Department of Sociology
University of California
Berkeley, CA 94720
Telephone: None Given
riley@berkeley.edu
My work uses comparative and historical methods to challenge a set of key conceptual oppositions in classical sociological theory: authoritarianism and democracy, revolution and counter-revolution, and state and society. Marx, Weber and Durkheim all in different ways conceptualized societies as sharply contrasting wholes: feudal or capitalist, traditional or modern, segmented or interdependent. Yet a growing body of theory and research challenges this dualistic approach. For example recent scholarship questions the opposition between absolutism and constitutionalism; the contrast between capitalism and pre-capitalism; and the opposition between democratic and authoritarian societies. I extend this work by investigating how techniques of social organization and political control migrate across historical, geographical, and ideological boundaries thus undermining the sharp conceptual contrast between types of social structures. I have done this in three main substantive areas: the comparative analysis of regimes, the study of political movements, and state-society relations. I have recently finished a book manuscript entitled The Civic Foundations of Fascism in Europe: Italy, Spain, and Romania 1870-1945 (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2010). I am also working on a second book entitled Knowledge Production or Construction?: A Comparative Analysis of Census Taking in the West (with Rebecca Jean Emigh and Patricia Ahmed). This is under contract with the Rose Monograph Series of the American Sociological Association. In addition I have started a new project investigated the connection between the meaning and substance of democracy in interwar and post-war Europe. I have published articles in the American Sociological Review, Comparative Studies in Society and History, Comparative Sociology, Social Science History and the New Left Review.
