Papers from a conference held at Mount Kisco, N.Y., Feb. 1982, sponsored by the Committee on States and Social Structures, the Joint Committee on Latin American Studies, and the Joint Committee on Western European Studies of the Social Science Research Council. Includes bibliographies and index.

This book highlights new historical research from Europe's northern frontier, bringing 'the people' back into the discussion of state politics, presenting alternative views of political and social relations in the Nordic countries before industrialization.

What difference do nonstate actors in international relations (such as Greenpeace, Amnesty International, IBM, or organizations of scientists) make in world politics? How do cross-national links interact with the world of states? Who controls whom? This book answers these questions by investigating the impact of nonstate actors on foreign policy in several issue areas and in regions around the world. It argues that the impact of such nonstate actors will depend on the institutional structure of states as well as international regimes and organizations.

The state is central to social scientific and historical inquiry today, reflecting its importance in domestic and international affairs. States kill, coerce, fight, torture, and incarcerate, yet they also nurture, protect, educate, redistribute, and invest. It is precisely because of the complexity and wide-ranging impacts of states that research on them has proliferated and diversified. Yet, too many scholars inhabit separate academic silos, and theorizing of states has become dispersed and disjointed. This book aims to bridge some of the many gaps between scholarly endeavors, bringing together scholars from a diverse array of disciplines and perspectives who study states and empires. The book offers not only a sample of cutting-edge research that can serve as models and directions for future work, but an original conceptualization and theorization of states, their origins and evolution, and their effects.

State structures, international forces, and class relations: Theda Skocpol shows how all three combine to explain the origins and accomplishments of social-revolutionary transformations. Social revolutions have been rare but undeniably of enormous importance in modern world history. States and Social Revolutions provides a new frame of reference for analyzing the causes, the conflicts, and the outcomes of such revolutions. It develops a rigorous, comparative historical analysis of three major cases: the French Revolution of 1787 through the early 1800s, the Russian Revolution of 1917 through the 1930s, and the Chinese Revolution of 1911 through the 1960s. Believing that existing theories of revolution, both Marxist and non-Marxist, are inadequate to explain the actual historical patterns of revolutions, Skocpol urges us to adopt fresh perspectives. Above all, she maintains that states conceived as administrative and coercive organizations potentially autonomous from class controls and interests must be made central to explanations of revolutions.

Bringing the Nation Back In takes as its starting point a series of developments that shaped politics in the United States and Europe over the past thirty years: the end of the Cold War, the rise of financial and economic globalization, the creation of the European Union, and the development of the postnational. This book contends we are now witnessing a break with the post-1945 world order and with modern politics. Two competing ideas have arisen—global cosmopolitanism and populist nationalism. Contributors argue this polarization of social ethos between cosmopolitanism and nationalism is a sign of a deeper political crisis, which they explore from different perspectives. Rather than taking sides, the aim is to diagnose the origins of the current impasse and to "bring the nation back in" by expanding what we mean by "nation" and national identity and by respecting the localizing processes that have led to national traditions and struggles.