Product Description: First published in 1998. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

Product Description: This volume brings together several of Prof. S.N. Eisenstadt's essays written over the years on Jewish history and identity. The major argument of the essays follows the Weberian view of Jewish historical experience as that of a distinct civilization, as a distinct Great Religion, the first monotheistic civilization without, however, accepting many of Weber's concrete analyses...read more

Product Description: This book is the analysis of the civilizational and historical context of the development of the Great Modern Revolutions; their relations to modernity, to the civilization of modernity, and to the development of multiple modernities; and the fate of revolutionary symbolism and dynamics in modern regimes, in the continually changing civilization of modernity, its dynamics and tribulations...read more

Product Description: The authors of this volume explore the tensions and dilemmas that impact pluralism and homogeneity in modern societies. This is the first work in this field in which the frame of discussion is a comparative civilizational analysis...read more

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Product Description: The overarching theme of the book is the historical meaning of the Axial Age, commonly defined as a period of several centuries around the middle of the last millennium BCE, and its cultural innovations. The civilizational patterns that grew out of this exceptionally creative phase are a particularly rewarding theme for comparative analysis...read more

Product Description: The republication of From Generation to Generation-almost half a century after its first appearance in 1956-constitutes a good occasion for a look at the way in which problems of youth and generations developed in contemporary societies...read more (view table of contents, read Amazon.com's description)

"The general as well as the more scholarly discourse on democracy has long been guided by two contradictory assumptions. On the one hand it has been assumed that there is a natural human predisposition to democracy, an assumption increasingly prevalent and popular following the breakup of the Soviet regime and many authoritarian regimes in Southern Europe and Latin America. On the other hand, it has been assumed from their very inception that democratic regimes were aware of their fragility. This awareness was built, to some degree, on the political discourse of antiquity, but it was rooted above all in the direct experience of the modern era."–from the introduction Paradoxes of Democracy is an essay on the inherent weaknesses and surprising strengths of democratic government by one of the most productive and learned scholars in the social sciences.Shmuel Eisenstadt opens with observations on divergent theories of democracy and closes with a discussion of mechanisms by which democratic regimes incorporate into their own structures the movements of protest that seem to challenge their existence. In between he courses through the roots of democratic theory in modern culture, the contradictions and tensions prompted by those roots, and some of the historical manifestations of contradiction. Eisenstadt focuses on the most important conditions―especially on different patterns of collective identity―which influence the extent to which democratic regimes are able to incorporate themes of protest and social movements and thus ensure their common survival.

Product Description: How may we characterize contemporary society in a world so complex? Can looking at the diverse paths followed by various cultures in the modern world generate useful new social scientific typologies, or must a different set of questions be posed in this era of globalization? What, in short, is the nature of modernity? These are some of the questions addressed by the contributors to Multiple Modernities...read more (view table of contents, read Amazon.com's description)

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Product Description: Today it is assumed that we understand contemporary nationalism and nation-building. Researchers rarely consider the very different traditions from which such state-building emerged. Instead, there is almost too much discussion of the "global village," with its supposed uniformity and inevitable trajectories...read more (view table of contents, read Amazon.com's description)

This book is a major comparative analysis of fundamentalist movements in historical and cultural context, spanning revolutionary France, America and Japan, with an emphasis on the contemporary scene. Leading sociologist S. N. Eisenstadt examines the protofundamentalist movements that arose in the great "axial civilizations" in premodern times in order to illuminate the meaning of the global rise of fundamentalism that is shown to be an important current in modernity. The central theme of the book is the distinctively Jacobin features of fundamentalist movements and their ambivalent attitude to tradition. (view table of contents)

Product Description: S. N. Eisenstadt is well known for his wide-ranging investigations of modernization, social stratification, revolution, comparative civilization, and political development. This collection of twelve major theoretical essays spans more than forty years of research, to explore systematically the bases of human action and society...read more

Product Description: Winner of the prestigious MacIver Award when it was first published, this remains a towering work of modern political sociology, especially of macrosociology. Its main objective is comparative analysis of political commonalities found in different societies, both historical and present...read more

Product Description: Democracy and Modernity presents a colloquium of scholars on the present state of democracy in many parts of the globe, in both developed and developing countries. Where does it stand firm, and where is it on shifting ground? What are the conditions necessary for the consolidation of democracy, and what difficulties face those countries where a stable democratic regime is still a hope for the future? How do the political traditions of a country's past affect its ability to maintain democracy in the present? Recent changes in the nature of regimes in many previously non-democratic countries have made these questions all the more timely...read more

Product Description: Patterns of Modernity