Charles Tilly's Democracy identifies the general processes causing democratization and de-democratization at a national level across the world over the last few hundred years. It singles out integration of trust networks into public politics, insulation of public politics from categorical inequality, and suppression of autonomous coercive power centers as crucial processes. Through analytic narratives and comparisons of multiple regimes, mostly since World War II, this book makes the case for recasting current theories of democracy, democratization, and de-democratization.

This book reinterprets the last five centuries of European history, a period characterised by war, revolt and contention, by the rise and struggles of states and empires, and by urbanization, enrichment and industrialization. His focus is on revolutions, their origins in ambition and discontent, and the variability of their outcomes over time and according to place, politics and culture. He seeks an understanding of revolutionary processes grounded in the contingencies of circumstance, and to show the pace of great revolutions in the long-term history of Europe and the world at large.

Between 1750 and 1840 ordinary British people abandoned such time-honoured forms of protest as collective seizures of grain, the sacking of buildings, public humiliation, and physical abuse in favour of marches, petition drives, public meetings and other sanctioned routines of social movement politics. The change created - perhaps for the first time anywhere - mass participation in national politics.

Coalitions Across Borders shows how social movements have cooperated and conflicted as they work to develop a transnational civil society in response to perceived threats of neoliberalism--free trade, privatization, structural adjustment, and unbrid

Five historians uncover the ties between people's daily routines and the all-encompassing framework of their lives. They trace the processes of social construction in Western Europe, the United States, Latin America, Africa, and China, discussing both the historical similarities and the ways in which individual history has shaped each area's development. They stress the need for a social history that connects individuals to major ideological, political, and economic transformations.

Spanning ten thousand years of social change, this book examines the ways in which world-systems evolve. A comparative study of stateless societies, state-based regional empires, and the modern global capitalist political economy, it reveals the underlying processes at work in the reproduction and transformation of social, economic, and political structures.Christopher Chase-Dunn and Thomas Hall show that stateless societies developed in the context of regional intersocietal networks that differed significantly from larger and more hierarchical world-systems. The processes by which chiefdoms...

History Without a Subject presents a broad-ranging discussion of the topic of postmodernity. Beginning with an analysis of how changes in the global economy are affecting the lives of ordinary Americans, this book suggests that the postmodern condition in this country can be likened to the balkanization of culture and society and the Brazilianization of politics and the economy.Arguing that global trends are now more determining than nationally based institutions and organizations, David Ashley traces connections between the postmodern condition and the following developments: the...

Over the years Charles Tilly has had an indelible influence on a remarkable number of key questions in social science and history. In the fields of social change, states and institutions, urbanization, and historical sociology, his seminal work has spawned whole new lines of inquiry and research. In one volume, this book offers the best and most influential of Tilly's important work, with a new introduction by the author that relates his analyses to a wide body of scholarship. The book includes a review and critique by Arthur Stinchcombe.

From Contention to Democracy addresses a crucial aspect of contemporary societies: the role of social movements for political and social change. The volume gathers together essays written by prominent social theorists who have been asked to reflect on the relationship between movements and processes of social, political, and cultural change.