Political Sociology General Comprehensive Exams: Reading List
DAY ONE
Fall 2013
Power
1. Bourdieu, Pierre. 1977. Outline of a Theory of Practice. Trans. Richard Nice. Cambridge.
("Structures and the Habitus;" "Structures, Habitus, Power: Basis for a Theory of Symbolic
Power")
2. Connell, R.W. 1987. Gender and Power: Society, the Person, and Sexual Politics. Stanford:
Stanford University Press. (334)
3. Fanon, Frantz. 1963. The Wretched of the Earth. Pref. J.P. Sartre. Grove. (241)
4. Foucault, Michel. 1979. Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison. Pantheon.
5. Habermas, Jurgen. 1989. The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere. M.I.T. (251)
6. Lukes, Steven. 2005. Power: A Radical View. Palgrave Macmillan
7. Mann, Michael. 1986. Excerpts from The Sources of Social Power. Cambridge.
8. Marx, Karl, and Frederich Engels. 1972. The Marx-Engels Reader. Ed. Robert C. Tucker.
Norton. ("The German Ideology”, “Communist Manifesto;” "Preface to a Contribution to the
Critique of Political Economy”)
9. Somers, Margaret. 1995. “What’s Political or Cultural about Political Culture and the Public
Sphere? Toward a Historical Sociology of Concept Formation.” Sociological Theory 13: 11344.
10. Weber, Max. [1968]. Economy and Society, v. 3, 941-955 ("Domination and Legitimacy"),
956-963 and 980-994 ("Bureaucracy"), 1006-1015 ("Patriarchalism and Patrimonialism"),
1111-1135 and 1148-1156 ("Charisma and Its Transformations")
11. Weber, Max. 1946. From Max Weber: Essays in Sociology. Eds. and trans. Hans H. Gerth and
C. Wright Mills. Oxford. (“Politics as a Vocation;” “Class, Status and Party”)
12. Said, Edward. 1978. Orientalism. New York: Vintage Books. (352)
13. Gramsci, Antonio Selections from the Prison Notebooks. (“The Intellectuals,” “State and Civil
Society”)
State
1. Anderson, Benedict. 1983. Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of
Nationalism. Verso. (237)
2. Charrad, Mounira M. 2001. States and Women’s Rights: The Making of Postcolonial Tunisia,
Algeria, and Morocco. Berkeley: University of California Press. (341)
3. Chatterjee, Partha. 1993. The Nation and its Fragments: Colonial and Postcolonial Histories.
Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. (282)
4. Gellner, Ernest. 1983. Nations and Nationalism. Oxford: Blackwell. (150).
5. MacKinnon, Catharine. 1989.Toward a Feminist Theory of the State. Cambridge: Harvard
University Press. (330)
6. Moore, Barrington. 1966. The Social Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy: Lord and
Peasant in the Making of the Modern World. Beacon. (509)
7. Polanyi, Karl. 2001. The Great Transformation, Beacon Press
8. Skocpol “Introduction: Bringing the State Back In”. Evans, Peter; Dietrich Rueschemeyer and
Theda Skocpol. 1985. Bringing the State Back In. Cambridge University Press. (367)
9. Sewell, William H. Jr. 1992. “A Theory of Structure: Duality, Agency and Transformation.”
American Journal of Sociology 1-29.
10. Skocpol, Theda. 1979. States and Social Revolutions: A Comparative Analysis of France,
Russia and China. Cambridge University Press.
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11. Tilly, Charles. 1992. Coercion, Capital, and European States. Cambridge, MA: Blackwell.
(228)
12. Gorski, Philip. 2003. Disciplinary Revolution: Calvinism and the Rise of the State in Modern
Europe. University Of Chicago Press
13. Wacquant, Loic. 2007. Punishing the Poor: The Neoliberal Government of Social Insecurity.
Duke University Press.
14. James C. Scott. 1999. Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human
Condition Have Failed. Yale University Press.
Social Movements
1. Auyero, Javier. 2007. Routine Politics and Violence in Argentina: the Grey Zone of State
Power. Cambridge University Press.
2. Benford, Robert D. and David A. Snow. 2000. "Framing Processes and Social Movements: An
Overview and Assessment." Annual Review of Sociology 26: 11-39. (28)
3. Harvey, David. 2007. A Brief History of Neoliberalism. Oxford University Press. (206)
4. McAdam, Doug, John McCarthy, and Mayer Zald. 1996. Comparative Perspectives on Social
Movements: Political Opportunities, Mobilizing Structures, and Cultural Framings.
Cambridge. (357)
5. *Goodwin, Jeff and James Jasper. 1999. “Caught in a Winding, Snarling Vine: The Structural
Bias of Political Process Theory.” Sociological Forum 14: 27-54. (27)
6. McAdam, Doug, Sidney Tarrow, and Charles Tilly. 2001. Dynamics of Contention
Cambridge; New York: Cambridge University Press.
7. Melucci, Alberto. 1998. Challenging Codes. New York: Cambridge University. Chapters 1
and 2.
8. Tarrow, Sidney. 1994. Power in Movement: Social Movements, Collective Action, and
Politics. Cambridge. (211)
9. Tilly, Charles. 1978. From Mobilization to Revolution. Reading, Mass.: Addison-Wesley
10. Walder. Andrew G. 2009. “Political Sociology and Social Movements,” Annual Review of
Sociology. 35: 393-412. (19)
11. Walzer, Michael. 1991. “The Idea of Civil Society” Dissent (Spring) pp. 293-304. (7)
12. Cohen, Jean. 1985. “Strategy or Identity: New Theoretical Paradigms and Contemporary
Social Movements.” Social Research 52: 663-716. (53)
13. Gould, Deborah. 2009. Moving Politics: Emotion and Act Up's Fight Against AIDS.
14. Piven, Francis Fox and Richard Cloward. 1978. Poor Peoples’ Movements: Why they Succeed,
How they Fail
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