John Hall

McGill University | McGill · Department of Sociology

From unemployment to Brexit to climate change, capitalism is in trouble and ill-prepared to cope with the challenges of the coming decades. How did we get here? While contemporary economists and policymakers tend to ignore the political and social dimensions of capitalism, some of the great economists of the past - Adam Smith, Friedrich List, John...

From unemployment to Brexit to climate change, capitalism is in trouble and ill-prepared to cope with the challenges of the coming decades. How did we get here? While contemporary economists and policymakers tend to ignore the political and social dimensions of capitalism, some of the great economists of the past - Adam Smith, Friedrich List, John...

From unemployment to Brexit to climate change, capitalism is in trouble and ill-prepared to cope with the challenges of the coming decades. How did we get here? While contemporary economists and policymakers tend to ignore the political and social dimensions of capitalism, some of the great economists of the past - Adam Smith, Friedrich List, John...

From unemployment to Brexit to climate change, capitalism is in trouble and ill-prepared to cope with the challenges of the coming decades. How did we get here? While contemporary economists and policymakers tend to ignore the political and social dimensions of capitalism, some of the great economists of the past - Adam Smith, Friedrich List, John...

Storm clouds began to threaten the postwar political economy rather quickly. By the late 1960s, war-torn countries had made great strides in revitalizing their economies, while competition was heating up in world markets, challenging the United States’ economic primacy. Then, the price of oil skyrocketed in the 1970s, driving production costs highe...

From unemployment to Brexit to climate change, capitalism is in trouble and ill-prepared to cope with the challenges of the coming decades. How did we get here? While contemporary economists and policymakers tend to ignore the political and social dimensions of capitalism, some of the great economists of the past - Adam Smith, Friedrich List, John...

From unemployment to Brexit to climate change, capitalism is in trouble and ill-prepared to cope with the challenges of the coming decades. How did we get here? While contemporary economists and policymakers tend to ignore the political and social dimensions of capitalism, some of the great economists of the past - Adam Smith, Friedrich List, John...

Adam Smith died in 1790, just before the French Revolutionary and Napoleonic wars. The long peace of the nineteenth century that followed rested on an implicit geopolitical deal. For decades after the Congress of Vienna of 1815 had established a framework for peace, no one wanted to challenge Britain, in part because they were exhausted from war bu...

Without nation-states Covid-19, climate change, international cyberattacks, and other threats would go unchecked. In The World of States, John L. Campbell and John A. Hall challenge the view that nation-states have lost their relevance in the context of globalization and rising nationalism. The book traces how states evolved historically, how conte...

This chapter examines Denmark's response to the 2008 financial crisis. It first provides an overview of four legacies of Danish history that created modern Denmark: Lutheranism, statism, the solution of the national question, and the construction of layered homogeneity. It considers how the Reformation of 1536 established Lutheranism as the religio...

This book examines the paradox of vulnerability: small nation-states tend to rise to the challenge of the vulnerabilities that they face so as to become inventive and stronger. Focusing on the experiences of Denmark, Ireland, and Switzerland in managing the 2008 financial crisis, the book shows that perceived state vulnerability gives rise to socia...

This chapter examines how Ireland managed the 2008 financial crisis. It first provides an overview of Ireland's transition from colony to nation-state before discussing its institutions and legacies as well as the national question that it had to deal with. It then considers Ireland's political economy, focusing on the impact of the multinational c...

Why are small and culturally homogeneous nation-states in the advanced capitalist world so prosperous? Examining how Denmark, Ireland, and Switzerland managed the 2008 financial crisis, this book shows that this is not an accident. The book argues that a prolonged sense of vulnerability within both the state and the nation encourages the developmen...

This chapter examines how Switzerland managed the 2008 financial crisis. It first provides an overview of Switzerland's transition into a modern nation-state before discussing the institutional factors that crystallize Swiss national identity despite cultural differences, including the country's exposure and vulnerability to outside threats. It the...

This concluding chapter summarizes the book's main findings, showing how vulnerability can increase national solidarity allowing institutions to be built that work for a country's collective benefit, allowing it to stay afloat when a crisis strikes. Denmark, Ireland, and Switzerland exemplify the book's argument about the paradox of vulnerability,...

