Growing into Politics

This volume presents cutting-edge, theoretically ambitious studies in political sociology by first-rate European scholars that deal with some of the major challenges European societies and politics are facing. These have to do with globalisation and complex Europeanisation, which have contributed to restructuring the European nation-state and redefining political power. Accounting for these transformations requires revisiting traditional objects of political science such as state sovereignty, civil society and citizenship. While doing this, the studies of this volume join sophisticated empirical analyses with methodological and conceptual innovations such as field theory, multiple correspondence analysis and the study of space sets. Combining qualitative and quantitative research techniques and macro- and micro-levels, they have in common a contextual analysis of politics through scrutiny of configurations of groups, representations and perceptions in an increasingly transnational space. A transnational perspective that seeks to avoid methodological nationalism is present in all the studies of this volume. Endorsement "Social science considerations of Europe and European integration have been colonised by 'new institutionalisms,' whether the rational choice version that mimics economics or the alternative 'historical' variety, both rooted in Anglophone debates. Political sociology has been relatively absent, alas, partly because sociology has been fragmented by national concerns and multiple social problem orientations. A Political Sociology of Transnational Europe is a splendid launching pad for the intellectual game change that is needed. The book brings together an all-star international cast of political sociologists who present refreshing and different approaches that elucidate much about today's unprecedented crisis conditions in Europe. In practically every essay we learn that the world of politics is much more than national institutions and that analysing it demands much more than national state-centered theories and methods can give us." George Ross, ad personam Jean Monnet Chair at the Université de Montréal, Morris Hillquit Professor emeritus at Brandeis University, and, Faculty associate of the Minda de Gunzburg Center for European Studies at Harvard University.