Understanding Scotland: The Sociology of a Nation

by David Mc Crone (Author)

• Used

  Paperback
  1992

  $5.77

  Scotland stands at the centre of sociological concerns in the late 20th century. Rather than being an awkward, ill fitting case, a nation without a state, it is at the centre of the discipline's postmodernist dilemma. Scotland has been part of the United Kingdom, a highly centralized and unitary state for nearly three hundred years, yet has survived the Union in 1707 as a distinctive civil society. Its sense of difference and identity has, indeed, grown rather than diminished. In many respects Scotland is a society with an unmade history, for its history seems incomplete and unpredictable. In a world where the nation state is losing its raison d'etre, Scotland provides an important test case for the proposition that the quest for self-determination occurs in the context of major shifts in political and social arrangements at the global level.