Political Sociology Comprehensive Exam Reading List
Julie Beicken
Spring 2011
Day 1: General Exam
Core List
1. Bourdieu, Pierre. 1977. Outline of a Theory of Practice. Trans. Richard Nice. Cambridge. ("Structures and the Habitus;" "Structures, Habitus, Power: Basis for a Theory of Symbolic Power")
2. Charrad, Mounira M. 2001. States and Women’s Rights: The Making of Postcolonial Tunisia, Algeria, and Morocco. University of California.
3. Foucault, Michel. 1979. Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison. Pantheon.
4. Huntington, Samuel P. 1996. The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order. Simon & Schuster.
5. Lipset, Seymour Martin. (1960; revised 1981) Political Man: The Social Bases of Politics. Johns Hopkins.
6. Mann, Michael. 1986. The Sources of Social Power, 2 vols. Cambridge.
7. Marx, Karl, and Frederich Engels. 1972. The Marx-Engels Reader. Ed. Robert C. Tucker. Norton. ("Class Struggle in France;" “Critique of Hegel's Philosophy of Right: Introduction;” “Communist Manifesto;” "Preface to a Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy”)
8. Mills, C. Wright. 1956. The Power Elite. Oxford.
9. Moore, Barrington. 1966. The Social Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy: Lord and Peasant in the Making of the Modern World. Beacon.
10. Skocpol, Theda. 1979. States and Social Revolutions: A Comparative Analysis of France, Russia, and China. Cambridge.
11. Tocqueville, Alexis de. 1956. Democracy in America. Ed. Richard D. Heffner. New American Library.
12. Weber, Max. 1946. From Max Weber: Essays in Sociology. Eds. and trans. Hans H. Gerth and C. Wright Mills. Oxford. (“Bureaucracy;” “Politics as a Vocation;” “Class, Status and Party”)
States, Nationhood
13. Block, Fred. 1977. “The Ruling Class Does Not Rule: Notes Toward a Marxist Theory of the State.” Socialist Revolution 33: 6-28
14. Brubaker, Rogers. 1992. Citizenship and Nationhood in France and Germany. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press.
15. Evans, Peter; Dietrich Rueschemeyer and Theda Skocpol. 1985. Bringing the State Back In. Cambridge University Press.
16. Skowronek, Stephen. 1982. Building a New American State: The Expansion of National Administsrative Capacities, 1877-1920. Cambridge.
17. Steinmetz, George. 1999. State/Culture: State Formation after the Cultural Turn. Cornell Univ. Press.
18. Tilly, Charles. 1992. Coercion, Capital, and European States. Cambridge, MA: Blackwell.
Groups and Institutions
19. Amenta, Edwin. 1998. Bold Relief : Institutional Politics and the Origins of Modern American Social Policy. Princeton.
20. Giddens, Anthony. 1984. The Constitution of Society: Outline of the Theory of Structuration. University of California.
21. Habermas, Jurgen. 1991. The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere. MIT Press.
22. Calhoun, Craig. 1993. Habermas and the Public Sphere. MIT Press.
23. Orloff, Ann S. and Theda Skocpol. 1984. “Why Not Equal Protection? Explaining the Politics of Public Spending in Britain, 1900-1911, and the United States, 1880s-1920.” American Sociological Review 49: 726-750.
24. Piven, Frances Fox and Richard Cloward. 1993 (2nd Ed). Regulating the Poor: The Functions of Public Welfare. Vintage.
25. Putnam, Robert. 1995. “Bowling Alone: America’s Declining Social Capital.” Journal of Democracy 6:65-78.
26. Wacquant, Loic. 2009. Punishing the Poor. Duke University Press.
Culture and Politics
27. Adut, Ari. 2008. On Scandal: Moral Disturbances in Society, Politics and Art. Cambridge University Press.
28. Gorski, Philip. 2003. The Disciplinary Revolution: Calvinism and the Rise of the State in Early Modern Europe. Chicago.
29. Sewell, William H., Jr. “A Theory of Structure: Duality, Agency and Transformation," American Journal of Sociology 98 (1992): 1-29
30. Skocpol, Theda. “Cultural Idioms and Political Ideologies in the Revolutionary Reconstruction of State Power: A Rejoinder to Sewell.” Journal of Modern History, Vol. 57, No. 1 (Mar., 1985), pp. 86-96
31. Steensland, Brian. 2007. The Failed Welfare Revolution. Princeton University Press.
32. Swidler, Ann. 1986. “Culture in Action: Symbols and Strategies” American Sociological Review 51 (April): 273-286
Power, Domination, and Ideology
33. Fanon, Frantz. 1963. The Wretched of the Earth. Pref.J.P. Sartre. Grove.
34. Foucault. Michel. 1980. (Colin Gordon, ed) Power/Knowledge. Selected Interviews and Other Writings, 1972-1977. Pantheon.
35. Gramsci, Antonio. 1971. Selections from the Prison Notebooks of Antonio Gramsci. International.
36. Lukes, Steven. 2005. Power: A Radical View. Palgrave Macmillan; 2nd edition
37. Simmel, Georg. 1971. On Individuality and Social Forms; Selected Writings. Ed. and Intro. Donald N. Levine. University of Chicago. (Chap. 7: “Domination”)
38. Tilly, Charles. 1998. Durable Inequality. University of California.
33 books; 5 articles