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Historical Sociology - Syllabus
Abstracts, Bibliography, Syllabus, Journals, Sociologyindex, Books on Historical Sociology, Sociology
Books 2009, Historical Sociology
Sociology 555 (Fall 2007)--Comparative Historical Sociology
Syllabus
Instructor: Professor Matthew Lange
Email: matthew.lange@mcgill.ca
Course Overview
Comparative historical sociology has an enormously rich research tradition and includes
the works of such renowned sociologists as Theda Skocpol, Max Weber, and Charles Tilly.
Scholars following this research tradition generally ask huge questions and analyze large
structures and long processes. What caused the emergence of effective states in Western
Europe? Why did the West industrialize before other regions of the world? What causes
social revolutions?
In this course, we focus on the methods behind comparative historical analysis, trying to
understand the bases upon which comparative historical scholars make their gigantic
claims. The goal of the course is to provide students with an understanding of what
comparative historical sociology is, to acquaint them with major works, to consider
contemporary debates, and to provide them with knowledge about the methodological
underpinnings of the research tradition.
Comparative Historical Sociology SYA5355 Syllabus
Professor: Marc Dixon
COURSE DESCRIPTION & OBJECTIVES
This course provides an overview of important themes, debates, and agendas in historical
sociology. One objective is to help students understand, appreciate, and critique
important works in this area. Readings will include both exemplary substantive
contributions to historical sociology and works pertaining specifically to problems of
methodology and theory. In addition, by providing a forum to discuss important theoretical
and methodological issues in the field and by pushing students to grapple with these
issues relative to their own research projects, this class will help students develop the
skills necessary to become a critical, informed researcher, and consumer of the many
analytic tools at the historical sociologist’s disposal.
REQUIRED READING
Skocpol, Theda. 1979. States and Social Revolutions. Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press.
144 Historical sociology Unit information 2008–09 Syllabus
Historical sociology is a wide-ranging subject that explores in depth the
historical ‘roots’ of contemporary social, economic and political conditions.
This unit looks in detail at some of the processes that contributed to the formation of
key aspects of the ‘modern’ world. There are many possible ways of approaching
historical sociology. In this unit, students focus on the complex range of factors that
were at work in the rise of the modern state. By focusing in this way, students will be
able to examine a range of sociological ideas about social, political and institutional
change.
Learning outcomes
At the end of this unit and having completed the essential reading and activities students
should: be able to understand the conditions and processes that have contributed to the
development of key aspects of the contemporary world; be able to locate contemporary
social phenomena in a historical context; be able to recognise the ways that philosophies
and theories of history have shaped the ways that we understand processes of historical
and social change; have developed critical and reflexive skills in relation to the
analysis of contemporary social phenomena and their historical contexts; have developed a
critical understanding of the conditions that have privileged notions of western
‘modernity’ in comparison to other social formations, both historical and
geographical.
Prerequisite
If taken as part of a BSc degree, units which must be passed before this unit may be
attempted:
Aims and objectives
This unit is designed to:
examine the historical development of key social and political formations of the modern
world
enable students to recognise and understand different ways in which historical change has
been conceptualised in different theoretical traditions.
Essential reading
Hall, S. and B. Glieben Formations of modernity. (Polity Press, 1992) [ISBN
9780745609607].
Goldthorpe, J H. ‘The Uses of History in Sociology: Reflections on Some Recent
Tendencies’, The British Journal of Sociology 42(2) 1991, pp. 211–230.
Mann, M. ‘In Praise of Macro-Sociology: a Reply to Goldthorpe’, The British
Journal of Sociology 45(1) 1994, pp. 37–54.
Syllabus
This is a description of the material to be examined, as published in the Regulations. On
registration, students will receive a detailed subject guide which provides a framework
for covering the topics in the syllabus and directions to the essential reading.
Sociology and history. A critical introduction to theories and ideas about the nature and
meaning of historical change and development in Enlightenment, Hegelian, Marxist,
neo-Marxist, liberal and post-structuralist and postcolonial thought; an introduction to
historical sociology as a sub-discipline and the relationship between history and
sociology as disciplines; a consideration of the centrality of the state and its
development to historical sociological traditions; the emergence and development of the
state form in different historical/sociological perspectives.
The emergence of the early modern state. A survey of historical state forms through
ancient empires, the feudal state to the early modern state; a comparison of ancient
‘imperial’, feudal and early modern state forms; consideration of theoretical
models that describe the transition from feudal to early modern states.
