> have you read legitimation crisis? how about the stuff on social
> movements? how about the historical sociology of the public sphere?
Sure have. They're pretty good as a portrait of Central European social democracy in its full Brandt-era bloom -- but pretty far from an analysis of Eurocapitalism, the Eurostate, or its constituent components; his frame of analysis is the welfare-state, ethnically homogenous nation-state. We're living through the tumultuous birth-hour of a variety of global public spaces, so there are probably places where his stuff is useful, but only Pierre Bourdieu has gone the distance towards a genuine Eurosociology, with all these wondrously subversive and useful categories like the habitus, the field, symbolic capital and symbolic domination, etc., concepts capable of taking on trillion-euro beasts like Deutsche Bank on their own turf.
-- Dennis