to the great depression in Sweden, Britain and the United States Margaret Weir and Theda Skocpol; Part II. States and Transnational Relations: 5. War making and state making as organized crime Charles Tilly; 6. Transnational linkages and the economic role of the state: an analysis of developing and industrialized nations in the post-World War II period Peter B. Evans; 7. Small nations in an open international economy: the converging balance of state and society in Switzerland and Austria Peter Katzenstein; Part III. States and the Patterning of Social Conflicts: 8. Working-class formation and the state: nineteenth-century England in American perspective Ira Katznelson; 9. Hegemony and religious conflict: british imperial control and political cleavages in Yorubaland David D. Laitin; 10. State power and the strength of civil society in the southern cone of Latin America Alfred Stepan; Conclusion; 11. On the road toward a more adequate understanding of the state Peter B. Evans, Dietrich Rueschemeyer and Theda Skocpol; Index.
