in 1927, at the age of eighteen, jean kowalyk moved to the ukrainian village of czortowiec, where she worked as a seamstress. when the germans invaded in 1941, they brought to the village forced laborers to build a work camp. jean “watched the cruelty [done to the workers] day after day […] when i saw people being molested, my religious heart whispered to me, ‘do not kill. love others as you love yourself’”. some time later, she heard a knock on her door. when she opened it, solomon berger, a jewish doctor the family knew, was “on his knees”, put his arms around her legs, and “begged for help”. jean let him in and hid him – along with several others – behind a false wall until the end of the war (1).

The issue of Nietzsche's influence on Weber's cultural criticism remains controversial. While it is generally accepted that Nietzsche's criticism of Western culture provided Weber with an underlying problematic of cultural crisis and meaninglessness, I wish to argue that Nietzsche had a more extensive and important impact on Weber than is usually acknowledged. Weber's practical and theoretical treatment of the ‘empirical sciences of action’, namely, sociology and history, involves a profound reaction to Nietzsche. This becomes evident in his general conceptualizations of knowledge and science, but more specifically in his ideal-type methodology, his approach to action through tensions between life in this world and received interpretative structures, as well as in the substance of his ideal-types of rational action.

The Evolution of patterns of selection and recruitment to the British political elite has been most authoritatively explored and presented in the work of W. L. Guttsman (1), which covers the period roughly from 1830 to 1955. For developments in the period since 1955 one may turn only to a few sources where the subject is partially treated (2) and to a large mass of journalistic commentary. This article examines the political elite in this most recent period, concentrating particularly on what appear to be the most striking developments of this period. Since, however, these developments are only comprehensible when set against their historical background, we start with a brief summary of the position reached by the mid-1950s.

I must start with a personal disavowal. This essay employs an explicitly Lévi-Straussian procedure but it is not intended as a guide to wider aspects of Lévi-Strauss thought. Although I feel reasonably safe with Lévi-Strauss's concept of structure, I am quite out of my depth when it comes to the related but subtler notion of esprit. Lévi-Strauss's esprit appears in sundry guises. In 1952, originally in English, he/it was a personalized “human mind”, an uninvited guest who took his place around the conference table among a group of American linguists and anthropologists (1); in the earlier chapters of La pensée sauvage he is perhaps the bricoleur—handiman—who is busy contriving culture from the junk of history and anything else that comes to hand (2); at the conclusion of Le cru et le cuit (3), in more abstract and more serious vein, esprit seems to be a kind of limiting characteristic of the human brain mechanism and appears as part of an extremely involved interchange relationship in which it (esprit) is the causal force producing myths of which its own structure is a precipitate. Elsewhere again (4) esprit seems to correspond to that very mysterious something which is a mediator between “praxis et pratiques” and which is described as « le schème conceptuel par l'opération duquel une matière et une forme, dépourvues l'une et l'autre d'existence indépendante, s'accomplissent comme structures, c'est-à-dire comme êtres à la fois empiriques et intelligibles ».

Definitions of insanity and the treatment of those identified as mentally ill have been more obviously subject to changes in social values and ideas of individual responsibility than any other category of clinically recognised illness. These changes have exercised a significant influence upon the relationship of psychological to physical medicine and, inter alia, the status of psychiatry as a scientific and authoritative source of medical treatment and social labelling. The present trend towards the integration and expansion of psychiatry within general and community medicine has resulted in the increasing involvement of psychiatry in the problems of social life. A wide spectrum of deviant and socially disturbing behaviour, previously considered largely as legal or moral problems, is now seen and treated as a symptom of illness and explained in medical terms.

