This sequel to Randall Collins' world-influential micro-sociology of violence introduces the question of time-dynamics: what determines how long conflict lasts and how much damage it does. Inequality and hostility are not enough to explain when and where violence breaks out. Time-dynamics are the time-bubbles when people are most nationalistic; the hours after a protest starts when violence is most likely to happen. Ranging from the three months of nationalism and hysteria after 9/11 to the assault on the Capitol in 2021, Randall Collins shows what makes some protests more violent than others and why some revolutions are swift and non-violent tipping-points while others devolve into lengthy civil wars. Winning or losing are emotional processes, continuing in the era of computerized war, while high-tech spawns terrorist tactics of hiding in the civilian population and using cheap features of the Internet as substitutes for military organization. Nevertheless, Explosive Conflict offers some optimistic discoveries on clues to mass rampages and heading off police atrocities, with practical lessons from time-dynamics of violence.

The Great Recession has prompted a reassessment of the specific mode of capitalist accumulation that achieved dominance in the era of globalization. Yet just about all of this literature has focused on one of two issues: why things went wrong, and what we need to do in order to return the system to stability. Outside of a contingent of radical socialists on the fringes of the debate, virtually no one questioned whether capitalism could continue. In Does Capitalism Have a Future?, the prominent theorist Georgi Derleugian has gathered together a quintet of eminent macrosociologists to assess whether the capitalist system can survive. The prevalent common wisdom, for all its current gloom, nevertheless safely assumes that capitalism cannot break down permanently because there is no alternative. The authors shatter this assumption, arguing that this generalization is not supported by theory but is rather an outgrowth of the optimistic nineteenth-century claim that human history ascends through stages to an enlightened equilibrium of liberal capitalism. Yet as they point out, just about all major historical systems have broken down in the end (e.g., the Roman empire). In the modern epoch there have been several cataclysmic events-notably the French revolution, World War I, and the collapse of the Soviet bloc-that came to pass mainly because contemporary political elites had spectacularly failed to calculate the consequences of the processes they presumed to govern. At present, none of our governing elites and very few of our intellectuals can fathom an ending to our current reigning system. Considering whether a collapse is possible is the task that the quintet-Derleugian, Michael Mann, Randall Collins, Craig Calhoun, and Immanuel Wallerstein-sets out to explore. While all of the contributors arrive at different conclusions, they are in constant dialogue with each other and therefore able to construct relatively seamless-if open-ended-whole. For instance, Wallerstein (who accurately predicted the collapse of the Soviet system in 1979) and Collins, identify fatal structural faults in twenty-first century capitalism. Mann, on the other hand, does not think that there is any serious alternative to the market dynamic, but he does identify other serious threats to the system, including environmental degradation. Calhoun and Derluguian are more circumspect and focus on the role of politics in steering the system toward either revival or collapse. This most ambitious of books, written by the highest caliber of sociologists, asks the biggest of questions: are we on the cusp of a radical world historical shift or not?

A concise overview of sociology's greatest classic thinker. Weber emerges as a multisided intellectual personality, whose intellectual ambivalence is related to a neurotic breakdown in mid career and to the compromises he was forced to make among the conflicting politievanscal and intellectual currents of his time. Here we see what kinds of philosophical idealism Weber favored and what kinds he rejected, as well as his position on the "battle of methods" among the economists of his day. Weber's famous "Protestant Ethic" thesis is put in proper perspective as an intellectual gambit in one particular period of his life, rather than as his central achievement. Weber's overall view of social change is examined, drawing on several of his crucial but little-known works, on the sociology of ancient agrarian societies and on the long chain of organizational conditions that finally led to modern capitalism. Also treated are Weber's major works on the sociology of religion and his contributions to systematic theory, especially social stratification. The many strands of Weber's theorizing, and his tremendous scope of comparisons across world history, are here brought into a clear and manageable focus. "Randall Collins is the leading sociological theorist of his generation. He has also done more than anyone else to use and develop Weberian sociology. Accordingly we expect much from Collins on Weber and Max Weber does not disappoint." --Whitney Pope, Indiana University "A lively, efficient, reliable interpretation, captivating for the novice, provocative for the expert. . . . Typical Collins." --Alan Sica, University of Kansas "A good introductory survey of Weber's major writings. It is interesting reading and highly informative." --Contemporary Sociology "A good capsule biography . . . very readable . . . honors clarity, style, and the value of popular understanding." --The Madison Independent Books in Review "Ideal for an introductory course on Weber." --Ethics