The development of the modern state. Key concerns in the formation of liberal democratic,
welfare and ‘totalitarian’ states; examination of continuities and
discontinuities between absolutist, liberal democratic/welfare, constitutional and
‘totalitarian’ state forms; consideration of questions of revolution and social
change, governmentality, ‘population’ and the emergence of
‘bio-political’ concerns.
Nationalism and imperialism. An examination of the centrality of nationalism in the
nineteenth and twentieth centuries; a consideration of European colonial and imperial
expansionism in the same period.
Globalisation, the postcolonial situation and neo-imperialism. A consideration of the
emergence of ‘globalisation’; theoretical models of ‘globalisation’
and their historical context; an examination of contemporary geo-political formations in a
historical context.
GHIS 6127 Foundations of Sociology II: Sociology and History - Syllabus New School
University - Eiko Ikegami
This course examines sociology as understood in historical context. Students examine major
theoretical works as products of the times and social conditions in which they were
written, with the aim of cultivating a better understanding of the dialectical
relationship between social knowledge and history. Course materials focus on the theory
and practice of major eighteenth- and nineteenth-century developments ranging from the
enlightenment, modernity, and state formation to the birth of the individual and modern
social institutions. The course, offered yearly, is intended to complement and deepen the
study of theory offered in Foundations of Sociology-I.
GHIS 6133 Historiography and Historical Practice - Syllabus New School University - Oz
Frankel
This course focuses on US history to examine current permutations of historiographical
interests, practices, and methodologies.
Over the last few decades, US history has been a particularly fer tile ground for
rethinking the historical, although many of these topics are applicable to the study of
other nations and societies. American history has been largely rewritten by a generation
of scholars who experienced the 1960s and its aftermath and have viewed America’s
past as a field of inquiry and contest of great political urgency. Identity politics, the
culture wars, and other forms of organization and debate have also endowed history with
unprecedented public resonance in a culture that has been notoriously amnesiac. We will
explore major trends and controversies in American historiography, the multicultural
moment in historical studies, the emergence of race and gender as cardinal categories of
historical analysis, the enormous preoccupation with popular culture, the impact of memory
studies on historical thinking, the recurrent agonizing over American exceptionalism and,
consequently, recent attempts to break the nation-state mold and to globalize American
history. Another focus will be the intersection of analytical strategies borrowed from the
social sciences and literary studies with methods and epistemologies of historicization
that originated from the historical profession.
New School University - Historical Studies
Syllabus Courses
GHIS 5140 The United States and the World - Spring 2005. New School University
David Plotke
In the second half of the twentieth century, the cold war provided a framework for
thinking about relations between the United States and the rest of the world. There was
disagreement about what the cold war meant, but there was no denying its central
importance. After the end of the cold war there has been much disagreement within the
United States about the direction of American policies and the right terms of debate. The
prominence of American military and political power is evident. But arguments continue on
all fronts. Larger and smaller US military efforts (from Iraq to Haiti) produce sharp
arguments in the United States and internationally. Debate continues about new and old
problems, from environmental regulation to human rights
enforcement to the policies of international economic institutions.
This course analyzes the place of the United States in the contemporary world. We assess
competing conceptions of how the world is and how it should be. Is the US-led battle with
terrorism and “rogue” states a means of achieving international security or the
expression of an expansive American hegemony? Does economic and social globalization
require or prevent new forms of international regulation? Will new cultural encounters
take the form of a war of civilizations or an intercultural dialogue? What do we make of
the “democratic peace” argument against claims for emergent forms of
international law and governance or claims that realism remains the best guide to
understanding international politics?
GHIS 5143 Power, Culture, and American Cities - Fall 2004. New School University
American urban ethnography has historically neglected the roles of government and politics
in shaping the parameters of urban experiences. Yet community power studies have attempted
to understand urban power relations formalistically, bypassing the study of urban
residents’ daily lives. As a result, we have two scholarly literatures that provide
useful but incomplete visions of
modern urban life. This course brings together these two perspectives. Readings and
discussions will engage with both literatures, folding in considerations of race,
ethnicity, and gender in American city life, with a focus on the relation between culture
and political economy. We reconstruct the history of the different tracks of urban studies
in the United States, starting
with its roots in anthropology and sociology in the Chicago school and in political
science in reform-oriented studies of public administration. We revisit the community
power debate of the 1950s through the 1970s, which shook out largely along disciplinary
lines, and examine the development of the urban political economy perspective of the 1980s
and 1990s, as well as
developments within US urban anthropology. We employ local case study materials, and at
every point we try to understand the trajectories of urbanism discourses in relation to
urban politics and policy.
