States and Collective Action: The European Experience

It has become something of an orthodoxy of contemporary sociology that modern democratic industrial societies are essentially alike, and that they are confronted by uniform challenges, whether industrial, social, or political. In this important collection of studies, Professor Birnbaum asserts, however, that the very existence of differentiated states within the western world must, by definition, challenge such a hypothesis. Linking historical and sociological investigation, Birnbaum argues that it is only through divergent state-formation that regional and national state variations can be explained.