Proposed Political Sociology Reading List
Fall 2006
Core List
Anderson, Benedict. 1983. Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of
Nationalism. Verso.
Bell, Daniel. 1973. The Coming of Post-Industrial Society. New York. Basic Books
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")
Charrad, Mounira M. 2001. States and Women’s Rights: The Making of Postcolonial Tunisia,
Algeria, and Morocco. University of California.
Foucault, Michel. 1979. Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison. Pantheon.
Habermas, Jurgen. 1989. The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere. M.I.T.
Hobsbawm, Eric and Terence Ranger, eds. 1992. The Invention of Tradition. Cambridge.
Huntington, Samuel P. 1996. The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order. Simon
& Schuster.
Lipset, Seymour Martin. (1960; revised 1981) Political Man: The Social Bases of Politics. Johns
Hopkins.
Luker, Kristin. 1984. Abortion and the Politics of Motherhood. University of California.
Mann, Michael. 1986. The Sources of Social Power, 2 vols. Cambridge.
Marshall, T. H. and Tom Bottomore. 1992. Citizenship and Social Class. Pluto.
Marx, Karl, and Frederich Engels. 1972. The Marx-Engels Reader. Ed. Robert C. Tucker.
Norton. ("Class Struggle in France;" “Critique of Hegel's Philosophy of Right:
Introduction;” “Communist Manifesto;” "Preface to a Contribution to the Critique
of Political Economy”)
Michels, Robert. 1966. Political Parties: A Sociological Study of the Oligarchical Tendencies of Modern
Democracy. Free Press.
Mills, C. Wright. 1956. The Power Elite. Oxford.
Moore, Barrington. 1966. The Social Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy: Lord and Peasant in the
Making of the Modern World. Beacon.
Skocpol, Theda. 1979. States and Social Revolutions: A Comparative Analysis of France, Russia, and
China. Cambridge.
Tocqueville, Alexis de. 1956. Democracy in America. Ed. Richard D. Heffner. New
American Library.
Weber, Max. 1946. From Max Weber: Essays in Sociology. Eds. and trans. Hans H. Gerth
and C. Wright Mills. Oxford. (“Bureaucracy;” “Politics as a Vocation;” “Class,
Status and Party”)
States, Nationhood
Block, Fred. 1977. “The Ruling Class Does Not Rule: Notes Toward a Marxist Theory of
the State.” Socialist Revolution 33: 6-28
Brubaker, Rogers. 1992. Citizenship and Nationhood in France and Germany. Cambridge, Mass.:
Harvard University Press.
Evans, Peter; Dietrich Rueschemeyer and Theda Skocpol. 1985. Bringing the State Back In.
Cambridge University Press.
Fraser, Nancy. 1997. Justice Interruptus: Reflections on the “Post-Socialist” Condition. Routledge.
Huntington, Samuel P. 1991. The Third Wave: Democratization in the Late Twentieth Century.
University of Oklahoma.
Przeworski, Adam. 1985. Capitalism and Social Democracy. Cambridge.
Scott, James C. 1998. Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition
Have Failed. Yale.
Skowronek, Stephen. 1982. Building a New American State: The Expansion of National
Administsrative Capacities, 1877-1920. Cambridge.
Steinmetz, George. 1999. State/Culture: State Formation after the Cultural Turn. Cornell Univ.
Press.
Tilly, Charles. “War Making and State Making.’; Chapter 7 in Roads from Past to Future.
Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield.
Tilly, Charles. 1992. Coercion, Capital, and European States. Cambridge, MA: Blackwell.
Groups and Institutions
Amenta, Edwin. 1998. Bold Relief : Institutional Politics and the Origins of Modern American Social
Policy. Princeton.
Cohen, Jean and Andrew Arato. 1992. Civil Society and Political Theory. M.I.T. (Sections I, III).
Emirbayer, Mustafa and Mimi Sheller. 1999. “Publics in History.” Theory and Society 28:
145-197.
Ertman, Thomas. 1997. Birth of the Leviathan. New York: Cambridge. Selections.
Giddens, Anthony. 1984. The Constitution of Society: Outline of the Theory of Structuration.
University of California.
Habermas, Jurgen. 1984. Theory of Communicative Action. Trans. T.McCarthy. Beacon.
Manza, Jeff and Clem Brooks. 1999. Social Cleavages and Political Change: Voter Alignments and
U.S. Party Coalitions. Cambridge.
Orloff, Ann S. and Theda Skocpol. 1984. “Why Not Equal Protection? Explaining the
Politics of Public Spending in Britain, 1900-1911, and the United States, 1880s1920.” American Sociological Review 49: 726-750.
Piven, Frances Fox and Richard Cloward. 1993 (2nd Ed). Regulating the Poor: The Functions of
Public Welfare. Vintage.
___________ 1978. Poor People’s Movements: Why They Succeed and How They Fail. Vintage.
Putnam, Robert. 1995. “Bowling Alone: America’s Declining Social Capital.” Journal of
Democracy 6:65-78.
Skocpol, Theda. 1992. Protecting Soldiers and Mothers: The Political Origins of Social Policy in the
United States. Harvard.
