The Sociology of Political Crisis - by Michel Dobry (Hardcover)

Book Synopsis

The Sociology of Political Crisis provides a pioneering and powerful theoretical approach to a large range of critical "events" like political breakdowns, revolutions, upheavals or collapses, which it considers as self-fueling processes emancipating themselves from the multiple causes that gave rise to them. Exploring the properties of "fluid conjunctures", Michel Dobry highlights the plasticity of the structures in which people act and explains the phenomena of structural uncertainty and de-objectification of the social world that affect theirexpectations and calculations. This first English translation of a classic text deftly moves through the currents of both sociology and
philosophy to engage with political crisis in increasingly timely ways.

Review Quotes

"Michel Dobry's book develops an impressive framework for understanding the unfolding of political crises in apparently very different historical contexts. Backed by brilliant case studies, the translation of this pathbreaking work will fascinate English-speaking students and researchers in political sociology and, more generally, be a source of discussion in the field of contemporary social sciences." --Luc Boltanski, Professor at the School for Advanced Studies in the Social Sciences, Paris, France

"The Sociology of Political Crisis casts an entirely new light on logics of action in extraordinary events where collective behaviour, calculations, and goals are all up for grabs. It is an absolute delight to see this French social science classic now translated into English." --Harald Wydra, Professor of Politics, St. Catharine's College, University of Cambridge, UK

"Dobry's book is one of the rare classics of the social sciences that gain importance over time. This is because it develops a highly original theoretical toolkit which proves powerfully fertile for empirical work in a wide variety of fields, well beyond political crises alone." --Wolfgang Knöbl, Director of the Hamburg Institute for Social Research, Hamburg, Germany

About the Author