作者简介

Ivan Ermakoff is Associate Professor of Sociology at the University of Wisconsin, Madison.

内容简介

What induces groups to commit political suicide? This book explores the decisions to surrender power and to legitimate this surrender: collective abdications. Commonsensical explanations impute such actions to coercive pressures, actors' miscalculations, or their contamination by ideologies at odds with group interests. Ivan Ermakoff argues that these explanations are either incomplete or misleading. Focusing on two paradigmatic cases of voluntary and unconditional surrender of power - the passing of an enabling bill granting Hitler the right to amend the Weimar constitution without parliamentary supervision (March 1933), and the transfer of full executive, legislative, and constitutional powers to Marshal Petain (Vichy, France, July 1940) - "Ruling Oneself Out" recasts abdication as the outcome of a process of collective alignment.Ermakoff distinguishes several mechanisms of alignment in troubled and uncertain times and assesses their significance through a fine-grained examination of actors' beliefs, shifts in perceptions and subjective states. To this end, he draws on the analytical and methodological resources of perspectives that usually stand apart: primary historical research, formal decision theory, the phenomenology of group processes, quantitative analyzes, and the hermeneutics of testimonies. In elaborating this dialogue across disciplinary boundaries, "Ruling Oneself Out" restores the complexity and indeterminate character of highly consequential collective decisions and demonstrates that an in-depth historical exploration can lay bare processes of crucial importance for understanding the formation of political preferences, the paradox of self-deception, and the make-up of historical events as highly consequential.


Ivan Ermakoff is Associate Professor of Sociology at the University of Wisconsin, Madison.

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豆瓣评论

  • 孟羊羊
    读起来过于痛苦的一部书,对于历史细节的细致阐述使我一不留神就不知道下面再说什么了。不过论点很清晰,理论架构和经验材料的贴合度也很高,特别是十一章主要谈论了对位理论的适用范围问题。与其把这本书视作比较历史社会学,我更愿意把它放在符号互动论的视角下理解,序列对位、地方知识和默会合作这三个用在对现实世界的互动分析中更好啦。等我把符号互动论的脉络读完再写长评。03-29
  • Lane
    从更广泛的collectively alignment、abdication和event的角度重新思考legal revolutions的微观展开过程和历史意义问题,这本书神奇在于,在看完之后,它会不断地再次浮现当你看别的文献的时候09-06

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