Dylan Riley

Dylan Riley is Professor of Sociology at the University of California, Berkeley. He is the author of The Civic Foundations of Fascism in Europe: Italy, Spain, and Romania 1870-1945 (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2010, Verso, 2019). He is also the co-author of a two-volume work with Rebecca Jean Emigh and Patricia Ahmed entitled Antecedents of Censuses: From Medieval to Nation States and Changes in Censuses: From Imperialism to Welfare States (Palgrave 2016). In addition to these books, he has 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 and the New Left Review (of which he is a member of the editorial committee). His work has been translated into German, Russian, and Spanish.

The project

Title: Special Paths : Germany and the US in Comparative Perspective

"Most political sociologists explain authoritarianism by identifying structural, cultural, or political pathologies or particularities that account for why some capitalist societies have taken an authoritarian as opposed to a liberal democratic route to the modern world. This research project inverts that approach by suggesting that what is surprising is liberal democracy, not authoritarianism, and that geo-political position has been by far the most important factor in allowing for this outcome. To very briefly summarize, in my view capitalist development has an internal tendency toward authoritarianism, even if that tendency is often blocked by particular conditions operating to thwart it. The most important such condition is geopolitical. Where capitalists and their political allies were able to easily access land and markets this profoundly altered the pattern of class formation rendering liberal democracy possible. Where they lacked such access, industrial capitalist class conflict played out in its “pure state” which tended to be incompatible with liberal democracy. I develop this argument through a comparative historical analysis of the most important rising industrial powers of the late nineteenth century: the German Empire, and the United States up until the eve of World War I. These cases are particularly important because they produced by the 1930s the archetypes of capitalist authoritarianism (National Socialist Germany) and capitalist democracy (the New Deal United States). I pursue the comparison among these cases along five axes: their agricultural systems, their patterns of industrialization, their political institutions, the strength of their working classes and finally their differing geopolitical positions. I seek to show that along the first three dimensions these cases were strikingly similar. Both countries featured a dualistic economy with rather labor repressive agricultural systems and highly developed but regionally concentrated industry."

Hosting institution: Sciences Po - AxPo Observatory of Market Society Polarization

Selective Bibliography

• Perdita: On Loss. Verso, (Forthcoming).
• Microverses: Observations from a Shattered Present. Verso, 2022.
• Antecedents of Censuses: From Medieval to Nation States. (with Rebecca Jean Emigh and Patricia Ahmed). Palgrave Press, 2016.
• Changes in Censuses: From Imperialism to Welfare States. (with Rebecca Jean Emigh and Patricia Ahmed). Palgrave Press, 2016.
• Both volumes won Honorable Mention, Barrington Moore Prize for Best Book, Comparative and Historical Section of the American Sociological Association, 2017.
• The Civic Foundations of Fascism in Europe: Italy, Spain and Romania 1870-1945.
• The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2010, Verso, 2019.
• Reviewed in American Journal of Sociology, Contemporary Sociology, American History Review, Review of International History, Review of Politics, Comparative Politics, Journal of World Systems Research, New Left Review.
• The re-edition of this book is with Verso in 2019. It was reviewed in The Financial Times. The book has been translated into Mandarin and Greek as well.