This book explores the accomplishments of the golden age of
"macrohistory," the sociologically informed analysis of long-term
patterns of political, economic, and social change that has reached new
heights of sophistication in the last decades of the twentieth century.
It describes the scholarly revolution that has taken place in the
Marxian-inspired theory of revolutions, the shift to a state-breakdown
model in which revolutions, rather than bubbling up from discontent
below, start at the top in the fiscal strains of the state. The author
links revolutions to military-centered transformations of the state, and
reviews how he used this theory in the early 1980s to predict the
breakdown of the Soviet empire.
He goes on to show the implications of viewing states and societies from
the outside in, including the geopolitical patterns that affect the
legitimacy of dominant ethnic groups and thus determine the direction of
ethnic assimilation or fragmentation. Another application is the
author's new theory of democratization, which asserts that democracy
depends not merely on a widening of the franchise but on a geopolitical
pattern favoring federated structures of collegially shared power.
Using this new theoretical tool, the author argues that Anglophone
scholars have polemically misinterpreted German history, and that the
roots of the Holocaust cannot be determined by German-bashing but must
be attributed to processes that affect all of us. Other essays
generalize about the historical dynamics and transformations of markets.
Going beyond Weber's Eurocentric model, the author proposes a more
general theory that explains the origins of capitalism in Japan on an
independent but parallel path.
