The trends towards falling fertility and mortality and increasing longevity, which have led to the demographic ageing of all Western industrialized societies, have not occurred in isolation. More specifically, we are also seeing a combination of forces which are resulting in the ageing of some life-transitions. While public and legal institutions may be lowering the age threshold into full legal adulthood, individuals themselves are choosing to delay many of those transitions which demonstrate a commitment to full adulthood. This shift from a high-mortality/high-fertility society to a low-mortality/low-fertility society and the ageing of family transitions within these societies have significant implications for both family structure and kinship roles. Drawing on recent demographic figures for the European Union, this paper highlights the impact of these main trends on individuals and families.

The article attempts to assess the use and usefulness of the concept of ‘social capital’. First, it assesses its differing conceptual uses in the works of four key writers, Pierre Bourdieu, Gary S. Becker, James S. Coleman and Robert D. Putnam, identifying broadly a problematic ‘social capital as social fact’ perspective associated with Putnam, and a more promising ‘contacts with influential people’ approach that can be derived from Bourdieu. It then considers the practical uses already made of the former approach in the development studies literature, before addressing some of the analytical problems associated with applying the latter in a policy environment. Finally, it takes three short examples from research in rural Central and Eastern Europe to illustrate how the concept can be used to both analyse social relations and suggest policy priorities. The article's conclusion is that ‘social capital’ of any variety is by no means the ‘missing link’ in development economics, yet ‘social capital’ of the Bourdieu-derived kind can be a useful, work-a-day concept in social analysis.

This article of fiscal sociology suggests an analytical review of the corpus of models and data relative to the avoidance (legal or not) of the tax so as to establish a cognitive theory of the rationality of the taxpayer. It aspires also to catch the attention of the sociologists for this promising field of research, though still neglected. On the basis of labelling theory of the deviance, of the tax revolt history and fiscal (social) psychology, the rational approach of the taxpayers insists on the importance of the concrete cognitive relation towards tax to explain the phenomena of tax avoidance (or not). It consists both in underlining the limits of the self-interest standard model and in emphasizing the political dimension of the taxation to give credence to the reality of a citizen's conception about the fair taxation (‘contribution-tax’) of the fiscal State in a given context.

Randall Collins' The Sociology of Philosophies: A Global Theory of Intellectual Change (1998) examines and compares communities of intellectuals linked as networks in ancient and medieval China and India, medieval and modern Japan, ancient Greece, medieval Islam and Judaism, medieval Christendom and modern Europe. The book has been the subject of many interesting and often positive reflections (for example, European Journal of Social Theory 3 (I), 2000; Review Symposium or reviews in Sociological Theory 19 (I), March 2001). However, it has also attracted a number of critical reviews (for example, reviews in Philosophy of the Social Sciences 30 (2), June 2000). Since not many books achieve such notoriety, it is worthwhile to rethink Collins' controversial approach. The aim of this paper is to encourage further debates of notions and issues presented in Collins' book. We would like, by joining two voices—sociologist and philosopher—to reopen discussion of Collins' attempt to discover a universality of patterns of intellectual change, as we think that more interpretative rather than explanatory versions of our respective disciplines can enrich our understanding of blueprints of intellectual creativity.

A RATHER dim recollection of Thomas Nagel's books over the decades leaves the impression of an extraordinarily perceptive and deep thought, straightforwardly revealing the essentials of the topic, yet remaining at a high level of abstraction and generality. We now have, on this latter aspect, exactly the opposite, since the topic is the taxes you pay, while keeping the former virtue in focussing on the basic divide of normative politics. Here, indeed, two outstanding philosophical minds stoop over one of the most mundane of issues, the rightfulness of taxation. Economists, politicians, lawyers and laymen will all be delighted about this new dimension of the debate. This issue—let us recall—is of some importance since the public sector commonly consumes about half of national products.

The blurbs on the jacket of this book are unusually misleading. A U.S. senator avers that it ‘conveys a sweep of historical analysis that gives us deep insight… into the American character’, and ‘sheds light on America's present and possible future as well as its past’. Since it contains virtually no historical or sociological evidence about the United States, it is hard to see how it might do this. One Harvard professor calls it ‘a major work of political theory’, and another ‘an enduring work of political theory in its own right’. But while the author conveys his disaffection with contemporary American democracy, he nowhere clearly and succinctly formulates anything that might reasonably be called a theory. A Johns Hopkins professor thinks that it ‘shows us how pertinent Tocqueville remains for democrats today’. Incidentally, it may perhaps do this, though this is hardly the author's intent, since he emphasizes the archaic and feudal quality of Tocqueville's final account of democracy.

REVOLUTION entered modern politics in the form of a bold and ambitious political judgment, aimed both at grasping something momentous, which was unmistakably happening, and at gauging its limited susceptibility to intentional control. From the outset that judgment, and the term in which it was precariously embodied, picked out one key image: the necessitated and ineluctably hazardous resolution of a profound crisis within a particular society, which must and would transform through intense political and social struggle its forms of government and social organization, and very possibly also of economic life. Over time every element in that judgment has proved as vulnerable as it was always bound to be contentious. But for all its manifest exposure and inevitable provocation, for almost two centuries, it went a long way towards setting the agenda for modern politics the world over. The two most inflammatory elements in the judgment were clear from quite early on in the French Revolution. One was the sense of crisis as the working through of a clearly intelligible fatality. The other was the fond hope that, once compelled to begin, that crisis must in due course issue in a resolution of the acute strains which had occasioned it in the first place. Jeff Goodwin's title does not explicitly affirm either element; but it contrives to evoke both, and do so in their most politically insinuating form.