This new edition is a substantial abridgment and update of Randall Collins 's 1975 classic, "Conflict Sociology." The first edition represented the most powerful and comprehensive statement of conflict theory in its time. Here, Sanderson has retained the core chapters and added discussions on Collins 's and others work in recent years. An afterword summarizes Collins 's latest forays into microsociological theorizing and attempts to demonstrate how his newer microsociology and older macrosociology are connected.

What is charisma? And how does it generate influence and power? World-renowned sociologist Randall Collins explores these and many other questions in a highly readable exploration of the various forms of charisma and how charisma elevated Jesus, Cleopatra, Lawrence of Arabia, Queen Elizabeth, Hitler, Churchill, Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt, Madame Mao Zedong, and others. He explores four types of charisma: frontstage, backstage, success-magic, and reputational charisma. Not everyone has the same kind of charisma and Collin's identifies important differences and their relations to power. The book exemplifies Collin's sophisticated micro-sociology in accessible and compelling prose, quietly building subtle matrices of analysis that show how sociology unveils hidden discoveries.

Sex, smoking, and social stratification are three very different social phenomena. And yet, argues sociologist Randall Collins, they and much else in our social lives are driven by a common force: interaction rituals. "Interaction Ritual Chains" is a major work of sociological theory that attempts to develop a "radical microsociology." It proposes that successful rituals create symbols of group membership and pump up individuals with emotional energy, while failed rituals drain emotional energy. Each person flows from situation to situation, drawn to those interactions where their cultural capital gives them the best emotional energy payoff. Thinking, too, can be explained by the internalization of conversations within the flow of situations; individual selves are thoroughly and continually social, constructed from the outside in.

The first half of "Interaction Ritual Chains" is based on the classic analyses of Durkheim, Mead, and Goffman and draws on micro-sociological research on conversation, bodily rhythms, emotions, and intellectual creativity. The second half discusses how such activities as sex, smoking, and social stratification are shaped by interaction ritual chains. For example, the book addresses the emotional and symbolic nature of sexual exchanges of all sorts--from hand-holding to masturbation to sexual relationships with prostitutes--while describing the interaction rituals they involve. This book will appeal not only to psychologists, sociologists, and anthropologists, but to those in fields as diverse as human sexuality, religious studies, and literary theory.

Although he is undoubtedly one of the most important sociologists of all time, this text argues that much of Weber's work has been misunderstood and many of his most notable theories neglected or even overlooked. A new interpretation of his works is accordingly offered by the author herein.

What is charisma? And how does it generate influence and power? World-renowned sociologist Randall Collins explores these and many other questions in a highly readable exploration of the various forms of charisma and how charisma elevated Jesus, Cleopatra, Lawrence of Arabia, Queen Elizabeth, Hitler, Churchill, Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt, Madame Mao Zedong, and others. He explores four types of charisma: frontstage, backstage, success-magic, and reputational charisma. Not everyone has the same kind of charisma and Collin's identifies important differences and their relations to power. The book exemplifies Collin's sophisticated micro-sociology in accessible and compelling prose, quietly building subtle matrices of analysis that show how sociology unveils hidden discoveries.

In the popular misconception fostered by blockbuster action movies and best-selling thrillers--not to mention conventional explanations by social scientists--violence is easy under certain conditions, like poverty, racial or ideological hatreds, or family pathologies. Randall Collins challenges this view in "Violence," arguing that violent confrontation goes against human physiological hardwiring. It is the exception, not the rule--regardless of the underlying conditions or motivations.