GHIS 5150 Hegemony and Empire - New School University Syllabus
Eli Zaretsky
There are at present two important historical explanations of America’s world
predominance. On the one hand, Giovanni
Arrighi’s Long Twentieth Century argues that capitalism is a social system which, in
a sense, reinvents itself every hundred years.
In his account, American predominance rests on its invention of mass consumption and the
vertically integrated corporation. On the other hand, Philip Bobbitt’s Shield of
Achilles - working from an equally capacious historical theory—explains American
hegemony as the synthesis between its domestic legal regime and geopolitical order. While
Arrighi offers economics without politics, Bobbitt offers politics without economics. In
this course we will explore the possibilities of combining the two theories.
Other authors to be read include John Mearsheimer, Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Perry
Anderson, Samantha Powers, Robert Brenner, and Immanuel Wallerstein.
GHIS 5164 The Rise and Fall of New World Slavery - Syllabus New School University
Robin Blackburn
This course surveys the whole trajectory of slavery in the New World from the sixteenth to
the close of the nineteenth century.
The evolution of conceptions of empire, slavery, and race in early modern Europe are
placed in the context of state rivalry, cultural history, political economy, and class
struggle. The Baroque empires of the Iberian peninsula and France are contrasted with the
commercial and Protestant ethos of the English and Dutch. The role of capitalism in the
rise of the plantation and the
reasons for the planters’ increasing reliance on the labor of captive Africans are
explored. The paradox that slavery had almost died out in Western Europe on the eve of
colonization, yet was to grow to enormous scale in the Americas is addressed.
Contrasts between North America, the Caribbean, and South America are drawn and of the way
the slave regimes of these lands helped to supply the central thrust of the Atlantic
economy and capital accumulation. The course will interrogate the nature of the slave
regime in these zones and of the rivalries, revolts, and revolutions that they stimulated.
The contribution of slave testimony and resistance to abolitionist mobilization will be
explored as well as that of free people of color. The course will conclude with
consideration of the achievements and limitations of emancipation and the continuing
legacy of slavery.
GHIS 6134 Historical Methods and Sources - Syllabus New School University
Julián Casanova
This course is meant as an introduction to twentieth-century European historiography and
to the different methods of historical research and of writing history. After an overview
of the diverse answers to the basic questions—What is history? How to write
history?— the course will trace the main trends in the development of European
historiography from historicism to
postmodernism. Special attention will be paid to the emergence of social history as a
reaction to the dominant political history and historicism of the nineteenth century and
its crystallization in different national variants: the French Annales, the British
Marxist historians and “history from below,” and the German and Italian schools
of social history. Following a discussion of the
interdisciplinary dialogue and the debates between social history and the social sciences,
particularly historical sociology, the course will conclude with a review of the most
recent trends: the crisis of social history, the postmodern and poststructuralist
challenges, the revival of narrative and the fragmentation of the nation, and the new
dialogue with anthropology, literature, and cultural studies.
GHIS 6155 Globalization and Anticapitalism in Historical Perspective - Syllabus New School
University
Robin Blackburn
This course will present an account of the origins and development of globalization, of
the social and political traditions that have contested capitalism, and of the new forms
of collectivism in the modern world. The legacy and debates of nineteenth- and
twentiethcentury socialism, liberalism, and anarchism will be reconsidered in the light of
the experience of the twentieth century.
The ideas of Marx and Proudhon, Engels and Bakunin, Kautsky and Lenin, Bauer and
Bernstein, Trotsky and Luxemburg, the
Fabians and the syndicalists, Mao and Fidel Castro, Keynes and Beveridge, Polanyi and
Bookchin, and Fanon and C.L.R.
James will be scrutinized and shown to have continued bearing on the new forms of
capitalism and collectivism in the twenty-first century. The calculation debate of the
thirties and forties, which pitted Mises and Hayek against Oskar Lange and Maurice Dobb,
will be reexamined. The legacy of struggles for universal social security in the advanced
countries will be presented for the light it can shed on inequality and insecurity in the
modern world. The question will be posed as to how today’s new social movements and
anticapitalism can measure up to new forms of corporate and financial power. The role of
money managers and institutional funds in globalization will be explored. The potential of
consumers’ campaigns, cultural contestation, social trade unionism, environmentalism,
and pension fund activism will be assessed in terms of their capacity to strengthen
democracy and mount an effective challenge to capitalist power.
