State/culture: State-formation After the Cultural Turn

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George Steinmetz
Cornell University Press, 1999 - History - 433 pages

What impact does culture have on state-formation and public policy? How do states affect national and local cultures? How is the ongoing cultural turn in theory reshaping our understanding of the Western and modernizing states, long viewed as the radiant core of a universal, context-free rationality? This eagerly awaited volume brings together pioneering scholars who reexamine the sociology of the state and historical processes of state-formation in light of developments in cultural analysis.The volume first examines some of the unsatisfying ways in which cultural processes have been discussed in social science literature on the state. It demonstrates new and sophisticated approaches to understanding both the role culture plays in the formation of states and the state's influence on broad cultural developments. The book includes theoretical essays and empirical studies; the latter essays are concerned with early modern European nations, non-European countries undergoing political modernization, and twentieth-century Western nation-states. A wide range of perspectives are presented in order to delineate this emergent area of research. Together the essays constitute an agenda-setting work for the social sciences.

 

Contents

Genesis and Structure of
1
Bureaucratic Field
53
Timothy Mitchell Society Economy and the State Effect
76
Julia Adams Culture in RationalChoice Theories of StateFormation
98
Philip S Gorski Calvinism and StateFormation in Early
147
Steven Pincus Nationalism Universal Monarchy and
182
PART THREE
211
The Circle of Justice
253
Ann Shola Orloff Motherhood Work and Welfare in
321
Emotion Nation and Identity
355
Bob Jessop Narrating the Future of the National Economy
378
Now Where? by Charles Tilly
407
Index
421

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About the author (1999)

George Steinmetz is Associate Professor of Sociology and German Studies at the University of Michigan and author of Regulating the Social: The Welfare State and Local Politics in Imperial Germany.