ABSTRACT

The imprint of that concern is clear on the foundational texts in historical sociology down to the 1990s – Charles Tilly clearly, but also on Michael Mann, who to the author mind has produced the most subtle and flexible account of these issues to date. Max Weber assumed that for people interested in politics the key institutionalised form of political power would be the state. While the position of the nation state is of course far from irrelevant to modern politics, there is an even more abiding concern about the relationship between political and other forms of power, and the extent of political agency in the face of apparently overwhelming collective challenges. What the authors really have in common is a concern with people, power, and agency, and how that played out in collective institutions of various kinds, and that, of course, is a question of pressing contemporary significance.