Traces the way certain ideas, including nature, history and religion - which the political scientist calls foundational ideas - have been understood and used by statesmen and public intellectuals. This book covers the histories of these ideas and their relation to other ideas, to practices, and to the fortunes of successive partisan regimes.

Christianity has been important for American democracy. This book offers a view of how Christianity and democracy have shaped each other. It shows that amid deeply felt religious differences, a Protestant colonial society gradually convinced itself of the truly Christian reasons for, and the enlightened political advantages of, religious liberty.

Theda Skocpol, author of the award-winning 1979 book States and Social Revolutions, updates her arguments about social revolutions.

Traces the way certain ideas, including nature, history, and religion have been understood and used by statesmen and public intellectuals over the course of American history.

From the nineteenth through the mid-twentieth centuries, millions of Americans participated in fraternal associations - self-selecting brotherhoods and sisterhoods that provided aid to members, enacted group rituals, and engaged in community service. This book shows how African American groups played key roles in the struggle for civil rights.

Until recently, dominant theoretical paradigms in the comparative social sciences did not highlight states as organizational structures or as potentially autonomous actors. Indeed, the term 'state' was rarely used. Current work, however, increasingly views the state as an agent which, although influenced by the society that surrounds it, also shapes social and political processes. The ...

Theoretical paradigms in the comparative social sciences tend not to highlight the state as an organizational structure. However, this book presents research which reflects the increasingly popular view of the state as an agent able to shape social and political processes.

Tells the story of the most visible African American fraternal associations. This book demonstrates how African American fraternal groups played key roles in the struggle for civil rights and racial integration. It reveals an important chapter in the story of civic democracy and racial equality in America.

Some of the most important questions of the social sciences in the 20th century have been posed by scholars working at the intersections of social theory and history viewed on a grand scale. The core essays of this book focus on the careers and contributions of nine of these scholars.

In this look at how American social policy has baeen hijacked by a rhetoric of extremes, the author examines a problem also pertinent to European governments, the lack of policies concerned with the average working parents of modest means.

Places the welfare debates of the 1980s in the context of past patterns of US policy, such as the Social Security Act of 1935, the failure of efforts in the 1940s to extend national social benefits and economic planning, and the backlashes against big government that followed reforms of the 1960s and early 1970s.

An account of how health care reform under the Clinton administration went from being one of the Democrats' most popular policies to the most divisive.

An analysis of civic engagement in American democracy. It looks at the roots of US patterns of civic engagement, examining the ways in which social groups and government/electoral politics have influenced each other. It also examines the impact of advocacy groups on democratic processes.

Theda Skocpol shows how all three combine to explain the origins and accomplishments of social-revolutionary transformations.