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Fall 2012 Newsletter of the ASA Comparative and Historical Sociology Section Vol ________________________________________________________________________ __ Trajectories Fall 2012 Newsletter of the ASA Comparative and Historical Sociology Section Vol. 24, No. 1 ___________________________________________________________________________________________________________ SECTION OFFICERS CONTENTS 2012-2013 Letter from the Chair…………….……………….1 Panel Review (Charrad and Kane)….…….……...5 Chair Member Awards………….….…………………...8 Julian Go Member Publications....…………………………. 9 Boston University Section Members on the Job Market.…….……..14 Section Awards...……………………………..…15 Chair-Elect Call for Member Information.………………......19 Andreas Wimmer Princeton University Past Chair Letter From the Chair Neil Fligstein University of California-Berkeley Globalizing Comparative-Historical 1 Secretary-Treasurer Sociology Ho-fung Hung Johns Hopkins University Julian Go Boston University Council Members I write at a time when calls for “global” and Nina Bandelj, UC Irvine (2013) “transnational” social science surround me. ASA Greta Krippner, U Michigan (2013) Presidents like Michael Burawoy (2008) and Euro- Mounira Maya Charrad, U Texas-Austin (2014) pean theorists like Ulrich Beck (2006) are calling Dylan John Riley, UC Berkeley (2014) for sociologies that are more global in scope, Emily Erikson, Yale University (2015) method, and conceptual orientation. A new ASA Isaac Reed, U Colorado (2015) section is called “Global and Transnational Sociol- Elizabeth Pearson (Student, 2014) ogy.” And our colleagues in history have already been enacting “global history” and “transnational Newsletter Editors history” for some time now. But comparative- Ateş Altınordu, Sabancı University historical sociology, traditionally wedded to meth- Seio Nakajima, U Hawaii-Manoa odological nationalism, has been comparably less vocal. While there is now an emerging strand of the “third wave” of historical sociology that has Webmaster Kurtulus Gemici, National U of Singapore 1Thanks to Julia Adams and Nicholas Hoover Wilson for feedback on this piece. Trajectories Vol. 24, No. 1 Fall 2012 globalized its focus, and while this work is promis- alization entails some form of separation. The ing, much more needs to be done (Adams, problem is mistaking the conceptual abstraction for Clemens, and Orloff 2005).2 This brief note is a real abstraction. In historical sociology, a par- meant to encourage forward movement. It does so ticular pernicious version is the analytic bifurcation partly by looking backwards. between “Europe” and the “Rest” – or variants First and foremost, to be clear: the issue is not thereof, such as the “inside” as opposed to the that comparative historical sociology has narrowed “outside” of nations; or “the domestic” from the its lens to Europe or the United States. As past “foreign.” This type of bifurcation is a partner to Chair James Mahoney has pointed out in these methodological nationalism. It is one legacy pages, there are many of us researching non- among others of the Westphalia myth which many European parts of the world (Mahoney 2011). Nor International Relations scholars have criticized – is it a question of looking at “inter-national” is- viz., the myth that the Westphalian system of states sues. We have already studied the international was and has been a reality rather than what it actu- system, along with the world-system, both of ally was and remains today: an idealized model. which are taken as consisting mainly of national The second wave of comparative-historical so- states. The issue is that, for too long, comparative ciology best exemplifies this tendency. So take one historical sociology has failed to look beyond, example, consider Tilly’s magisterial Coercion, through, or across national processes and inter- Capital, and European States, AD 990-1992 national systems to explore transnational and (1990). This is an exemplary work for it seeks, as global dynamics: that is, connections, relations, the best historical sociology does, to explain key and processes that traverse conventional state aspects of modernity; in this case, the formation of boundaries. Note the main themes of the “second the nation-state or, as he calls them “national wave” of historical sociology: class-formation, states,” and their rise to dominance. We would revolution, political regimes, the welfare state and think that this book makes transnational and global state-formation, collective action, etc.. These were relations a key part of the analysis. After all, the all about national states or processes within na- book seeks to explain the national-state form rather tional states. They also sometimes assumed, im- than take it for granted. Furthermore, when we plicitly or explicitly, that the state and