Macrohistory: Essays in Sociology of the Long RunStanford University Press, 1999 - 312 páginas This book explores the accomplishments of the golden age of "macrohistory, the sociologically informed analysis of long-term patterns of political, economic, and social change that has reached new heights of sophistication in the last decades of the twentieth century. It describes the scholarly revolution that has taken place in the Marxian-inspired theory of revolutions, the shift to a state-breakdown model in which revolutions, rather than bubbling up from discontent below, start at the top in the fiscal strains of the state. The author links revolutions to military-centered transformations of the state, and reviews how he used this theory in the early 1980s to predict the breakdown of the Soviet empire. He goes on to show the implications of viewing states and societies from the outside in, including the geopolitical patterns that affect the legitimacy of dominant ethnic groups and thus determine the direction of ethnic assimilation or fragmentation. Another application is the author s new theory of democratization, which asserts that democracy depends not merely on a widening of the franchise but on a geopolitical pattern favoring federated structures of collegially shared power. Using this new theoretical tool, the author argues that Anglophone scholars have polemically misinterpreted German history, and that the roots of the Holocaust cannot be determined by German-bashing but must be attributed to processes that affect all of us. Other essays generalize about the historical dynamics and transformations of markets. Going beyond Weber s Eurocentric model, the author proposes a more general theory that explains the origins of capitalism in Japan on an independent but parallel path. |
Conteúdo
List of Figures ix | 1 |
Maturation of the StateCentered Theory of Revolution | 19 |
The Prediction of the Soviet | 37 |
A Geopolitical Theory | 70 |
A Geopolitical Theory | 110 |
GermanBashing and the Theory of Democratic Modernization | 152 |
Market Dynamics as the Engine of Historical Change | 177 |
An Asian Route to Capitalism | 209 |
Appendix A How Simulating a Compact Theory Can Reproduce | 239 |
Appendix B Borkenaus Geopolitics of Language and Cultural | 259 |
Bibliography | 291 |
307 | |
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Termos e frases comuns
agrarian-coercive alliances analytical aristocrats armies arms industry became Borkenau breakdown Buddhist bureaucratic Cambridge capitalism capitalist causal central China church coalition collegial power collegial power-sharing collegial structures conciliar movement conflict conquest continuum core crisis cultural daimyo democracy democratic dominant Dutch Republic economic elite Empire England ethnic groups ethnonationalism Europe European expansion factors of production feudal forces France franchise geopolitical German German Empire Goldstone GP theory growth identity ideology imperial initial institutions internal Irish Japan kinship land language legitimacy macrohistory marchland medieval military mobilization modern monasteries monastic movements networks organization papacy pattern period political population power-prestige prediction prestige production Pure Land reform regime regions Reichstag religious republic result revolution rulers Russia Russian Russian Empire sector secular Sengoku period Skocpol social society sociology somatotypes Soviet superordinate markets temples territorial tion Tokugawa twentieth century United University Press Weber world system