The image of the debauched French aristocrat of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries is one that still has power over the international public imagination, from the unending fascination with the Marquis de Sade to the successes of the film Ridicule. Drawing on memoirs, letters, popular songs and pamphlets, and political treatises, The Enlightened and Depraved: Decadence, Radicalism, and the Early Modern French Nobility traces the origins of this powerful stereotype from between the reign of Louis XIV and the Terror of the French Revolution. The decadent and enlightened noble of early modern France, the libertine, was born in a push to transform the nobility from a warrior caste into an intelligentsia. Education itself had become a power through which the privileged could set themselves free from old social and religious restraints. However, by the late eighteenth century, the libertine noble was already falling under attack by changing attitudes toward gender, an emphasis on economic utility over courtly service, and ironically the very revolutionary forces that the enlightened nobility of the court and Paris helped awaken. In the end, the libertine nobility would not survive the French Revolution, but the basic idea of knowledge as a liberating force would endure in modernity, divorced from a single class.

The essays in this collection examine agrarian transformation in Latin America and the role in this of peasants, with particular reference to Bolivia, Peru, Chile, Brazil and Central America. Among the issues covered are the impact of globalization and neo-liberal economic policies.

Can a state empower its citizens by classifying them? Or do reservation policies reinforce the very categories they are meant to eradicate? Indian reservation policies on government jobs, legislative seats and university admissions for disadvantaged groups, like affirmative action policies elsewhere, are based on the premise that recognizing group distinctions in society is necessary to subvert these distinctions. Yet the official identification of eligible groups has unintended side-effects on identity politics. Bridging theories which emphasize the fluidity of identities and those which highlight the utility of group-based mobilizations and policies, this book exposes didactic enforcement of categorizations, while recognizing the social and political gains facilitated by group-based strategies.

eBook available with sample pages: 020340193X

First published in 1997, this study of 9,000 people born in the same week in 1970, who have been followed up since birth, has produced a unique picture of life for those in their mid 20s - a year before the new Labour Government took office. The new survey shows a fractured society with clear evidence of an increasing gulf between those 'getting on' with their careers and blooming and those who are being left behind. The polarisation between those 'getting on' and those 'getting nowhere' was primarily about financial and career achievement but was also reflected in almost every other area of their lives. A theme running throughout the book is what characterises successful integration into adult life, as opposed to marginalisation and social exclusion which is encountered by increasing numbers of young people.

First published in 1985, this book explores the 'lived culture' of urban black students in a community college located in a large northeastern city in the United States. The author immersed herself in the institution she was studying for a full academic year, exploring both the direct experiences of education, and the way these experiences were worked over and through the praxis of cultural discourse. She examines in detail the messages of the school, including the 'hidden curriculum' and faculty perspectives, as well as the way these messages are transformed at a cultural level. The resulting work provides a major contribution to a number of debates on education and cultural and economic reproduction, as well as a leap forward in our understanding of the role schooling plays in the re-creation of race and class antagonisms. This work will be of great interest to anyone working with minorities, particularly in the context of education.

While the concept of cities and places of refuge, or sanctuary cities, is as ancient as history itself, the past few years has given rapid rise to a new, related phenomenon in the U.S.: the anti-sanctuary city movement. As of 2018, over 500 U.S. municipalities and several states have adopted anti-sanctuary city policies. How do we explain the rapid rise of this movement? This book examines the social, political, and racial underpinnings of this radical new movement, and what members of targeted communities can do to counteract its corrosive effects. This book accomplishes five goals: Conceptually and descriptively gives form to the anti-sanctuary movement. Identifies trends and reasons for successes and failures of this movement. Draws lessons for social justice advocates in countering this movement. Presents a series of cities illustrating how and why this movement has unfolded in certain geographical areas. Presents recommendations for anticipating the evolution of this movement and countering its destructive impacts in communities where the anti-sanctuary is taking root.