Thinkers with Jewish backgrounds contributed powerfully to our understanding of nationalism. We examine the different Jewish conditions in East Central Europe and Russia at the end of the nineteenth and at the start of the twentieth century so as to map the theories of nationalism that resulted. Four such theories are identified, each illustrated w...

A New Paradigm? - Arjomand Said Amir, Social Theory and Regional Studies in the Global Age (Albany, SUNY Press, 2014) - Volume 55 Issue 3 - John A. Hall

English Adaptations - Runciman W.G., Very Different, But Much the Same: The Evolution of English Society Since 1714 (Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2015) - Volume 56 Issue 3 - John A. Hall

This paper uses theories of small states (e.g. Katzenstein) and nationalism (e.g. Gellner) to explain why Denmark and Ireland responded to the 2008 financial crisis in different ways. In Denmark, a coordinated market economy with considerable corporatism and state intervention, the private sector shouldered much of the financial burden for rescuing...

Globalization has affected the way that the state is seen by the public and academics. Some say that the state has lost it powers, outflanked from above by economic change and from below by the rise of regional and nationalist movements. More common is the view that states have detrimental effects on the development of economies and societies. This...

One of the classical questions in the study of nationalism concerns the end of empires. Is nationalism, to use the phrase of Hiers and Wimmer, the cause or consequence of the end of empire? This paper considers a neglected case, that of the decomposition of the Danish imperial monarchy in the years between 1848 and 1864. We find that nationalist co...

This paper examines the proposition that the economic performance of advanced capitalist countries depends on their size and ethnic composition. As such it blends insights from two important literatures in comparative political economy. One is exemplified by the work of Peter Katzenstein, who wrote the classic treatise on the relationship between n...

SocietyagainsttheMarket - DaleGareth, Polanyi: The Limits of the Market (Cambridge, Polity, 2010). - Volume 52 Issue 3 - John A. Hall

Michael McKeon’s great The Secret History of Domesticity has at its core a powerful, well-articulated view of the nature of modernity. This paper engages with that view. The argument of this essay is simple: McKeon does not give sufficient attention to alternative views of modernity – or, if you like, to tensions with modernity. This matters: his v...

Many claim that national economic success depends upon cultural homogeneity. We collect new time-series data and develop new measures of ethnic, linguistic and religious fractionalization for the OECD countries. We show that cultural diversity may vary by type across countries and over short periods of time. We also show that our measure of ethnic...

This essay drews attention to two books on empires by historians which deserve the attention of sociologists. Bang's model of the workings of the Roman economy powerfully demonstrates the tributary nature of per-industrial tributary empires. Darwin's analysis concentrates on modern overseas empires, wholly different in character as they involved th...

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This essay drews attention to two books on empires by historians which deserve the attention of sociologists. Bang's model of the workings of the Roman economy powerfully demonstrates the tributary nature of per-industrial tributary empires. Darwin's analysis concentrates on modern overseas empires, wholly different in character as they involved th...

The teleological functionalism of Gellner's theory of nationalism has been much criticised. Attention here is on a different matter, namely Gellner's basic premise – that national homogeneity is a condition for societal success. We defend this view in a particular way – by showing that small, culturally homogeneous countries have advantages that of...

Building on insights from Katzenstein and Gellner, the authors theorize that small, culturally homogeneous countries with a strong national identity have institutional advantages that tend to enhance their long-term socioeconomic performance. They can coordinate policy in ways that help them respond successfully to external vulnerabilities by build...

Social science as much as the public tends to see power in essentially negative terms, as the exercise of will over others, with effectiveness to that end resting upon the possession of decisive means of coercion. This paper argues a different case, namely, that rule is likely to be most effective when policies of social inclusion are adopted. Diff...

Denmark has out-performed most other advanced capitalist countries since the mid-1980s Contributors to National Identity and the Varieties of Capitalism draw from the literature on capitalism and small states and corporatism to explore why this is the case. They find that Danish political and economic institutions facilitate bargaining and consensu...

ClarkePeter F., Liberals and Social Democrats, Cambridge University Press, London, 1978. xiii+344 pp. £10.50; ColliniStefan, Liberalism and Sociology: L. T. Hobhouse and Political Argument in England 1880–1914, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1979. viii+281 pp. £12.00. - Volume 9 Issue 2 - John Hall