Political Sociology Best Book Award Winner, 2006

Award Committee: Joya Misra (chair), Marion Fourcade-Gourinchas, Diane Davis, Robert Fishman, Neil Brenner

Winner: Eiko Ikegami’s Bonds of Civility: Aesthetic Networks and the Political Origins of Japanese Culture (Cambridge).

Eiko Ikegami’s Bonds of Civility is a book of great beauty and intellectual sophistication that pushes the boundaries in political sociology by linking arts and aesthetics to state formation, politics, and state-civil society relations. This pioneering book offers major conceptual innovations, a wealth of rich historical scholarship, and a finely crafted theoretical analysis all of which are put to work in elaborating a complex argument of major significance.

In the book, Ikegami demonstrates the emergence of a distinctive style of aesthetic socialization during Japan's Tokugawa period that compensated for the shogunate's meticulous segmentation of civil society. At essence, Bonds Of Civility shows how boundary-crossing social networks focused on cultural production and practice rearranged the structures of social connection and hierarchy as well as the communicative style of Japanese society with wide ranging consequences for that country's political and social orders.

The committee found the book to be the most complex, nuanced, and scholarly of thirty books we reviewed for the prize. We are certain that this outstanding work will have a great impact on the wider field – as well as within the subfield of political sociology.

Honorable Mention: Georgi Derlugian’s Bourdieu’s Secret Admirer in the Caucasus: A World-Systems Biography (Chicago)

Georgi Derlugian’s Bourdieu’s Secret Admirer in the Caucasus: A World-Systems Biography is a complex, innovative, ambitious and groundbreaking work, which links an ethnography/biography to a larger argument about state (de)formation and globalization. In the book, Derlugian traces the life story of Musa Shanib, an intellectual revolutionary who in the post-Soviet period becomes a nationalist warlord, in order to understand “why and how. . . the end of Soviet developmentalism produce[d] ethnic violence.” The book shares important new knowledge on the break-up of the Soviet Union and the rise of Islamic militancy, while brilliantly drawing on the insights of Pierre Bourdieu, Charles Tilly, and Immanuel Wallerstein. As a skilled theoretician interested in applying conceptual frameworks to a host of crucial problems –including globalization, democratization, nationalism, and terrorism – Derlugian’s contribution should be applauded