the social think about European states from AD 990-1992, aligned. And while the “international” sometimes surely European empires would come to the fore- appeared onto the second wave’s analytic radar, it ground; and empires were transnational phenome- did so fleetingly at best. Even then, the key dynam- non through and through. Not only did they expand ics and dimensions of the global were not ade- globally and interact on a global stage, they were quately theorized. Instead second-wavers tended to themselves complex transnational formations that offer only an impoverished conception of the bled over, and across, expansive social space. “international” (Hobden 1999) Indeed, empires should be central to Tilly’s What happened? We could probably think of analysis. The book’s entire point is to explain how many good reasons for the occlusion of the trans- the national state (defined on p. 2 as “states gov- national and global in conventional studies. But erning contiguous regions and their cities by means here let me propose just one: “the iron cage of of centralized, differentiated, and autonomous Westphalia,” or rather, the “analytic bifurcations” structures”) came to become the dominant form of comparative historical sociology (Go 2012). By over other possible sociopolitical forms, including this I mean the analytic abstraction or separation of city-states and – yes indeed – empires! our social objects from their wider constitutive re- We might expect Tilly, therefore, to tell us how lations. Of course, any social scientific conceptu- around the mid-twentieth century, national states in Europe emerged from the ashes of European em- 2 See for instance Adams (2007), Barkey (2008); Go (2008; pire. Why? For most of the historical period Tilly 2011), Magubane (2004), and Steinmetz (2007) among oth- covers, European states like Britain and France – ers. Some insightful programmatic statements include Ad- which Tilly refers to as exemplary of national ams, Clemens, and Orloff (2005) and Magubane (2005). For states – were not coercion-wielding organizations promising guides from UK scholars, see Lawson (2007) and Bhambra (2011). “governing contiguous regions and their cities by 2 Trajectories Vol. 24, No. 1 Fall 2012 means of centralized, differentiated and autono- of France – hence fully inside it. This is why the mous structures.” They were empire-states; coer- English crown fought, so hard and so often, to cion wielding organizations governing expansive keep colonies within itself, suppressing the Ameri- regions and cities with a hierarchy of citi- can revolution in the 1770s or, for that matter, vio- zen/subject at the core of the system. In the 1920s lently suppressing the Mau-Mau rebellion in the and 1930s, the British empire-state was at its terri- 1950s. And France’s colonies likewise were not torial highpoint, encompassing more than 33 mil- “outside” of France: they were French. Hence lion miles of territory around the world, structured France fought the bloody Algerian war in the by various hierarchical political divisions and 1950s to “keep Algeria French.” That was the fragmented sovereignties. The French empire en- mantra after all. compassed over 12 million miles around the same This is what I mean by analytic bifurcation: time. These states only became truly national states Tilly’s model separates into distinct domains the later, after World War II. “national state” and “empire” –‘internal’ and ‘ex- Yet this is not Tilly’s story. Tilly instead sees ternal’, ‘inside’ and ‘outside’ – that were never the “national state” winning out over “city-states, really separated in practice. empires, theocracies, and many other forms of The point is not to disparage Tilly’s fantastic government” a century earlier, in the nineteenth work, which I have long admired and which got century. “Full-fledged empires flourished into the me interested in comparative-historical sociology seventeenth century, and the last zones of frag- in the first place. The point is that, if we want mented sovereignty only consolidated into national comparative-historical sociology to address trans- states late in the nineteenth” (23). How can this be? national and global concerns, we need to think be- The problem lies in the bifurcation effected by yond the Westphalian system of states. Consider Tilly’s conceptualization of the state. He notes, for all the things that we miss when we fall prey to instance, that just as national states in Europe were analytic bifurcation. Comparative-historical soci- emerging, they were also “creating empires beyond ology might be known for its insights on racial and Europe, in the Americas, Africa, Asia and the Pa- ethnic group formation in South Africa or the US cific.” He refers to these as “external empires” but not for work on historical patterns
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