Contention And Trust In Cities And States

The catalyst for this book is the fact that noted sociologist Charles Tilly, upon his death in 2008, left one completed chapter of an unfinished manuscript entitled “Cities, States, and Trust Networks,” examining the relationships between cities and nation-states over the sweep of history, and in particular the role of trust networks in mediating this relationship. Though this was the catalyst, the book serves a broader purpose: to survey recent frontier work on cities, nation-states, and the relations between the two in historical and contemporary perspective. Essays in the book will address four main themes: city-state relations, trust networks and commitment, democracy and inequality, and the importance of historical legacies in shaping state structures, practices, and capacities. They will be global in scope, with research on the United States, Latin America, Europe, Asia, and Africa; a number of the pieces will be comparative. They will also be interdisciplinary, including works of geography, history, political science, sociology, urban planning. The book addresses several confluent needs of readers. One is to simply update themes addressed in earlier edited work such as Bringing the State Back In (1985). A second is to bring together current thinking about cities on the one hand and nation-states on the other, literatures that are often segregated from each other. A third is to perform those two purposes in a way that is global in scope and combines both historical and current analyses, to pull together insights from the full range of human experience.

The catalyst for this book is the fact that noted sociologist Charles Tilly, upon his death in 2008, left one completed chapter of an unfinished manuscript entitled “Cities, States, and Trust Networks,” examining the relationships between cities and nation-states over the sweep of history, and in particular the role of trust networks in mediating this relationship. Though this was the catalyst, the book serves a broader purpose: to survey recent frontier work on cities, nation-states, and the relations between the two in historical and contemporary perspective. Essays in the book will address four main themes: city-state relations, trust networks and commitment, democracy and inequality, and the importance of historical legacies in shaping state structures, practices, and capacities. They will be global in scope, with research on the United States, Latin America, Europe, Asia, and Africa; a number of the pieces will be comparative. They will also be interdisciplinary, including works of geography, history, political science, sociology, urban planning. The book addresses several confluent needs of readers. One is to simply update themes addressed in earlier edited work such as Bringing the State Back In (1985). A second is to bring together current thinking about cities on the one hand and nation-states on the other, literatures that are often segregated from each other. A third is to perform those two purposes in a way that is global in scope and combines both historical and current analyses, to pull together insights from the full range of human experience.

Evolution of the Property Relation defines an approach to economics which is centered around the concept of property and explores the historical evolution of the relationship of the individual, private property, and the state, and the distinctive changes wrought by the emergence of the market.

A social theory of grand corruption from antiquity to the twenty-first century. In contemporary policy discourse, the notion of corruption is highly constricted, understood just as the pursuit of private gain while fulfilling a public duty. Its paradigmatic manifestations are bribery and extortion, placing the onus on individuals, typically bureaucrats. Sudhir Chella Rajan argues that this understanding ignores the true depths of corruption, which is properly seen as a foundation of social structures. Not just bribes but also caste, gender relations, and the reproduction of class are forms of corruption. Using South Asia as a case study, Rajan argues that syndromes of corruption can be identified by paying attention to social orders and the elites they support. From the breakup of the Harappan civilization in the second millennium BCE to the anticolonial movement in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, elites and their descendants made off with substantial material and symbolic gains for hundreds of years before their schemes unraveled. Rajan makes clear that this grander form of corruption is not limited to India or the annals of global history. Societal corruption is endemic, as tax cheats and complicit bankers squirrel away public money in offshore accounts, corporate titans buy political influence, and the rich ensure that their children live lavishly no matter how little they contribute. These elites use their privileged access to power to fix the rules of the game—legal structures and social norms—benefiting themselves, even while most ordinary people remain faithful to the rubrics of everyday life.

According to media reports, Latin America is one of the most violent regions in the world—a distinction it held throughout the twentieth century. The authors of Violence and Crime in Latin America contend that perceptions and representations of violence and crime directly impact such behaviors, creating profound consequences for the political and social fabric of Latin American nations. Written by distinguished scholars of Latin American history, sociology, anthropology, and political science, the essays in this volume range from Mexico and Argentina to Colombia and Brazil in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, addressing such issues as extralegal violence in Mexico, the myth of indigenous criminality in Guatemala, and governments’ selective blindness to violent crime in Brazil and Jamaica. The authors in this collection examine not only the social construction and political visibility of violence and crime in Latin America, but the justifications for them as well. Analytically and historically, these essays show how Latin American citizens have sanctioned criminal and violent practices and incorporated them into social relations, everyday practices, and institutional settings. At the same time, the authors explore the power struggles that inform distinctions between illegitimate versus legitimate violence. Violence and Crime in Latin America makes a substantive contribution to understanding a key problem facing Latin America today. In its historical depth and ethnographic reach, this original and thought-provoking volume enhances our understanding of crime and violence throughout the Western Hemisphere.

Rightly fearing that unscrupulous rulers would break them up, seize their resources, or submit them to damaging forms of intervention, strong networks of trust such as kinship groups, clandestine religious sects, and trade diasporas have historically insulated themselves from political control by a variety of strategies. Drawing on a vast range of comparisons over time and space, Trust and Rule, first published in 2005, asks and answers how and with what consequences members of trust networks have evaded, compromised with, or even sought connections with political regimes. Since different forms of integration between trust networks produce authoritarian, theocratic, and democratic regimes, the book provides an essential background to the explanation of democratization and de-democratization.