Jack A. Goldstone (born September 30, 1953) is an American
sociologist,
political scientist, and historian, specializing in studies of
social movements,
revolutions,
political demography, and the 'Rise of the West' in world history. He is an author or editor of 13 books and over 150 research articles. He is recognized as one of the leading authorities on the study of revolutions and long-term social change.[1] His work has made foundational contributions to the fields of
cliodynamics,
economic history and
political demography.[2][3][4] He was the first scholar to describe in detail and document the long-term cyclical relationship between global population cycles and cycles of political rebellion and revolution.[5] He was also a core member of the "California school" in world history, which replaced the standard view of a dynamic West and stagnant East with a 'late divergence' model in which Eastern and Western civilizations underwent similar political and economic cycles until the 18th century, when Europe achieved the technical breakthroughs of industrialization.[6] He is also one of the founding fathers of the emerging field of political demography, studying the impact of local, regional, and global population trends on international security and national politics.[7]
His academic awards include the
American Sociological Association Distinguished Scholarly Publication Award, for 'Revolution and Rebellion in the Early Modern World', and the Myron Weiner award for lifetime scholarly achievement from the International Studies Association. He has also won the Arnaldo Momigliano Award of the
Historical Society, and seven awards for 'best article' in the fields of Comparative/Historical Sociology, Political Sociology, Social Theory, and Collective Behavior and Social Movements. He has won fellowships from the Council of Learned Societies, the
U.S. Institute of Peace, the
MacArthur Foundation, The John Simon Guggenheim Foundation, the Andrew Carnegie Foundation, the Australian Research School of Social Sciences, the
Canadian Institute for Advanced Research, the
Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences, and is an elected member of the Council on Foreign Affairs and the
Sociological Research Association. He has been the Richard Holbrooke Visiting Lecturer at the
American Academy in
Berlin, the Crayborough Lecturer at
Leiden University, and a
Phi Beta Kappa National Visiting Scholar.
International Handbook of Population Policies (Springer, 2022).
Phases of global demographic transition correlate with phases of the Great Divergence and Great Convergence, Technological Forecasting and Social Change (2015)
Revolutions: A Very Short Introduction (2014)
Political Demography: How Population Changes are Reshaping International Security and National Politics co-edited with Eric P. Kaufmann and Monica Duffy Toft (2012)
Understanding the Revolutions of 2011: Weakness and Resilience in Middle Eastern Autocracies Foreign Affairs (2011)
"The New Population Bomb", Foreign Affairs (2010)
Why Europe? The Rise of the West in World History 1500–1850 (2008)
States, Parties, and Social Movements (2003)
Revolutions: Theoretical, Compararative, and Historical Studies (2003) ISBN 9780155066793
^Turchin, Peter (October 2, 2016). Ages of discord : a structural-demographic analysis of American history. Chaplin, Connecticut.
ISBN9780996139540.
OCLC960053741.{{
cite book}}: CS1 maint: location missing publisher (
link)
Goldstone, Jack A.; Turchin, Peter (September 10, 2020).
"Welcome To The 'Turbulent Twenties'". Noema Magazine. Berggruen Institute. Retrieved November 22, 2020.