Cities of Power

Praise

“The distillation of decades of scholarship in urban history and the sociology of nationalism … Cities of Power does important work in connecting the look and feel of cities with their specific national histories.”
—Max Holleran, Times Literary Supplement

“Command of history and knowledge of the real world inform Göran Therborn’s thinking, making him one of the world’s most engaging and intriguing sociologists. Cities of Power focuses our attention on the places where transforming events happen and helps us understand the current tensions between states and people, capitals and peripheries, populism and elitism, nationalism and globalism.”
—Felipe Fernández-Armesto, author of Our America: A Hispanic History of the United States

“Cities of Power … is explicitly a riposte to the idea of the Global City, and the peculiar Monocle-magazine vision of trans-national, interconnected, intangible capitalism that it serves to alternately describe and vindicate … Few thinkers display such a genuinely global range.”
—Owen Hatherley, New Left Review

“Therborn’s description of what a global city is provokes legitimate reflection … Cities of Power is one more publication in a sparkling list of career accomplishments and might function as an important resource for many a sociology doctoral student.”
—Luzia Lodder, PopMatters

Praise for Göran Therborn:

“Therborn is a highly conceptual thinker, allying the formal rigor of his discipline at its best with a command of a vast range of empirical data. The result is a powerful theoretical structure, supported by a fascinating body of evidence.”
—Nation

“At a time when historians and economists tend to retire behind the barricades of their increasingly specialized professions, answering the big comparative questions about the pathways into and out of modernity, the global processes of inequality and the forces of possible change have been largely left to the sociologists. In my view, Göran Therborn, probably Sweden’s most distinguished social scientist, has made more essential contributions in these fields than anyone else, by a combination of analytical lucidity, common sense and an extraordinary command of international comparative data.”
—Eric Hobsbawm, author of The Age of Extremes