Remaking Modernity

A state-of-the-field survey of historical sociology, Remaking Modernity assesses the field’s past accomplishments and peers into the future, envisioning changes to come. The seventeen essays in this collection reveal the potential of historical sociology to transform understandings of social and cultural change. The volume captures an exciting new conversation among historical sociologists that brings a wider interdisciplinary project to bear on the problems and prospects of modernity.

The contributors represent a wide variety of theoretical orientations and a broad spectrum of understandings of what constitutes historical sociology. They address such topics as religion, war, citizenship, markets, professions, gender and welfare, colonialism, ethnicity, bureaucracy, revolutions, collective action, and the modernist social sciences themselves. Remaking Modernity includes a significant introduction in which the editors consider prior orientations in historical sociology in order to analyze the field’s resurgence. They show how current research is building on and challenging previous work through attention to institutionalism, rational choice, the cultural turn, feminist theories and approaches, and colonialism and the racial formations of empire.

Contributors. Julia Adams, Justin Baer, Richard Biernacki, Bruce Carruthers, Elisabeth Clemens, Rebecca Jean Emigh, Russell Faeges, Philip Gorski, Roger Gould, Meyer Kestnbaum, Edgar Kiser, Ming-Cheng Lo, Zine Magubane, Ann Shola Orloff, Nader Sohrabi, Margaret Somers, Lyn Spillman, George Steinmetz

Julia Adams is Professor of Sociology at Yale University. She is the author of The Familial State: Ruling Families and Merchant Capitalism in Early Modern Europe.

Elisabeth Clemens is Associate Professor of Sociology at the University of Chicago. She is the author of The People’s Lobby: Organizational Innovation and the Rise of the Interest Group.

Ann Shola Orloff is Professor of Sociology at Northwestern University. Her most recent book is States, Markets, Families: Gender, Social Policy, and Liberalism in Australia, Canada, Great Britain, and the United States (with Julia O’Connor and Sheila Shaver).