For a New Political Sociology

Will Atkinson is Professor of Sociology at the University of Bristol, UK. He is the author/editor of ten books on social class and Bourdieu’s social theory, including Class in the New Millennium (2017), Bourdieu and After (2020) and a four-volume series on The Class Structure of Capitalist Societies (2020-25).

• 1. Introduction: For a relational political sociology; Part I. Class and Political Position-taking; 2. Class ethos and political parties in ante-Brexit Britain: A shifting correspondence; 3. Classed voting and the gender gap: A social space approach to an intersectional analysis; 4. Class and politics in post-socialist Poland; Part II. Politics and States in Times of Crisis; 5. Civil wars as situations of radical social change: Thinking ruptures, with and beyond Bourdieu; 6. National political fields and international politics: A Bourdieusian analysis of Middle East regional politics during the Arab Spring; Part III. Rethinking International Relations; 7. The field of nation states and the genesis of national strategies; 8. The limits of the state: Multiple interests and weakened circuits in delivering China’s ‘Belt and Road Initiative’; Part IV. A Reflexive Political Sociology; 9. A reflexive sociology of political science: Global and national discursive spaces; 10. Bourdieu’s political sociology: From imperialism to the state and back again

“This is a timely and highly original collection of papers that brings Bourdieu’s relational sociology to the political. An important contribution.”—David L. Swartz, Boston University, USA