State/Culture

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.

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.

This collection of essays examines the process of state formation in light of the ongoing 'cultural turn' in the social sciences....Such work is particularly useful to historians of education....Although the essays collected in State Formation after the Cultural Turn do not focus directly on the history of education, they can be used as a source of conceptual inspiration. They can also be read as a map of the social sciences: providing useful coordinates of our own position, clarifying the differences between relevant writers and approaches, and noting the direction of particularly useful interventions....This is a useful book deserving a wide readership.

This book... is a serious and substantive addition to the literature, not only of states but also of cultures and economics.

This important volume... seeks to revitalize the study of state formation by allowing it to partake of the fruits of the cultural turn. In its ambitions this collection bears a strong resemblance to Peter Evans, Dietrick Rueschemayer, and Theda Skocpol's Bringing the State Back In of 1985, and its impact should be equally great... The richness of this volume's contributions should provide inspiration to all those who seek to reinvigorate the study of the state and state formation.