A state-of-the-field survey of historical sociology, Remaking Modernity assesses the field’s past accomplishments and peers into the future, envisioning changes to come. The seventeen essays in this collection reveal the potential of historical sociology to transform understandings of social and cultural change. The volume captures an exciting new conversation among historical sociologists that brings a wider interdisciplinary project to bear on the problems and prospects of modernity.

The contributors represent a wide variety of theoretical orientations and a broad spectrum of understandings of what constitutes historical sociology. They address such topics as religion, war, citizenship, markets, professions, gender and welfare, colonialism, ethnicity, bureaucracy, revolutions, collective action, and the modernist social sciences themselves. Remaking Modernity includes a significant introduction in which the editors consider prior orientations in historical sociology in order to analyze the field’s resurgence. They show how current research is building on and challenging previous work through attention to institutionalism, rational choice, the cultural turn, feminist theories and approaches, and colonialism and the racial formations of empire.

Contributors

Julia Adams

Justin Baer

Richard Biernacki

Bruce Carruthers

Elisabeth Clemens

Rebecca Jean Emigh

Russell Faeges

Philip Gorski

Roger Gould

Meyer Kestnbaum

Edgar Kiser

Ming-Cheng Lo

Zine Magubane

Ann Shola Orloff

Nader Sohrabi

Margaret Somers

Lyn Spillman

George Steinmetz