Understanding money requires that we first grasp what makes money so significant—so valuable—to us. The article thus examines the sociology outlined by Geoffrey Ingham and criticises its ontology of money as a measure of value underpinned by state authority. By contrast, it argues that money ought to be primarily intended as value in itself. Accordingly, money’s most specific attribute is none of its canonical functions but rather purchasing power: the power not to pay, or else the power to buy time. The latter is not the mere product of state (fiscal) agency, but is entangled from the start with the production of liquidity and the construction of speculative markets for debt. Thus the paper emphasises the importance of concrete bank discounting vis-à-vis abstract accounting in concrete processes of monetisation, and shows how modern money, far from cancelling debts, is historically constructed within liquid financial relations so as to “buy time” and systematically procrastinate the final “rendering of accounts” for debtors. As a result, money cannot exist without the simultaneous existence of a debt that it will never discharge.

David lockwood has drawn attention to two related but analytically distinct types of integration in society: social integration, referring to the relationship between groups—more especially classes or strata; and system integration referring to the degree of connectedness between institutional parts of the social order (i). The former type of integration concerns the social relations between actors, so that the problem of order in society is posed in terms of moral or normative categories. The second type of integration directs attention to the somewhat more technical or non-normative aspects of order, concerning as it does the degree of ‘fit’ or compatibility between various functionally connected institutions. Both types of integration are of course central to Marx's theory of social change. For Marx, the antagonisms stemming from weaknesses in social integration (exemplified in the extreme case by class polarization) plus the weaknesses in system integration (the contradiction between the forces of production and the relations of production) are understood to be the twin mechanisms responsible for social transformation. As many critics have pointed out, the exact nature of the link between these two different processes was never clearly specified by Marx. But it does seem apparent that system contradiction is regarded as causally prior to the cleavage, and ultimate conflict, between classes, since it's not until these contradictions in the system become irresolvable that the stage is set for the final showdown between contending classes.

With the progressive development of secularism in the West, of which Spain's formally becoming a secular state in 1978 may be taken as a symbolic culmination, the Church-State problem has long receded from the foreground of the Occidental memory. Yet, in other parts of the world, where God is not dead, the analogue problem of the relationship between the hierocracy and the state merits attention. As the Islamic revolution of February 1979 eloquently demonstrates, the problem is of great importance and the sociologists' or social historians' neglect of it could only be to the detriment of their understanding.

The question of how Western-style democracies have evolved and stabilized, and conversely why some countries have experienced a breakdown of evolving democracy —or the question of the transition to, versus breakdown of, democracy— is central to both socio-political theory and sociopolitical history. Apart from being a fascinating topic on its own, it is a fruitful meeting point between theory and history. Perhaps it is for those very reasons that there has been a surge of interest in it in recent years (see e.g. Burton and Higley 1987; Cotton 1989; Higley and Burton 1989; O'Donnell and Schmitter 1986; Stephens 1989). In this article, I apply a democratic elite or demo-elite theoretical perspective to the explanation of the historical processes of stabilization vs breakdown of democracy in prewar Europe, using illustrations from two European countries: Britain as a positive, and Germany as a negative case.

In a series of articles, A. Pizzorno has critically reviewed rational choice theory and developed an alternative to it. In certain academic environments, his work has become a clear referent of the sociological reaction against that paradigm. In this paper, we review and offer a critique of Pizzorno's contribution. Firstly, we reconstruct what we think to be the theoretical core of his position, as based on three main concepts: multiple identity, individuals as ‘strings of selves’ and ‘circles of recognition’ as mechanisms reducing identitary uncertainty. Secondly, we criticise this core as lacking philosophical rigour and as being underdeveloped. Thirdly, we analyse Pizzorno's theory as an alternative to the rational choice paradigm. Here we argue that social scientists – and Pizzorno is no exception – often make a double mistake when they oppose methodological individualism and rational choice models.

Although recognized for innovations in economics and economic sociology, Emil Lederer’s impressive contributions to political sociology have been almost completely ignored. Lederer wrote extensively on questions of practical and theoretical relevance for a sociological analysis of the state and war, especially in response to and anticipation of the World Wars of the last century. This article considers the elements of his political-sociological work in the context of the circumstances under which they developed and concludes with an attempt to construct an outline of the basic tenets of a sociology of the state and war derived from Lederer’s writings. This analysis highlights Lederer’s sensitivity to a dynamic understanding of the total social configuration and its impact on the individual psyche as central to explicating the characteristics of particular political-sociological phenomena.

