Rueschemeyer Works Find Chinese Audience

October 18, 2010

The work of Dietrich Rueschemeyer, a Brown Sociology Professor emeritus and Watson Institute adjunct, has recently attracted strong interest in China.

This year, his book Lawyers and Their Society: A Comparative Study of the Legal Profession in Germany and in the United States (Harvard University Press 1973) was published in Chinese translation by the Shanghai Joint Publishing Company. (A few years back, this book was one of a set of publications that the Journal of the Eastern Sociological Society, Sociological Forum, reviewed again as “forgotten classics.”)

Last year, Bringing the State Back In (Cambridge University Press 1985), co-edited by Peter Evans, Rueschemeyer, and Theda Skocpol, was translated and published by the Shenghuo-Dushu-Xinzhi Joint Publishing Company in Beijing.

Most recently, Fudan University Press in Shanghai inquired about the translation rights for Capitalist Development and Democracy (University of Chicago Press 1992), which Rueschemeyer co-authored with Evelyne Huber Stephens and John D. Stephens.

These translations suggest that a number of interrelated concerns find increasing attention in China. All three books focus on state-society relations in addition to the particular themes of democracy and the emergence of semi-autonomous professions.