Cambridge Studies in Historical Sociology – serie

How were state formation and early modern politics shaped by the state's proclaimed obligation to domestic welfare? Drawing on a wide range of historical scholarship and primary sources, this book demonstrates that a public interest-based discourse of state legitimation was common to early modern England, Japan, and China. This normative platform served as a shared basis on which state and society could negotiate and collaborate over how to attain good governance through providing public goods such as famine relief and infrastructural facilities. The terms of state legitimacy opened a limited yet significant political space for the ruled. Through petitioning and protests, subordinates could demand that the state fulfil its publicly proclaimed duty and redress welfare grievances. Conflicts among diverse dimensions of public interest mobilized cross-regional and cross-sectoral collective petitions; justified by the same norms of state legitimacy, these petitions called for fundamental political reforms and transformed the nature of politics.

How were state formation and early modern politics shaped by the state's proclaimed obligation to domestic welfare? Drawing on a wide range of historical scholarship and primary sources, this book demonstrates that a public interest-based discourse of state legitimation was common to early modern England, Japan, and China. This normative platform served as a shared basis on which state and society could negotiate and collaborate over how to attain good governance through providing public goods such as famine relief and infrastructural facilities. The terms of state legitimacy opened a limited yet significant political space for the ruled. Through petitioning and protests, subordinates could demand that the state fulfil its publicly proclaimed duty and redress welfare grievances. Conflicts among diverse dimensions of public interest mobilized cross-regional and cross-sectoral collective petitions; justified by the same norms of state legitimacy, these petitions called for fundamental political reforms and transformed the nature of politics.

How Economic Ideas Evolve offers a unique perspective on the development of political economies in Europe. With three major contributions, the book first establishes a link between religious, social, and economic ideas and the diverging development of political economies in Europe. Secondly, the work provides a historical sociological analysis of the contextual factors that influenced the development of religiously inspired socio-economic ideas. Chapters examine the impact of these ideas on economic and welfare institutions in Germany and Italy over three centuries. Lastly, the book goes beyond classic historical sociology to focus on the long-term developmental trajectories and impact of ideas on politics and policy. Thorough and expansive, How Economic Ideas Evolve contributes to the emerging scholarship of ideational historical sociology, broadening the toolkit of historical sociology to research the development and impact of socio-economic ideas and ideologies over long periods of time.

What explains the rise and resilience of the Islamist movement in Turkey? Since its founding in 1923, the Turkish republic has periodically reined in Islamist actors. Secular laws denied legitimacy to religious ideas, publications, and civic organizations, while military coups jailed or banned Islamist party leaders from politics. Despite such adversity, Islamists won an unprecedented victory at the 2002 national elections and have continued to rule since. 'Pious Politics' explains how Islamists succeeded by developing a popular, well-organized movement over decades that rallied the masses and built vigorous political parties. But an equally formative-if not more significant-factor was the cultural groundwork Islamists laid through a remarkably robust model of mobilization. Drawing on two years of ethnographic and archival research in Turkey, Zeynep Ozgen explores how social movements leverage cultural production to create sociopolitical change.

The Kansas Court of Industrial Relations, founded in 1920, was the lone US trial of a labor court - a policy design used almost everywhere else in the industrialized world during the interwar period. What led Kansas to establish the KCIR when no other state did? And what were the consequences of its existence for the development of economic policy in the rest of the country? Ben Merriman explores how the KCIR's bans on strikes and lockouts, heavy criminal sanctions, and unilateral control over the material terms of economic life, resulted in America's closest practical encounter with fascism. Battered by the Supreme Court in 1923, the KCIR's failure destroyed American interest in labor courts. But the legal battles and policy divisions about the KCIR, which enjoyed powerful supporters, were an early sign of the new political and intellectual alignments that led to America's unique New Deal labor policy.

This volume renews the study of corruption as 'embedded' in ongoing social relations. Instead of treating corruption as a universal phenomenon, A Comparative Historical Sociology of Corruption shows how corruption is often morally ambiguous and deeply intertwined with the social, political and economic struggles of particular groups in specific times and places. Ranging from Early Modernity to the present day, and spanning across the globe, the book focuses on three recurring aspects of corruption: emergence or the origins and struggles over whether something is corrupt; institutionalization or how different definitions of corruption predominate; and mobilization or the sociopolitical functions that different definitions of corruption serve in times of social change. The volume includes a wide variety of historical and contemporary studies to show that corruption is embedded in its context, providing a novel framework for readers to understand how and why corruption persists across time and place.

Order, Authority, Nation develops a sociological account of political conversion from left to right through an examination of the historical case of Marcel Déat and the French neo-socialists. Déat and the neo-socialists began their careers in the 1920s as democratic socialists but became fascists and Nazi collaborators by the end of World War II. While existing accounts of this shift emphasize the ideological continuity underlying neo-socialism and fascism, this book centers the fundamentally discontinuous and relational character of political conversion in its analysis. Highlighting the active part played by Déat and the neo-socialists in their own reinvention at different moments of their trajectory, it argues that political conversion is a phenomenon defined not just by a change in belief, but at its core, by how political actors respond to changing political circumstances. This sociological account of a phenomenon often treated polemically offers a unique contribution to the sociology and history of socialism and fascism.

This book challenges the conventional narrative that the 1970s were a fundamental watershed between two seamless economic policy paradigms in postwar United Kingdom, Keynesianism and neoliberalism. Drawing on extensive archival research, José Tomás Labarca highlights heterogeneity and discontinuity in postwar economic policymaking rather than consensus. The book argues that there was no seamless Keynesian economic policy epoch, challenging widespread misconceptions about excessive government spending in the 1960s and 1970s to offer a novel interpretation of shrinking policy space in the 1970s. Centering the multidimensional politics of official knowledge, Labarca provides an original analysis of how conflicts between competing government elite coalitions drove fragmented policy change before and after the 1970s. While most research focuses exclusively on the politics of economic ideas, Fragmented Policy Change proves that not only economic but also organizational and bureaucratic ideas, processes, and interests influence the evolution of relatively (in)coherent policy regimes.