"The 1989 democracy protests remain the focal symbol for democratic aspirations in China. The Great Proletarian Revolution of the 1960s remains the great cautionary tale about the evils of Maoism. Yet, the two movements may be more closely linked that is often thought, albeit in complex and sometimes paradoxical ways. A look at the links not only helps put 1989 in context, but reveals some enduring issues bearing on the struggle for democracy in China." No. 57, p. 33-52.

"1989 imperceptibly gave way to 1992, and anxiety began to regain a little intellectual respectability. Still, it has taken quite dramatic events, from Ethiopia to the former Soviet Union, and especially Yugoslavia, to focus attention on the possibility that nationalism might be more than a passing problem." Vol. 8:4, p. 387-411.

"Imagining democracy requires thinking of "the people" as active and coherent and oneself as both a member and an agent. Liberalism informs the notion of individual agency but provides weak purchase at best on membership and on the collective cohesion and capacity of the demos. In the modern era, the discursive formation that has most influentially underwritten these dimensions of democracy is nationalism." Vol. 19:1, p. 151-173.

"While it is impossible to dissociate nationalism entirely from ethnicity, it is equally impossible to explain it simply as a continuation of ethnicity of a simple reflection of common history of language." Vol. 19, p. 211-239.

"Sometime after 1968, analysts and participants began to speak of "new social movements" that worked outside formal institutional channels and emphasized lifestyle, ethical, or "identity" concerns rather than narrowly economic goals. A variety of examples informed the conceptualization. Alberto Melucci (1988: 247), for instance, cited feminism, the ecology movement or "greens," the peace movement, and the youth movement...these movements were allegedly new in issues, tactics, and constituencies. Above all, they were new by contrast to the labor movement, which was the paradigmatic "old" social movement, and to Marxism and socialism, which asserted that class was the central issue in politics and that a single political economic transformation would solve the whole range of social ills... I argue that the historical claim implicit in the idea of new social movements (as in the ideas of postmodernism and postindustrialism) is specious. I explore the major distinguishing characteristics attributed to NSMs in the recent literature and show that these fit very well the many movements that flourished in the late eighteenth and especially early nineteenth centuries." Vol. 17:3, p. 385-427.

"Pierre Bourdieu is not usually considered a development theorist. Yet Bourdieu's sociological perspective is deeply rooted in his studies of Algeria. The most famous of these are read largely for their insights into the logic of practice — including prominently Bourdieu's development of the notion of habitus as a way of integrating structural and phenomenological analysis, his effort to incorporate subjective and objective perspectives into a single analytic orientation, and his accounts of symbolic violence and cultural capital. But it is worthwhile also to recognize how much they reflect his engagement with the economic and social transformations attendant on Algeria’s colonization by France and incorporation into capitalist economic relations." Vol. 37:6, p. 1403-1415.

"What is public sociology as an enduring project? The stakes of the question are large, not just because there is a current fad for the phrase, but because how sociology matters in the public sphere is vital to the future of the field. Michael Burawoy has done a considerable service by putting public sociology on the disciplinary agenda more forcefully than anyone else since C. Wright Mills, joining Herb Gans, who helped to popularize the phrase and enlarging the project (Gans 2002). I support the project. But I would raise some questions about the formulation." Vol. 56:3, p. 355-363.

This is a revised version of a keynote presentation to a Lilly Foundation conference, Indianapolis, November 1993. In Private Action and the Public Good Chap. 2, p. 20-35.

Vol. 88:5, pp. 886-914

"Failure to respond effectively to Hurricane Katrina shares roots with proposals to privatize Social Security and the substitution of user fees and private purchase regimes for public provision of services. Inadequate public assistance to move the sick and elderly from New Orleans hospitals, like earlier inadequate investment in levee repair, reflects a widespread pattern: the reduction of public provision of public goods in favor of reliance on private markets or just plain tax cuts. Social institutions built over generations are being systematically unfunded and dismantled. In other words, the inadequate government response stemmed not only from incompetence but from policy."

"Two tacit Enlightenment premises have underwritten much thinking about the public roles of science and scholarship, teaching and research. They are that knowledge can be at once authoritative and democratic and can simultaneously inform expert instrumental use and public debate. Nineteenth and 20th-century developments were shaped by this joint project, but the two dimensions could readily come into tension or even contradiction. In the present article, I do not propose to offer an ideal resolution to the tension, but to argue that it has become acute, and especially that intensified inequalities and new patterns of instrumental evaluation of universities as providers of private goods are making the integration of the two ideals all but unsustainable." No. 84, p. 7-43.

A history of a multi-streamed discipline.

v. 5/1-2, p. 12-14.

This is a response to a simultaneously published article which is not available here. Vol. 8, p. 277-296.