Culture and Politics
Gamson, William and Andre Modigliani. “Media Discourse and Public Opinion on Nuclear
Power: A Constructionist Approach.” American Journal of Sociology, Vol. 95, No. 1 (Jul.,
1989), pp. 1-37
Foucault, Michel. 1978. The History of Sexuality, 3 vols. Pantheon. (Vol. 1.)
Gellner, Ernest. 1992. Postmodernism, Reason, and Religion. Routledge.
Gorski, Philip. 2003. The Disciplinary Revolution: Calvinism and the Rise of the State in Early
Modern Europe. Chicago.
Gusfield, Joseph R. 1963. Symbolic Crusade: Status Politics and the American Temperance
Movement. University of Illinois.
Hunter, James Davison. 1991. Culture Wars: The Struggle to Define America. Basic.
Melucci, Alberto. 1989. Nomads of the Present: Social Movements and Individual Needs in
Contemporary Society. Eds. J. Keane and P. Mier. Hutchinson Radius.
Sewell, William H., Jr. “A Theory of Structure: Duality, Agency and Transformation,"
American Journal of Sociology 98 (1992): 1-29
Skocpol, Theda. “Cultural Idioms and Political Ideologies in the Revolutionary
Reconstruction of State Power: A Rejoinder to Sewell.” Journal of Modern History, Vol.
57, No. 1 (Mar., 1985), pp. 86-96
Snow, David A. and Robert D. Benford. 1988. "Ideology, Frame Resonance and Participant
Mobilization." International Social Movement Research 1: 197-219.
Snow, David A., E. Burke Rochford, Steven K. Worden, and Robert D. Benford. 1986.
"Frame Alignment Processes, Micromobilization and Movement Participation."
American Sociological Review 51: 464-81
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: 113-44.
Swidler, Ann. 1986. “Culture in Action: Symbols and Strategies” American Sociological Review
51 (April): 273-286
Power, Domination, and Inequality
Bendix, Reinhard. 1978. Kings or People: Power and the Mandate to Rule. University of
California.
Fanon, Frantz. 1963. The Wretched of the Earth. Pref.J.P. Sartre. Grove.
Foucault. Michel. 1980. (Colin Gordon, ed) Power/Knowledge. Selected Interviews and Other
Writings, 1972-1977. Pantheon.
Gaventa, John. 1995. “Power and Participation.” Pp. 14-27 in American Society and Politics,
Theda Skocpol and John L. Campbell. McGraw Hill.
Gramsci, Antonio. 1971. Selections from the Prison Notebooks of Antonio Gramsci. International.
Lukes, Steven. 2005. Power: A Radical View. Palgrave Macmillan; 2nd edition
Mannheim, Karl. 1936. Ideology and Utopia: An Introduction to the Sociology of Knowledge.
Harcourt, Brace.
Pareto, Vilfredo. 1966. Sociological Writings. Ed. and Intro. S. E. Finer. Praeger.
Simmel, Georg. 1971. On Individuality and Social Forms; Selected Writings. Ed. and Intro.
Donald N. Levine. University of Chicago. (Chap. 7: “Domination”)
Tilly, Charles. 1998. Durable Inequality. University of California.
Young, Iris. 1990. Justice and the Politics of Difference. Princeton.
Protest, Rebellion, and Revolution
Benford, Robert D. and David A. Snow. 2000. "Framing Processes and Social Movements:
An Overview and Assessment." Annual Review of Sociology 26: 11-39
Castells, Manuel. 1983. The City and the Grassroots: A Cross-cultural Theory of Urban Social
Movements. University of California.
Gamson, William. 1990. The Strategy of Social Protest, 2d ed. Wadsworth.
Goldstone, Jack. 1991. Revolution and Rebellion in the Early Modern World. University of
California.
Goodwin, Jeff. 2001. No Other Way Out: States and Revolutions, 1945-1991. Cambridge.
Goodwin, Jeff and James M. Jasper. 1999. “Caught in a Winding, Snarling Vine: The
Structural Bias of Political Process Theory.” Sociological Forum 1.
Jasper. James. 1999. The Art of Moral Protest: Culture, Biography, and Creativity in Social
Movements. University of Chicago Press.
McAdam, Doug, John McCarthy, and Mayer Zald. 1996. Comparative Perspectives on Social
Movements: Political Opportunities, Mobilizing Structures, and Cultural Framings. Cambridge.
McAdam, Doug, Sidney Tarrow, and Charles Tilly. 2001. Dynamics of Contention. Cambridge
University Press.
Melucci, Alberto. 1998. Challenging Codes. New York: Cambridge University. Chapters 1 and
2.
Sewell, William H. Jr. 1996. “Historical Events as Transformations of Structures: Inventing
Revolution at the Bastille.” Theory and Society 25: 841-81.
_______. 1980. Work and Revolution in France: The Language of Labor from the Old Regime to
1848. Cambridge.
Tarrow, Sidney. 1994. Power in Movement: Social Movements, Collective Action, and Politics.
Cambridge.
Taylor, Verta and Nancy E. Whittier, 1992. “Collective Identity in Social Movement
Communities: Lesbian Feminist Mobilization," in Aldon Morris and Carol McClurg
Mueller, eds., Frontiers in Social Movement Theory. Yale.
Tilly, Charles. 1978. From Mobilization to Revolution. Addison-Wesley.