Collins gives a comprehensive explanation of violence and its dynamics, drawing upon video footage, cutting-edge forensics, and ethnography to examine violent situations up close as they actually happen--and his conclusions will surprise you. Violence comes neither easily nor automatically. Antagonists are by nature tense and fearful, and their confrontational anxieties put up a powerful emotional barrier against violence. Collins guides readers into the very real and disturbing worlds of human discord--from domestic abuse and schoolyard bullying to muggings, violent sports, and armed conflicts. He reveals how the fog of war pervades all violent encounters, limiting people mostly to bluster and bluff, and making violence, when it does occur, largely incompetent, often injuring someone other than its intended target. Collins shows how violence can be triggered only when pathways around this emotional barrier are presented. He explains why violence typically comes in the form of atrocities against the weak, ritualized exhibitions before audiences, or clandestine acts of terrorism and murder--and why a small number of individuals are competent at violence.

"Violence" overturns standard views about the root causes of violence and offers solutions for confronting it in the future.

Randall Collins gehört zu den produktivsten und originellsten soziologischen Theoretikern der Gegenwart. In seinem Werk verbindet er eine an die Traditionslinien von Marx und Weber anknüpfende meso- und makrosoziologische Konflikttheorie mit einer emotionssoziologisch fundierten Interaktionstheorie. Auf dieser theoretischen Grundlage hat er inspirierende Beiträge zu unterschiedlichen soziologischen Forschungsfeldern formuliert. Seine Publikationen zur sozialen Ungleichheit, zur Wissenschaftssoziologie, zur Entstehung und Dynamik des Kapitalismus und zur langfristigen territorialen Macht von Staaten haben zu fruchtbringenden Diskussionen geführt. Dieser Band versammelt eine Auswahl der wichtigsten und interessantesten Beiträge von Collins.

Randall Collins traces the movement of philosophical thought in ancient Greece, China, Japan, India, the medieval Islamic and Jewish world, medieval Christendom, and modern Europe. What emerges from this history is a social theory of intellectual change, one that avoids both the reduction of ideas to the influences of society at large and the purely contingent local construction of meanings. Instead, Collins focuses on the social locations where sophisticated ideas are formed: the patterns of intellectual networks and their inner divisions and conflicts.

This book explores the accomplishments of the golden age of "macrohistory," the sociologically informed analysis of long-term patterns of political, economic, and social change that has reached new heights of sophistication in the last decades of the twentieth century.
It describes the scholarly revolution that has taken place in the Marxian-inspired theory of revolutions, the shift to a state-breakdown model in which revolutions, rather than bubbling up from discontent below, start at the top in the fiscal strains of the state. The author links revolutions to military-centered transformations of the state, and reviews how he used this theory in the early 1980s to predict the breakdown of the Soviet empire.
He goes on to show the implications of viewing states and societies from the outside in, including the geopolitical patterns that affect the legitimacy of dominant ethnic groups and thus determine the direction of ethnic assimilation or fragmentation. Another application is the author's new theory of democratization, which asserts that democracy depends not merely on a widening of the franchise but on a geopolitical pattern favoring federated structures of collegially shared power.
Using this new theoretical tool, the author argues that Anglophone scholars have polemically misinterpreted German history, and that the roots of the Holocaust cannot be determined by German-bashing but must be attributed to processes that affect all of us. Other essays generalize about the historical dynamics and transformations of markets. Going beyond Weber's Eurocentric model, the author proposes a more general theory that explains the origins of capitalism in Japan on an independent but parallel path.

This new edition is a substantial abridgment and update of Randall Collins 's 1975 classic, "Conflict Sociology." The first edition represented the most powerful and comprehensive statement of conflict theory in its time. Here, Sanderson has retained the core chapters and added discussions on Collins 's and others work in recent years. An afterword summarizes Collins 's latest forays into microsociological theorizing and attempts to demonstrate how his newer microsociology and older macrosociology are connected.

