Third ISA Forum of Sociology (July 10-14, 2016)

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Critical and Normative Visions of Nation Building, Euroscepticism and Transnationalism

WG02 Historical and Comparative Sociology (host committee)

Language: English and French

From precursors like Marx and Tocqueville up to contemporaries like Bartolini (Restructuring Europe, 2005) via classics (Weber, Geertz and Elias, Tilly, Wallerstein or Anderson), long-term historical sociology of the modern political has always had much to do with Europe. Isn’t the nation-state born in Europe after all? 
In the 20th century, historical sociologists, be they comparativists or not, have been seeking to move away from an evolutionism legated by nineteenth and early twentieth centuries’ social theorists Marx and Comte, as well as Spencer or Durkheim. However, historical sociology, even when closer to idiographic approaches rather than to nomothetic sociology, is still often suspected of (at least unintentional) Eurocentrism. 
This session proposes to take this challenge seriously by questioning the visions of Europe that stems from classic and contemporary socio-historical analyses. It aims at tackling three issues: 

• Do comparisons between nation-state(s) building processes and building processes of a European political entity entail specific normative visions of Europe?
• How can historical sociology help to understand resistances to European integration (e.g. Euroscepticism)?
• Does historical and political sociology of the EU propose critical views on trans-nationalisation processes at work after 1945?

The session is also open to theoretical issues such as:

• Can/Should historical sociology of Europe avoid/integrate comparison?
• Does the legacy of classics in contemporary figures of historical sociology entail particular visions about the future of European societies?
• Finally, what can we learn from the entangled relations between historical sociology, the history of Europe and political philosophy?

Posters: