What is Political Sociology?
What is Sociology?
2. Edition May 2024
224 Pages, Softcover
General Reading
Short Description
With an entire discipline devoted to political science, what is distinctive about political sociology? This concise book explains what a sociological perspective brings to our understanding of the emergence, reproduction, and transformation of different forms of political order. Crucially, political sociology expands the field of view to the politics that happen in other social settings - in the family, at work, in civic associations - as well as the ways in which social attributes such as class, religion, age, race, and gender shape patterns of political participation and the distribution of political power.
Political sociology grapples with these issues across an enormous range of historical and geographic settings, from intimate to geo-political scales. It requires an analytic toolkit that includes concepts of power, identities and inequalities, social closure, civil society, and modes of political action. Using these central concepts, this updated edition of What is Political Sociology? discusses the major forms of political order, processes of regime formation and revolution, the social bases for political participation, policy formation as well as feedbacks, social movements and social change, and the possibilities for new forms of digital and transnational politics. In sum, the book offers an insightful introduction to this core perspective on social life.
With an entire discipline devoted to political science, what is distinctive about political sociology? This concise book explains what a sociological perspective brings to our understanding of the emergence, reproduction, and transformation of different forms of political order. Crucially, political sociology expands the field of view to the politics that happen in other social settings - in the family, at work, in civic associations - as well as the ways in which social attributes such as class, religion, age, race, and gender shape patterns of political participation and the distribution of political power.
Political sociology grapples with these issues across an enormous range of historical and geographic settings, from intimate to geo-political scales. It requires an analytic toolkit that includes concepts of power, identities and inequalities, social closure, civil society, and modes of political action. Using these central concepts, this updated edition of What is Political Sociology? discusses the major forms of political order, processes of regime formation and revolution, the social bases for political participation, policy formation as well as feedbacks, social movements and social change, and the possibilities for new forms of digital and transnational politics. In sum, the book offers an insightful introduction to this core perspective on social life.
1 Power and Politics
2 States, Empires, Nation-States
3 Regimes and Revolutions
4 Voice and Vote in Democratic Politics
5 Bringing the State Back In
6 Social Movements and Social Change
7 The Politics of Populism
8 Transnationalism and the Future(s) of Political Order
Manali Desai, University of Cambridge
"Clemens does us the incalculable service of synthesizing a vast and contentious body of research. Ranging from classical theories of the nation-state and power to the newest scholarship on empire and colonialism, Clemens maps the terrain in our rearview mirror and points the way toward a new horizon. This book is an indispensable resource."
Cedric de Leon, University of Massachusetts Amherst
