Macrohistory: Essays in Sociology of the Long Run

by Randall Collins

This book explores the accomplishments of the golden age of “macrohistory,” the sociologically informed analysis of long-term patterns of political, economic, and social change that has reached new heights of sophistication in the last decades of the twentieth century. It describes the scholarly revolution that has taken place in the Marxian-inspired theory of revolutions, the shift to a state-breakdown model in which revolutions, rather than bubbling up from discontent below, start at the top in the fiscal strains of the state. The author links revolutions to military-centered transformations of the state, and reviews how he used this theory in the early 1980s to predict the breakdown of the Soviet empire. He goes on to show the implications of viewing states and societies from the outside in, including the geopolitical patterns that affect the legitimacy of dominant ethnic groups and thus determine the direction of ethnic assimilation or fragmentation. Another application is the author’s new theory of democratization, which asserts that democracy depends not merely on a widening of the franchise but on a geopolitical pattern favoring federated structures of collegially shared power. Using this new theoretical tool, the author argues that Anglophone scholars have polemically misinterpreted German history, and that the roots of the Holocaust cannot be determined by German-bashing but must be attributed to processes that affect all of us. Other essays generalize about the historical dynamics and transformations of markets. Going beyond Weber’s Eurocentric model, the author proposes a more general theory that explains the origins of capitalism in Japan on an independent but parallel path.

Genres: Sociology, History

328 pages, Paperback

First published December 1, 1999

About the author

Dr. Randall Collins is an American sociologist who has been influential in both his teaching and writing. He has taught in many notable universities around the world and his academic works have been translated into various languages. Collins is currently Emeritus Professor of Sociology at the University of Pennsylvania. He is a leading contemporary social theorist whose areas of expertise include the macro-historical sociology of political and economic change; micro-sociology, including face-to-face interaction;and the sociology of intellectuals and social conflict. He has devoted much of his career and research to study society, how is it created and destroyed through emotional behaviors of human beings. He is considered to be one of the leading non-Marxist conflict theorists in the United States, and served as the president of the American Sociological Association from 2010 to 2011.

Dr. Collins' first position in academia was at UC Berkeley, followed by many other universities including the University of Wisconsin-Madison, followed by the UC San Diego, the University of Virginia, then UC Riverside, and finally the University of Pennsylvania. He took intermittent breaks from academia, as a novelist, and as a freelance scholar. He has also been a visiting professor at Chicago, Harvard, and Cambridge, as well as various schools in Europe, Japan, and China. Collins has published almost one hundred articles since finishing his undergraduate education. He has also written and contributed to several books with a range of topics such as the discovery of society to the sociology of marriage and family life.

Dr. Collins grew up in a slew of different cities and countries, his father being a diplomat (and possible spy) with the US State Department during the Cold War. They lived in Germany immediately following World War II, and later in Moscow, among other places such as Uruguay.