A second edition of my book Revolutions: A Worldwide Introduction to Political and Social Change (Paradigm, 2005) is underway. I am adding a chapter on social movements and terrorism. With luck it will appear in mid to late 2009.

I am also coediting (with Jack Goldstone, Masamichi Sasaki, and Ekkart Zimmerman) The Concise Encylopedia of Comparative Sociology, to be published by E. J. Brill. My role has been to organize biographies and autobiographies of approximately 40 eminent comparative sociologists, most of which are now ready. With luck this volume will appear in 2010 or 2011.

I have begun to write a trade book entitled How Societies Work: Human Social Life Across Time and Space. I have decided I want to reach a much larger and wider audience than academic sociologists and anthropologists. I plan to start with a single volume dealing with evolving; eating; working; copulating; mating and relating; striving, achieving, and dominating; engendering; fighting and killing; differentiating; and modernizing. If that volume sells well I plan to write a second volume focusing on believing and ritualizing; moralizing; thinking; learning; postmodernizing; changing; projecting; and imagining. A provisional outline appears below.

How Societies Work: Human Social Life Across Time and Space

 

I am currently working on several other projects. The biggest project is on the long-term evolution of religion, on which I have already published three articles with a fourth to appear in an edited collection in 2009. (To view and download two of these articles, see the Publications page.) There will be several additional articles to come, and eventually everything will be pulled together into a book provisionally entitled Shamans, Priests, and Prophets: Religion from Earliest Times to the Present, which will probably be written as a trade book. An outline of book as currently conceived appears below.

Shamans, Priests, and Prophets: Religion from Earliest Times to the Present

I am also working on a project on world democratization from 1900 to the present. This work was begun several years ago and interrupted numerous time. However, I am now trying to finish it in collaboration with two of my graduate students, Richard Niemeyer and Kristopher Proctor. Below are copies of two papers, which represent two different versions of the research. A new article bringing together materials from both of these articles, along with new data analyses, should be ready within a couple of months.

 

"Endogenous and Exogenous Factors in the Growth of Democracy 1900-2005" (ASA, 2008)

2009 paper still to be added

Another project is an attempt to bring to the attention of sociologists the largely forgotten work of Edward Westermarck, a Finnish sociologist who was the first real Darwinian sociologist. He was doing an early version of sociobiology or evolutionary psychology long before they existed. Below is a first draft of a paper on Westermarck.

 

 

Westermarck paper here