In their own words, the subjects of this book present a rich portrait of the modern black middle-class, examining how cultural consumption is a critical tool for enjoying material comforts as well as challenging racism. New York City has the largest population of black Americans out of any metropolitan area in the United States. It is home to a steadily rising number of socio-economically privileged blacks. In Black Privilege Cassi Pittman Claytor examines how this economically advantaged group experiences privilege, having credentials that grant them access to elite spaces and resources with which they can purchase luxuries, while still confronting persistent anti-black bias and racial stigma. Drawing on the everyday experiences of black middle-class individuals, Pittman Claytor offers vivid accounts of their consumer experiences and cultural flexibility in the places where they live, work, and play. Whether it is the majority white Wall Street firm where they're employed, or the majority black Baptist church where they worship, questions of class and racial identity are equally on their minds. They navigate divergent social worlds that demand, at times, middle-class sensibilities, pedigree, and cultural acumen; and at other times pride in and connection with other blacks. Rich qualitative data and original analysis help account for this special kind of privilege and the entitlements it affords-materially in terms of the things they consume, as well as symbolically, as they strive to be unapologetically black in a society where a racial consumer hierarchy prevails.

Class Strategies and the Education Market examines the ways in which the middle classes maintain and improve their social advantages in and through education.
Drawing on an extensive series of interviews with parents and children, this book identifies key moments of decision making in the construction of the educational trajectories of middle class children. Stephen J. Ball organises his analysis around the key concepts of social closure, social capital, values and principles and risk, while bringing a broad range of up-to-date sociological theory to bear upon his subject. From this thorough analysis, valuable and thought-provoking insights emerge into the assiduous care and considerable effort and expenditure which goes into ensuring the educational success of the middle class child
The middle classes are a sociological enigma, presenting the social researcher with considerable analytic and theoretical difficulties. Class Strategies and the Education Market provides a set of working tools for class analysis and the examination of class practices. Above all, it offers new ways of thinking about class theory and the relationships between classes in late modern society.

Riveting and inspiring first-person stories of how "taking a knee" triggered an awakening in sports, from the celebrated sportswriter "The Kaepernick Effect reveals that Colin Kaepernick's story is bigger than one athlete. With profiles of courage that leap off the page, Zirin uncovers a whole national movement of citizen-athletes fighting for racial justice." -Ibram X. Kendi, National Book Award-winning author of Stamped from the Beginning and How to Be an Antiracist In 2016, amid an epidemic of police shootings of African Americans, the celebrated NFL quarterback Colin Kaepernick began a series of quiet protests on the field, refusing to stand during the U.S. national anthem. By "taking a knee," Kaepernick bravely joined a long tradition of American athletes making powerful political statements. This time, however, Kaepernick's simple act spread like wildfire throughout American society, becoming the preeminent symbol of resistance to America's persistent racial inequality. Critically acclaimed sports journalist and author of A People's History of Sports in the United States, Dave Zirin chronicles "the Kaepernick effect" for the first time, through interviews with a broad cross-section of professional athletes across many different sports, college stars and high-powered athletic directors, and high school athletes and coaches. In each case, he uncovers the fascinating explanations and motivations behind a mass political movement in sports, through deeply personal and inspiring accounts of risk-taking, activism, and courage both on and off the field. A book about the politics of sport, and the impact of sports on politics, The Kaepernick Effect is for anyone seeking to understand an essential dimension of the new movement for racial justice in America.

The Rise of Professional Society lays out a stimulating and controversial framework for the study of British society, challenging accepted paradigms based on class analysis. Perkins argues that the non-capitalist 'professional class' represents a new principle of social organization based on trained expertise and meritocracy, a 'forgotten middle class' conveniently overlooked by classical social theorists.

