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Welcome to the official website of the Comparative and Historical Sociology section of the American Sociological Association. Please navigate the site using the contents bar to the left.
CONGRATULATIONS TO OUR 2009 SECTION AWARD WINNERS!
Barrington Moore Book Award (co-winners)
Karen Barkey, 2008. Empire of Difference: The Ottomans in Comparative Perspective. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
This book is a comparative study of imperial organization and longevity that assesses Ottoman successes as well as failures against those of other empires with similar characteristics. Barkey examines the Ottoman Empire’s social organization and mechanisms of rule at key moments of its history, emergence, imperial institutionalization, remodeling, and transition to nation-state, revealing how the empire managed these moments, adapted, and averted crises and what changes made it transform dramatically. The flexible techniques by which the Ottomans maintained their legitimacy, the cooperation of their diverse elites both at the center and in the provinces, as well as their control over economic and human resources were responsible for the longevity of this particular ‘negotiated empire’. Her analysis illuminates topics that include imperial governance, imperial institutions, imperial diversity and multiculturalism, the manner in which dissent is handled and/or internalized, and the nature of state society negotiations.
Ivan Ermakoff, 2008. Ruling Oneself Out: A Theory of Collective Abdications. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
What induces groups to commit political suicide? This book explores the decisions to surrender power and to legitimate this surrender: collective abdications. Commonsensical explanations impute such actions to coercive pressures, actors’ miscalculations, or their contamination by ideologies at odds with group interests. Ivan Ermakoff argues that these explanations are either incomplete or misleading. Focusing on two paradigmatic cases of voluntary and unconditional surrender of power—the passing of an enabling bill granting Hitler the right to amend the Weimar constitution without parliamentary supervision (March 1933), and the transfer of full executive, legislative, and constitutional powers to Marshal Pétain (Vichy, France, July 1940)—Ruling Oneself Out recasts abdication as the outcome of a process of collective alignment.
Ermakoff distinguishes several mechanisms of alignment in troubled and uncertain times and assesses their significance through a fine-grained examination of actors’ beliefs, shifts in perceptions, and subjective states. To this end, he draws on the analytical and methodological resources of perspectives that usually stand apart: primary historical research, formal decision theory, the phenomenology of group processes, quantitative analyses, and the hermeneutics of testimonies. In elaborating this dialogue across disciplinary boundaries, Ruling Oneself Out restores the complexity and indeterminate character of pivotal collective decisions and demonstrates that an in-depth historical exploration can lay bare processes of crucial importance for understanding the formation of political preferences, the paradox of self-deception, and the makeup of historical events as highly consequential.
Best Article Award
Cedric de Leon, 2008. "'No Bourgeois Mass Party, No Democracy': The Missing Link in Barrington Moore's American Civil War." Political Power and Social Theory 19: 39-82.
Statement from award committee: De Leon offers a richly detailed and persuasive account of how party politics and political discourse mediated class realignments before the U.S. Civil War, thus paving the way for the American version of bourgeois democratization suggested but inadequately explained years ago by Barrington Moore in his classic Social Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy. He successfully brings alive the political world of mid-19th century Chicago through the use of documentary evidence from multiple newspapers, ward-level voting data, and sensitivity to the particular themes and imagery of contemporary political debate. Thereby he convincingly links apparently local and contingent phenomena like local party affiliation shifts with major historical dynamics and outcomes, and with core theoretical questions in both sociology and political science raised by the work of Jeffrey Paige, Stein Rokkan, Katznelson and Zolberg, Adam Przeworski, and others. This article provides a model of how to connect historical nuance and local events with large-scale social change.
Honorable Mentions:
Statement from award committee: This article, very much a ‘classic’ piece of comparative-historical sociology with its elegant use of the comparative method, engages with some of the most substantial arguments raging in the field. In particular, it addresses the question as to why the 18th century Chinese economy did not take off as England’s did, despite having achieved a similar level of development. But it also adds 19th century Japan to the mix for a stimulating three-way comparison designed to highlight the critical variables. Hung argues persuasively that a strong urban entrepreneurial elite, protected by a state attentive to its interests (rather than paternalistically attentive to problems of social dislocation and unrest), is a necessary but neglected condition for the transition to capitalism. This constellation of factors was absent in late 18th and early 19th century China. Along the way Hung disputes accepted wisdom that the Chinese state was simply ‘anticommercial’, supports his case with archival evidence, and provides us with a clear and compelling example of how to use negative case methodology.
Statement from award committee: In this provocative article, Riga gets us to rethink the fundamental motivations underlying participation in one of the most focal/iconic phenomena studied by comparative-historical sociologists: the Russian Revolution. Through an application of the concept of intersectionality—an idea underutilized in comparative-historical sociology—she traces out the ways individuals situated in and shaped by different, ethnically charged experiences of class within an ethnicized imperial politics arrived at their enthusiasm for revolutionary universalism. Thus she argues that universalism grows out of the experience of specificity/ethnicity. The argument about the intertwining of universalist claims with situated motivations implicitly connects her work to research on the foundation and operations of colonial/imperial governance, theories of the operations of nationalism in the Soviet Union and elsewhere, and current debates on cultural globalization. These resonances are achieved all the while attending meticulously to issues involving historical sources, sampling, and measurement.
Reinhard Bendix Student Paper Award
Ateş Altinordu (Yale), "The Politicization of Religion: Political Catholicism and Political Islam in Comparison."
While religious politics has been a much discussed topic in the social sciences in recent decades, there are few studies that develop general explanations based on systematic and detailed comparative analysis. This article seeks to explain under what conditions the politicization of religion, defined as the formation of a distinct religious-political orientation and the rise of a successful religious party, tends to occur. To that end, I comparatively analyze the politicization of German Catholicism in the second half of nineteenth century (1848-1878) and the politicization of Turkish Islam in the post-1970 period (1970-2002), and briefly examine the negative case of nineteenth century German Protestantism. According to the theory of revival-reaction-politicization I propose, religion is politicized when major religious revivals confront social counter-mobilization and state repression, provided that no existing political party effectively represents concerns of religious defense.
Honorable Mention:
Wesley Hiers (UCLA), "The Colonial Roots of Racialized Polities."
Historical sociologists have posited a relationship between the colonial era and later outcomes such as economic growth, political development, and incidence of warfare. This paper continues this trend, but focuses on a different object of explanation: independence-era racialization of former European settlement colonies. Although all European settlement colonies fostered relations of dominance between European and non-European peoples based principally on settlers’ ability to exploit land and/or labor, the nation-states that emerged from this context were not uniformly racialized. Some, like the United States and South Africa, became racialized polities based on the dominance of ‘whites,’ while others, such as Cuba and Brazil, did not. The existing literature seeking to explain this variation suffers from a number of shortcomings, including selection on the dependent variable and a failure to consider the empirical adequacy of the theory in relation to the full universe of cases. Avoiding these flaws, this paper argues that the development (or not) of racialized polities in the independence era was linked to the prior degree and kind of imperial control. Through empire-wide comparisons (British and Iberian) and comparisons among former British settlement colonies, this analysis demonstrates the relationship between high degrees of settler autonomy during the colonial era and the subsequent development of a racialized polity in the nation-state period.