The Credential Society is a classic on the role of higher education in American society and an essential text for understanding the reproduction of inequality. Controversial at the time, Randall Collins's claim that the expansion of American education has not increased social mobility, but rather created a cycle of credential inflation, has proven remarkably prescient. Collins shows how credential inflation stymies mass education's promises of upward mobility. An unacknowledged spiral of the rising production of credentials and job requirements was brought about by the expansion of high school and then undergraduate education, with consequences including grade inflation, rising educational costs, and misleading job promises dangled by for-profit schools. Collins examines medicine, law, and engineering to show the ways in which credentialing closed these high-status professions to new arrivals. In an era marked by the devaluation of high school diplomas, outcry about the value of expensive undergraduate degrees, and the proliferation of new professional degrees like the MBA, The Credential Society has more than stood the test of time. In a new preface, Collins discusses recent developments, debunks claims that credentialization is driven by technological change, and points to alternative pathways for the future of education.

This book explores the accomplishments of the golden age of "macrohistory," the sociologically informed analysis of long-term patterns of political, economic, and social change that has reached new heights of sophistication in the last decades of the twentieth century.
It describes the scholarly revolution that has taken place in the Marxian-inspired theory of revolutions, the shift to a state-breakdown model in which revolutions, rather than bubbling up from discontent below, start at the top in the fiscal strains of the state. The author links revolutions to military-centered transformations of the state, and reviews how he used this theory in the early 1980s to predict the breakdown of the Soviet empire.
He goes on to show the implications of viewing states and societies from the outside in, including the geopolitical patterns that affect the legitimacy of dominant ethnic groups and thus determine the direction of ethnic assimilation or fragmentation. Another application is the author's new theory of democratization, which asserts that democracy depends not merely on a widening of the franchise but on a geopolitical pattern favoring federated structures of collegially shared power.
Using this new theoretical tool, the author argues that Anglophone scholars have polemically misinterpreted German history, and that the roots of the Holocaust cannot be determined by German-bashing but must be attributed to processes that affect all of us. Other essays generalize about the historical dynamics and transformations of markets. Going beyond Weber's Eurocentric model, the author proposes a more general theory that explains the origins of capitalism in Japan on an independent but parallel path.

The Credential Society is a classic on the role of higher education in American society and an essential text for understanding the reproduction of inequality. Controversial at the time, Randall Collins’s claim that the expansion of American education has not increased social mobility, but rather created a cycle of credential inflation, has proven remarkably prescient. Collins shows how credential inflation stymies mass education’s promises of upward mobility. An unacknowledged spiral of the rising production of credentials and job requirements was brought about by the expansion of high school and then undergraduate education, with consequences including grade inflation, rising educational costs, and misleading job promises dangled by for-profit schools. Collins examines medicine, law, and engineering to show the ways in which credentialing closed these high-status professions to new arrivals. In an era marked by the devaluation of high school diplomas, outcry about the value of expensive undergraduate degrees, and the proliferation of new professional degrees like the MBA, The Credential Society has more than stood the test of time. In a new preface, Collins discusses recent developments, debunks claims that credentialization is driven by technological change, and points to alternative pathways for the future of education.

This sequel to Randall Collins' world-influential micro-sociology of violence introduces the question of time-dynamics: what determines how long conflict lasts and how much damage it does. Inequality and hostility are not enough to explain when and where violence breaks out. Time-dynamics are the time-bubbles when people are most nationalistic; the hours after a protest starts when violence is most likely to happen. Ranging from the three months of nationalism and hysteria after 9/11 to the assault on the Capitol in 2021, Randall Collins shows what makes some protests more violent than others and why some revolutions are swift and non-violent tipping-points while others devolve into lengthy civil wars. Winning or losing are emotional processes, continuing in the era of computerized war, while high-tech spawns terrorist tactics of hiding in the civilian population and using cheap features of the Internet as substitutes for military organization. Nevertheless, Explosive Conflict offers some optimistic discoveries on clues to mass rampages and heading off police atrocities, with practical lessons from time-dynamics of violence.