The anthropological study of elites has gained increasing prominence with the issues of power, prestige and ststus in the societies of of anthropologists themselves. However, our understanding of elites is often partial, obscured as it is by the theoretical weaknesses of Western models on the one hand and, on the other, by the difficulties in studying elites from the 'inside'. Drawing on a diverse, comparative ethnographic literature, this new volume examines the intimate spaces and cultural practices of those elites who occupy positions of power and authority across a variety of different settings.

At this crucial moment in American history, when voting rights could be expanded to include all citizens, or legislatively limited, this significantly updated edition of Who Rules America? shows precisely how the top 1% of the population, who own 43% of all financial wealth, and receive 20% of the nation's yearly income, dominate governmental decision-making. They have created a corporate community and a policy-planning network, made up of foundations think-tanks, and policy-discussion groups, to develop the policies that become law. Through a leadership group called the power elite, the corporate rich provide campaign donations and other gifts and favors to elected officials, serve on federal advisory committees, and receive appointments to key positions in government, all of which make it possible for the corporate rich and the power elite to rule the country, despite constant challenges from the inclusionary alliance and from the Democratic Party. The book explains the role of both benign and dark attempts to influence public opinion, the machinations of the climate-denial network, and how the Supreme Court came to have an ultraconservative majority, who serve as a backstop for the corporate community as well as a legitimator of restrictions on voting rights, union rights, and abortion rights, by ruling that individual states have the power to set such limits. Despite all this highly concentrated power, it will be the other 99.5%, not the top 0.5%, who will decide the fate of the United States in the 2020s on all the important issues.

In the 1950s and 1960s, immigration bureaucrats in the Department of Citizenship and Immigration played an important yet unacknowledged role in transforming Canada's immigration policy. In response to external economic and political pressures for change, high-level bureaucrats developed new admissions criteria gradually and experimentally while personally processing thousands of individual immigration cases per year. Making Middle-Class Multiculturalism shows how bureaucrats' perceptions and judgements about the admissibility of individuals - in socioeconomic, racial, and moral terms - influenced the creation of formal admissions criteria for skilled workers and family immigrants that continue to shape immigration to Canada. A qualitative content analysis of archival documents, conducted through the theoretical lens of a cultural sociology of immigration policy, reveals that bureaucrats' interpretations of immigration files generated selection criteria emphasizing not just economic utility, but also middle-class traits and values such as wealth accumulation, educational attainment, entrepreneurial spirit, resourcefulness, and a strong work ethic. By making "middle-class multiculturalism" a demographic reality and basis of nation-building in Canada, these state actors created a much-admired approach to managing racial diversity that has nevertheless generated significant social inequalities.

While much recent scholarship has been examined the colonial Chesapeake's slave culture, little attention to the class of landowners who dominated this society. Trevor Burnard has corrected this oversight by undertaking the first systematic study of an agricultural elite in any British colony, providing a fascinating glimpse into the lives of 460 of the wealthiest men who lived in colonial Maryland during this era.

This title was first published in 2002: Advancing the understanding of a transition society, this book presents an in-depth analysis of social structures in modern Russia. Using unique survey data spanning nearly a decade, it describes and analyzes Russia's social development and class formation during the 1990s. Featuring a fascinating critical examination of such areas as social mobility, the structure and nature of labour markets, economic well-being and societal atmosphere, a team of leading international contributors cast a critical eye over the standard ways of understanding post-communist Russia. The result is an impressive and influential work which will make stimulating reading for researchers, academics and practitioners in the fields of Sociology, Politics and Economics as well as Russian specialists.

