Areas of Research/Interest: Comparative/historical sociology; political sociology; social theory; sociology of the arts.
Bio:
For as far back as I can remember, I have struggled to understand why Europe--and especially Germany--left the path of peace and prosperity after 1914 for that of war and genocide. While an undergraduate, I thought philosophy might throw some light on this problem, but I found its answers too abstract. It was the intellectual dynamism of historical sociology in the early 1980's, open as it was to the latest developments in history, social theory and political science, that persuaded me that I could best pursue this question further as a graduate student in sociology.
Select Publications:
Birth of the Leviathan: Building States and Regimes in Medieval and Early Modern Europe. Cambridge University Press, 1997. Barrington Moore Prize of the ASA 1998.
"Democracy and Dictatorship in Interwar Western Europe Revisited." World Politics, April 1998.
Taming the Leviathan: Building Democratic Nation-States in 19th and 20th Century Western Europe. (In Progress.)
