The article explores the implications of Nietzsche's view of human history and psychology for a sociology formulated in Nietzschean terms, and argues that although the ‘will to power’ cannot explain all that Nietzsche claims for it, his sociology of sociology does pass his own test of validity. It is suggested in conclusion that on the relation of sociology to the rank ordering of values, Nietzsche is consistent where Weber is not, and vice versa.

This paper criticizes the economic perspective that property rights determine economic outcomes, by examining sharecropping, because this form of property right can be associated with remarkably different economic outcomes. In particular, drawing on evidence from fifteenth-century Tuscany, it is argued that landlords' and tenants' class capacities explain sharecropping's variability. The results show that Tuscan sharecropping was efficient and contractual, because the difference in landlords' and tenants' class capacity was relatively small.

The article examines the different uses made of the concept of social class by researchers of the Chicago School between the turn of the century and the 1940s. The concept of social class is found in Small and Cooley, rarely referred to by Park, and not found at all in the urban sociology work he inspired in the 1920s (Shaw and McKay, etc.) However it reappears in the work on race relations at the end of the 1930s (Frazier, Hughes). Substitutes were introduced in the 1920s to explain internal differentiation within American cities. The spread of new methods of documentation favoured its reappearance in social-political and scientific contexts at the end of the 1930s. This example suggests that an order of phenomena which aims to explain a concept like social class—which is both a scientific and a lay person's concept—can only be ignored for a short time by a program of empirical research. The conclusion stresses the heterogeneity of factors which take into account the transmission and non-transmission of this type of idea from one generation of sociological researchers to another.

Social change is currently occurring in three directions: political democratisation, economic globalisation, and the spread of postmodern culture. The consequent problems cannot be treated by any of the three known methods of macrosocial regulation: the state, the market, the community. ‘Civil society’ has been assigned the role of synthetic and pluralistic rationalisation.

Based on the ‘Minorities at risk’ data set, which codes the status and conflicts of 268 politically active groups in 148 different countries, this paper finds: 1) the greater the language difference between the language of the minority and that of the dominant group, the lower the probability of minority rebellion against the state; 2) language grievances held by the minority are weakly but negatively related to rebellion; 3) language grievances are strongly associated with increased levels of political protest, suggesting that the remedy for these grievances is more likely to be sought in the political realm rather than in guerrilla action; 4) language grievances when compounded by religious grievances (which are a reasonable predictor of rebellion) strongly and significantly reduce the magnitude of rebellion. The mechanisms supporting these results are elucidated in a formalized official language game. The equilibrium path of this game is illustrated in case studies of India and Sri Lanka.

The paper seeks to assess the consequences of cultural diversity for European polity-building by focusing on the language issue. What does the European Babel mean for the project of transnational political integration ? To what extent has the shaping of the European language regime become a declared goal on the agenda of the EU ? In contrast with precedent patterns of nation-state formation, the present situation in Europe offers only few reasons to believe that some cultural standardization could be achieved by putting major political restrictions on multilingualism. Deliberate attempts at setting the institutional foundations of a culturally integrated European public sphere may end up producing unintended outcomes and lead to anti- European mobilizations striving for the protection of cultural difference. Hence, a political community of Europeans will not be based on a unitary and homogeneous public sphere, but rather reflect a complex mosaic of different cultural identities with cross-cutting political loyalties. In this context, cultural and linguistic diversity will be institutionalized, institutionalized, but to varying degrees and with different implications at different political levels.

The discourse of civil society has continued to thrive, despite reservations expressed by thinkers from both East and West. Assuming it is here to stay for the time being, at least, which aspects of the concept still need most scrutiny ? What ate the outstanding problems and themes for further reflection ? How best can we make the concept serviceable ? This essay surveys some of the recent literature with an eye to these questions.