On November 24, 2016, the Colombian government and the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia signed a revised peace accord that marked a political end to over a half-century of war. Feel the Grass Grow traces the far less visible aspects of moving from war to peace: the decades of campesino struggle to defend life, land, and territory prior to the national accord, as well as campesino social leaders' engagement with the challenges of the state's post-accord reconstruction efforts. In the words of the campesino organizers, "peace is not signed, peace is built." Drawing on nearly a decade of extensive ethnographic and participatory research, Angela Jill Lederach advances a theory of "slow peace." Slowing down does not negate the urgency that animates the defense of territory in the context of the interlocking processes of political and environmental violence that persist in post-accord Colombia. Instead, Lederach shows how the campesino call to "slowness" recenters grassroots practices of peace, grounded in multigenerational struggles for territorial liberation. In examining the various layers of meaning embedded within campesino theories of "the times (los tiempos)," this book directs analytic attention to the holistic understanding of peacebuilding found among campesino social leaders. Their experiences of peacebuilding shape an understanding of time as embodied, affective, and emplaced. The call to slow peace gives primacy to the everyday, where relationships are deepened, ancestral memories reclaimed, and ecologies regenerated.

Drawing on a diverse, comparative ethnographic literature, this new volume examines the intimate spaces and cultural practices of those elites who occupy positions of power and authority across a variety of different settings.
Using ethnographic case studies from a wide range of geographical areas, including Mexico, Peru, Amazonia, Indonesia, Sri Lanka, Europe, North America and Africa, the contributors explore the inner worlds of meaning and practice that define and sustain elite identities. They also provide insights into the cultural mechanisms that maintain elite status, and into the complex ways that elite groups relate to, and are embedded within, wider social and historical processes.

"Natural Hierarchies" adopts a highly original approach to trace the emergence and development of social rank in our present-day world. The author draws upon traditional methods used in the social sciences, detailed accounts of historical events in Europe, the Indian subcontinent, the Caribbean, and mainland America, to illustrate how meanings of race and caste have been transformed mainly through political struggles, and particularly in the context of colonialism.

This new and highly provocative analysis looks at ideas of hierarchy in the light of the latest historical, anthropological, and sociological evidence to generate understanding of present struggles in race and ethnic relations. It is a well-reasoned account that illuminates the strong historical links between the idea of hierarchy and concepts of race and caste.

Ever since the rise of mass labor movements in the late nineteenth century, socialism has been seen as an inevi- table and antagonistic response to capitalism and the spread of industrialization. Over the course of the twentieth century, however, socialism's failure to gain ground in the United States and most of the non-Western world exposed the limited, Eurocentric views of socialist theorists, and also the inadequacy of the theory as it applied to Europe as well. John Kautsky argues that a key factor in the development of social democratic labor movements was the persistence of powerful remnants of aristocratic institutions and ideologies whose survival into the industrial age preserved exclusionary hierarchies. These led, in turn, to radicalism and class consciousness among workers.

Kautsky traces the evolution of socialist labor movements in Europe and Japan where aristocratic elements were still strong, detailing the survival of aristocratic privilege and the concomitants of worker class consciousness and demands for equality. He shows how social democratic reliance on free elections was primarily a weapon against the aristocracy rather than capitalism. Contradicting socialist theory, working-class growth came to an end, class lines became blurred, and a considerable degree of equality was achieved through the welfare state.

Kautsky turns to those countries that were sufficiently industrialized to have large numbers of workers, but also had reasonably free elections, civil liberties, and less repression of trade unions. Though the United States, Canada, post-Soviet Russia, Mexico, and India have very different histories and societies, their workers have not confronted a powerful aristocracy. Great Britain, the first and for long the most advanced industrial country, was virtually the last to develop a socialist labor movement. In contrast, socialist movements in Canada and the United States, where egalitarian traditions were strong, found little support. Kautsky's concluding chapters treat the spread of corruption, the rise of new oligarchies in Russia, and the position of workers no longer honored and politically weak.

In its innovative perspective on long-held theories and its currency for contemporary problems, "Social Democracy and Aristocracy" is an important contribution to political thought in the post-Marxist world. Its global approach makes it uniquely valuable for the comparative study of labor history and economic development.

