Associate Professor
Stephen Leacock Building, Room 713
855 Sherbrooke Street West
Montreal, Quebec, H3A 2T7

Tel.: 514-398-6841
Fax: 514-398-3403
E-Mail: Donald Von Eschen
Office: Leacock 729

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• Research Areas
• Biography
• Publications
• Courses Taught

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Research Areas

Social change; historical sociology; comparative sociology; development; social movements; political economy; political sociology; ideal social systems

Biography

(PhD, Johns Hopkins University, 1967; MA, University of Chicago, 1960). Associate Professor, at McGill since 1967. Professor Von Eschen is working on a major four-volume book on social theory and social inequality. His aim is to investigate and assess in detail various contemporary theories of social inequality in order to identify the major explanatory themes of stratification that run through them, and apply those themes to concrete social institutions.

His publications include papers on social movements (e.g., with Jerome Kirk and Maurice Pinard, "The Disintegration of the Negro Non-Violence Movement," Journal of Peace Research, Issue 3, 1969, reprinted in Robert Laurer's (ed.) Social Movements and Social Change, 1976, and "The Organizational Substructure of Disorderly Politics," Social Forces, June 1971, reprinted in Jack Rothman's (ed.) Issues In Ethnic and Race Relations, 1977; papers on rural development in India (e.g., with Suraj Bandyopadhyay, "Villager Failure to Cooperation for development," in Donald Attwood and B.V. Baviskar's (eds.) Who Shares? Cooperatives and Rural Development, Oxford University Press, 1988; "Agricultural Failure: Caste, Class and Power in Rural West Bengal," in Dipankar Gupta's (ed.) Social Stratification, Oxford University Press, 1991, and "Electoral Communism and the Destruction of Cooperation in West Bangal," in B.S. Baviskar and Donald Attwood's (eds.) Finding the Middle Path, Westview Press, 1995; and work on social theory (e.g., "Competing Theories of Social Stratification," in K. Ishwaran's(ed.) Sociology, Addison-Wesley, 1986).

Professor Von Eschen's areas of teaching and research include social change, historical sociology, development, social movements, political economy, political sociology, stratification, and social theory. Professor Von Eschen teaches undergraduate courses on the sociology of development and underdevelopment, social change in industrial societies, social stratification and graduate seminars on the sociology of developing societies and social change.

Selected Publications

Books

Von Eschen, D. 1996. "Forward," to B. Ghosh's Rural Leadership and Development. New Delhi: Mohit Publications, vi-xv (8 pages).

Bandyopadhyay, S. and D. Von Eschen. 1995. "Electoral Communism and the Destruction of Cooperation in West Bengal," in B. S. Baviskar and D. Attwood (eds.) Finding the Middle Path: The Political Economy of Cooperation in Rural India. Boulder: Westview Press, 293-322.

Book Review

Von Eschen, D. and E. Hartwick. 2001. Review of R. Peet's Theories of Development, in Canadian Journal of Sociology, vol. 70, no. 3, pp. 243-245.

Von Eschen, D. 2000. Review of Hira Singh's Colonial Hegemony and Popular Resistence. Princes, Peasants, and Paramount Power. In Canadian Review of Sociology and Anthropology.

Courses Taught

Undergraduate Courses:
SOCI 254 Development and Underdevelopment
SOCI 333 Social Stratification
SOCI 354 Dynamics of Industrial Societies

Graduate Seminar:
SOCI 550 Sociology of Developing Societies
SOCI 652 Current Sociology Theory