The Great Recession has prompted a reassessment of the specific mode of capitalist accumulation that achieved dominance in the era of globalization. Yet just about all of this literature has focused on one of two issues: why things went wrong, and what we need to do in order to return the system to stability. Outside of a contingent of radical socialists on the fringes of the debate, virtually no one questioned whether capitalism could continue. In Does Capitalism Have a Future?, the prominent theorist Georgi Derleugian has gathered together a quintet of eminent macrosociologists to assess whether the capitalist system can survive. The prevalent common wisdom, for all its current gloom, nevertheless safely assumes that capitalism cannot break down permanently because there is no alternative. The authors shatter this assumption, arguing that this generalization is not supported by theory but is rather an outgrowth of the optimistic nineteenth-century claim that human history ascends through stages to an enlightened equilibrium of liberal capitalism. Yet as they point out, just about all major historical systems have broken down in the end (e.g., the Roman empire). In the modern epoch there have been several cataclysmic events-notably the French revolution, World War I, and the collapse of the Soviet bloc-that came to pass mainly because contemporary political elites had spectacularly failed to calculate the consequences of the processes they presumed to govern. At present, none of our governing elites and very few of our intellectuals can fathom an ending to our current reigning system. Considering whether a collapse is possible is the task that the quintet-Derleugian, Michael Mann, Randall Collins, Craig Calhoun, and Immanuel Wallerstein-sets out to explore. While all of the contributors arrive at different conclusions, they are in constant dialogue with each other and therefore able to construct relatively seamless-if open-ended-whole. For instance, Wallerstein (who accurately predicted the collapse of the Soviet system in 1979) and Collins, identify fatal structural faults in twenty-first century capitalism. Mann, on the other hand, does not think that there is any serious alternative to the market dynamic, but he does identify other serious threats to the system, including environmental degradation. Calhoun and Derluguian are more circumspect and focus on the role of politics in steering the system toward either revival or collapse. This most ambitious of books, written by the highest caliber of sociologists, asks the biggest of questions: are we on the cusp of a radical world historical shift or not?

A concise overview of sociology's greatest classic thinker. Weber emerges as a multisided intellectual personality, whose intellectual ambivalence is related to a neurotic breakdown in mid career and to the compromises he was forced to make among the conflicting politievanscal and intellectual currents of his time. Here we see what kinds of philosophical idealism Weber favored and what kinds he rejected, as well as his position on the "battle of methods" among the economists of his day. Weber's famous "Protestant Ethic" thesis is put in proper perspective as an intellectual gambit in one particular period of his life, rather than as his central achievement. Weber's overall view of social change is examined, drawing on several of his crucial but little-known works, on the sociology of ancient agrarian societies and on the long chain of organizational conditions that finally led to modern capitalism. Also treated are Weber's major works on the sociology of religion and his contributions to systematic theory, especially social stratification. The many strands of Weber's theorizing, and his tremendous scope of comparisons across world history, are here brought into a clear and manageable focus. "Randall Collins is the leading sociological theorist of his generation. He has also done more than anyone else to use and develop Weberian sociology. Accordingly we expect much from Collins on Weber and Max Weber does not disappoint." --Whitney Pope, Indiana University "A lively, efficient, reliable interpretation, captivating for the novice, provocative for the expert. . . . Typical Collins." --Alan Sica, University of Kansas "A good introductory survey of Weber's major writings. It is interesting reading and highly informative." --Contemporary Sociology "A good capsule biography . . . very readable . . . honors clarity, style, and the value of popular understanding." --The Madison Independent Books in Review "Ideal for an introductory course on Weber." --Ethics