Insanity, identity and empire examines the formation of colonial social identities inside the institutions for the insane in Australia and New Zealand. Taking a large sample of patient records, it pays particular attention to gender, ethnicity and class as categories of analysis, reminding us of the varied journeys of immigrants to the colonies and of how and where they stopped, for different reasons, inside the social institutions of the period. It is about their stories of mobility, how these were told and produced inside institutions for the insane, and how, in the telling, colonial identities were asserted and formed. Having engaged with the structural imperatives of empire and with the varied imperial meanings of gender, sexuality and medicine, historians have considered the movements of travellers, migrants, military bodies and medical personnel, and 'transnational lives'. This book examines an empire-wide discourse of 'madness' as part of this inquiry. -- .

Contents:
Introduction 1. Problems and Perspectives: A Picture of Maryland Elites Part One: Wealth 2. A Gentleman's Competence: The Ambitions of the Maryland Elite 3. 'A Species of Capital Attached to Certain Mercantile Houses': Elite Debts and the Significance of Credit Part Two: Family 4. The Demography and Character of Elite Families 5. Arrows Over Time: Elite Inheritance Practices Part Three: Society 6. The Progression of Provincial Politics 7. The Development of Provincial Consciousness: The Formation of Elite Identity Conclusion: Towards a History of Elites in the Eighteenth Century British Empire

This book focuses on social transformations as one of the central topics in the social sciences. The study of European social transformations is very valuable in the context of universal discussions within social sciences: explaining invariable, universal attributes of societies and examining changing attributes. The book consists of 20 chapters on European social transformations, written from the perspectives of distinguished scholars from such disciplines as economics, political science, educational science, geography, media and communication studies, public management and administration, social psychology and sociology. The temporal and spatial range of the book is wide, including such global changes as time-space compression, focusing particularly on change processes in Europe during the last two decades. The book consists of four main parts, beginning with an overview of the theoretical and methodological approaches, and then focusing separately on post-communist transformations, institutional drivers of social transformations in the European Union, and European transformations in the context of global processes. The book presents current theoretical, empirical and methodological approaches that complement the scientific literature on social transformations. This book is both an invaluable resource for scholars and an indispensable teaching tool for use in the classroom and will be of interest to students, academics, and policy-makers studying how this diverse region has changed over recent years.

The German-Austrian social theorist and philosopher Leo Kofler (1907-1995) represents what Oskar Negt once called 'unmutilated, living Marxism'. Throughout his life he dealt with issues of history and modernity, Marxist philosophy, and the critique of ideology, philosophical anthropology, and aesthetics. In this volume, author and Kofler biographer Christoph Junke elucidates the contours of his philosophy of praxis, traces an arc from the socialist classics to postmodernism, and outlines the socialist humanist thinker's enduring relevance. The book also includes six essays by Leo Kofler published in English for the first time. The main work was first published in German as Leo Koflers Philosophie der Praxis: Eine Einfuhrung in sein Denken by Laika Verlag, 2015.

This title was first published in 2003. A fascinating insight into the economic, social and political processes that shaped the lives of white workers in Johannesburg between the beginning of deep level mining (c. 1890) and the 1922 Rand Revolt miners' strike. The book examines four related topics: the formation of working class families, working class accommodation, the constitution of social networks in the working class neighbourhoods and the political and ideological aspects of white workers' unemployment. The main argument presented here is that the class experience of white workers in Johannesburg had a very important role in fostering a sense of community between English and Afrikaner workers and their families. It is this sense of community that plays an important part in understanding the solidarity that emerged between English and Afrikaner workers during the 1922 Rand Revolt.

This book traces the phenomenon of class from the medieval to the postmodern period, uniquely examining its relevance to literary and cultural analysis. Drawing on historical, sociological and literary writings, Gary Day:
* gives an account of class at different historical moments
* shows the role of class in literary constructions of the social
* examines the complex relations between 'class' and 'culture'
* focuses attention on the role of class in constructions of 'the literary' and 'the canon'
* employs a revived and revised notion of class to critique recent theoretical movements.