States and Collective Action: The European Experience

by Pierre Birnbaum

• ISBN13: 9780521325486
• ISBN10: 052132548X
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 1988-04-29
• Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Summary

It has become something of an orthodoxy of contemporary sociology that modern democratic industrial societies are essentially alike, and that they are confronted by uniform challenges, whether industrial (strikes and demonstrations), social (the 'crisis of the welfare state'), or political. In this important collection of studies Professor Birnbaum asserts, however, that the very existence of differentiation, challenge such a hypothesis. Linking historical and sociological investigation, Birnbaum argues that it is only through divergent state-formation that regional and national state variations in, for example, industrial conflict, policing or ideological configuration can be explained. His analysis of the influence of each type of state upon the development of various collective action and mobilisation processes establishes the crucial importance of the state as a quasi-independent variable.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgements

Introduction

1. Mobilisation theory and the state: the missing element

2. States, free riders and collective movements

3. The state and mobilisation for war: the case of the French Revolution

4. Ideology, collective action and the state: Germany, England, France

5. Individual action, collective action and worker's strategy: the United States, Great Britain and France

6. The state versus corporatism: France and England

7. The Nazi collective movement against the Prussian state

8. Territorial and ethnic mobilisation in Scotland, Brittany and Catalonia

9. Nation, state and culture: the example of Zionism

10. The state, the police and the West Indians: collective movements in Great Britain

Conclusion: the end of the state? from differentiation to dedifferentiation

Notes

Index.