State Formation, Nation-Building, and Mass Politics in Europe

A wonderful book about the thinking of the greatest modern European social scientist. -- Arend Lijphart, University of California, San Diego

Sets the standards in cross-national comparative research to extraordinarily high levels of academic excellence. -- Luis Moreno, 'Nationalism and Ethnic Politics'

Stein Rokkan was born in 1921 on the Lofoten archipelago in the far north of Norway and raised in the nearby town of Narvik. From these unlikely beginnings, he went on to become president of the International Political Science Association (1970–73), vice-president of the International Sociological Association (1966–70) and chairman of the European Consortium for Political Research (1970–76), of which he was also a co-founder. He was president of the International Social Science Council associated with UNESCO (1973–77) and chairman of Nordisk Forbund for Statskundskab (1975–76). Seymour Martin Lipset described him shortly after his death in 1979 as 'the pre-eminent political sociologist' of his generation. He remains widely cited in diverse literature today.

Stein Kuhnle is Professor of Comparative Politics at the University of Bergen (Norway) and Professor Emeritus at the Hertie School, where he taught Comparative Social Policy until 2013. He currently serves as honorary professor at the Centre for Welfare State Research at the University of Southern Denmark, and as honorary professor at Fudan University, Shanghai and at Sun Yat-sen University, Guangzhou, China.