A collection of readings from the major thinkers in sociology - from classics to contemporaries - which chronicles the development of modern sociology, highlighting the 4 main schools of sociological thought. This edition includes a new section on the rational choice-utilitarian tradition.

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...