GHIS 6240 State, Culture, and Identity - Syllabus New School University
Eiko Ikegami
The central concerns of this course are to explore, historically and comparatively, social
processes in which various types of personal collective and categorical identities are
formulated and revised, and further, to examine the dynamic relationship between culture
and state formation in an attempt to advance beyond more conventional studies of the
emergence of national states. Readings focus on issues as diverse as etiquette, manners,
national identities, and aesthetic tastes, as well as more routinely examined social
categories of social identity. The course also looks at classical works on state formation
and then moves on to more innovative approaches that deepen our understanding of the
interaction between culture and political structure and practices.
GHIS 6256 Gender, Politics, and History - Syllabus New School University
Elaine Abelson
This course approaches the history of women from the vantage point of feminist scholarship
and theories about gender. We will examine the social, economic, and political positions
of women (and men) in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries in order to explore and
evaluate structures of inequality, racial categories, and debates about the nature and
role of women in the United
States.
The construction of gender is shaped by concrete historical, social, and cultural factors,
and the goal of the course will be to integrate history and theory in order to more fully
understand the social construction of knowledge and “truth” as well as the
categories that govern our understanding of gender.
GHIS 6801 Revolutions and Civil Wars - Syllabus New School University
Julián Casanova
The comparative historical analysis of revolutions and civil wars calls for
interdisciplinary dialogue between sociology, political science, and history. Revolutions
and civil wars bring radical changes in social structures as well as in states’
functions and political structures that must be studied both internally and
internationally. After an introductory overview of the main
interpretative frameworks offered by sociology, political science, and historiography, the
course will turn its focus to a critical review of the most recent sociohistorical
research and debates concerning revolutions and civil wars in Europe from 1914 to 1945,
with special emphasis on the Russian Revolution and the Spanish Civil War. Students will
be encouraged to develop
comparisons with other time periods and other regions of the world.
GHIS 6808 Culture and the Social History of Truth - Syllabus New School University
Ann Laura Stoler
This course explores the relationship between regimes of truth, historical inquiry, and
ethnographic practice. How we imagine we can know the past is contingent on what we take
to be truth claims about the past, who we take to be credible witnesses, and what kinds of
evidence we marshal to construct historical accounts. Drawing on the work of Steven
Shapin, Hayden White, Michel Foucault, Natalie Davis, and scholars of historical
ethnography, we will look at hierarchies of credibility (documents, testimony, memory,
rumor, visual vs. verbal evidence) that scholars use and that contemporary and historical
actors may differently marshal to assert historical claims. Readings will be drawn from
truth and reconciliation reports, court cases, philosophy, literature, history, and
anthropology. This course is required for PhD students in Anthropology.
Historical Sociology - Journals
Abstracts, Bibliography, Syllabus, Journals, Sociologyindex, Books on Historical Sociology, Sociology
Books 2009, Historical Sociology
The Journal of Historical Sociology. - Edited by a distinguished
international panel of historians, anthropologists, geographers and sociologists, the
Journal of Historical Sociology is both interdisciplinary in approach and innovative in
content.-
History in Focus is a new occasional series taking a
thematic approach to history. Each issue is designed to provide an introduction to the
chosen topic and to help stimulate interest and debate. The series will concentrate on
highlighting books, reviews, web sites and conferences that relate to the theme, in order
to provide a quality assured information resource for learning and teaching. History in
Focus will provide a snapshot of resources and events at the time of issue. -
http://ihr.sas.ac.uk/ihr/Focus/index.html
Journal of Political Ecology: Case Studies in History and
Society - On-line content, with articles and book reviews on anthropology,
environment, and place. - http://www.library.arizona.edu/ej/jpe/jpeweb.html
Books on historical sociology:
- Vision
and Method in Historical Sociology
- Historical
Sociology of International Relations
- Historical
Sociology of Race and Class
- Historical
Sociology of Nuclear Missile Guidance
- Historical
Sociology and Political Pluralism
- The
Rational Choice Controversy in Historical Sociology
- Historical
Sociology of Education and Stratification
- Reflexive
Historical Sociology
- Max
Weber's Comparative Historical Sociology
- Essays
in Historical Sociology
- Historical
Sociology International Library
- Resistance
in Belize: Essays in Historical Sociology
- Foucaults
Methods and Historical Sociology
- The
Rise of Historical Sociology
- Introduction
to Cultural Historical Sociology
- Handbook
of Historical Sociology
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