A state-of-the-field survey of historical sociology, Remaking Modernity highlights the resurgence in historical inquiry underway right now, assesses the field’s past accomplishments, and peers into the future, delineating changes to come. The seventeen essays in this collection reveal the potential of historical sociology to transform understandings of social and cultural change. Where many discussions of the field have focused on questions of method, these essays illuminate the substantive and theoretical challenges presented by modernity, by social change writ large. This 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 range 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 and groups, bureaucracy, revolutions, collective action, and the modernist social sciences themselves. Remaking Modernity includes a significant introduction in which the editors consider prior orientations in historic sociology in order to highlight more recent developments. They point out 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 ;Philip Gorski; Roger Gould; Meyer Kestmbaum; Edgar Kiser; Ming-Cheng Lo; Zine Magubane; Ann Shola Orloff; Nader Sohrabi; George Steinmetz. Julia Adams is Arthur F. Thurnau Associate Professor of Sociology at the University of Michigan. She is the author of The Familial State: Ruling Families and Merchant Capitalism in Early Modern Europe. Elisabeth Clemens is Associate Professor of Sociology at the University of Chicago. She is the author of The People’s Lobby: Organizational Innovation and the Rise of the Interest Group. Ann Shola Orloff is Professor of Sociology at Northwestern University. Her most recent book is Women’s Employment and Welfare Regimes: Globalization, Export Orientation, and Social Policy in Europe and North America.
