[Joint AxPo/CEE Seminar] Special Paths: Germany and the US in Comparative Perspective

Joint AxPo - CEE Seminar

Sciences Po, 13 rue de l'Université, 75007, Paris

Registration

What is the connection between capitalism (a system characterized by the presence of wage labor and private ownership of the major means of production) and democracy (a political structure in which state managers can be ejected from power through elections)? Generations of scholars from a wide variety of political and theoretical perspectives have claimed that they are internally connected.

Through a comparative/historical analysis of Germany and the US (the two most dynamic capitalist powers of the late nineteenth century) I challenge this view. I claim instead that industrial capitalism and democracy were compatible only where the country in question had access to land and markets of sufficient scale to thwart otherwise powerful pressures toward authoritarianism created by worsening class conflict. Accordingly, theories of geopolitics must be fully integrated into theories of political regime type.

Speaker

Dylan Riley, University of California, Berkeley

Dylan Riley is Professor of Sociology at the University of California, Berkeley. He studies capitalism, socialism, democracy, authoritarianism, and knowledge regimes in broad comparative and historical perspective and is author, most recently, of Microverses: Observations from a Shattered Present (Verso 2022). He has also published articles in the American Journal of Sociology, American Sociological Review, Catalyst, Comparative Sociology, Contemporary Sociology, Comparative Studies in Society and History, Social Science History, The Socio-Economic Review, Theory and Society and the New Left Review (of which he is a member of the editorial committee). His work has been translated into German, Portuguese, Russian, and Spanish.

Discussant

Catarina Leão, Sciences Po, AxPo, CEE

Contact

Allison Rovny - allison.rovny@sciencespo.fr