This study discerns peculiarities in the electoral mobilisation in EU member states in recent years and examines the effect of current social transformations on political discourse and voting behaviour. The overall change is traced to the emergence of opportunity-vs-risk vectors of political identification, challenging the capital vs labour dynamics of conflict. The decline in electoral support for traditional Left parties is attributed to the failure of the European Left to adjust to this realignment.

This paper examines from a comparative perspective the first historically documented case of transitional justice: the restoration of the Athenian democracy in 403 BC. It analyzes in particular the rhetoric of amnesty, justice, reconciliation and revenge and the discursive strategies informing the prosecutions and litigation which followed the transition. Comparison of the Athenian experience with modern situations of transitional justice helps to identify key features which made the Athenian reconciliation so successful.

Much work in present-day political economy still adheres to an economistic understanding of how markets operate - evident above all in the tendency to concentrate on the disciplinary and constraining effects of globalization. Using American power in financial affairs as an example, this essay proposes a shift of focus towards the constitution of actor capacities, which will permit more accurate conceptualizations of highly leveraged forms of agency. To this end, it turns to the philosophical foundations of the American pragmatist tradition, exploring the way in which it can inform a deeper understanding of the enabling qualities of institutions, the processes through which actor capacities emerge and the operation of power.

Les mots de power et de Macht, en anglais et en allemand, de pouvoir ou depuissance, en français, continuent d'être entourés d'une sorte de halo sacré ou, si l'on préfère, d'être chargés de résonances mystérieuses et un peu terrifiantes. Le caractère démoniaque de la puissance (die Dämonie der Macht) est le titre d'un livre, écrit après l'aventure hitlérienne et suggéré par elle. Les spécialistes des relations internationales emploient le terme de power politics, équivalent de la Machtpolitik, non sans quelque équivoque sur le sens de ce concept qui tantôt désigne l'essence des relations entre États et tantôt une doctrine (le plus souvent condamnée) de ces relations. De l'autre côté de la Manche et de l'Atlantique, on ne se lasse pas de citer Lord Acton: «Le pouvoir corrompt, le pouvoir absolu corrompt absolument.» Et Montesquieu, avant lui, avait écrit: «C'est une expérience éternelle que tout homme qui a du pouvoir est porté à en abuser, il va jusqu'à ce qu'il trouve des limites. Qui le dirait? La vertu même a besoin de limites.» Quand C. Wright Mills a voulu dénoncer la minorité dans l'ombre qui règne sur les États-Unis, il a forgé l'expression power elite, reprenant à la tradition machiavélienne un de ces deux termes, elite, et le combinant avec le terme honni par les marxistes et par les radicaux, power. Car le pouvoir (power) est mauvais en soi, il est doublement mauvais si l'on ajoute qu'il est possédé par une élite, car le petit nombre, dans le climat idéologique américain, par définition ne sera pas composé des meilleurs puisque le pouvoir corrompt ceux qui le possèdent.

In his paper Ethnicity as Cognition (2006), Rogers Brubaker held that cognitive psychology can enrich the understanding of the practices of categorisation that underpins ethnicity, nationhood and race. I shall argue that the philosophical debate concerning the different types of explanation in social sciences – the explanations based on reasons and the explanations based on causal mechanisms – can throw some light on this issue. To analyse beliefs requires use of both approaches. It can be shown with the classical opposition between an ethnic and a civic conception of national belonging which derives from a reason-based approach. The causal mechanism approach underlying cognitive psychology can offer alternative models accounting for national self-understanding, notably the prototype model of categorisation. I confront empirically these two theories – the ethnic civic dichotomy and the prototype model – using the issp data from 2003 and evidence the advantages and shortcomings of each theory.

This paper aims to put contemporary political socialisation research in perspective. It offers a rapid overview of the crisis of the subfield after the 1970s and then shifts attention to post-crisis studies. Beginning with child political socialisation, it raises four issues: the use of theoretical frameworks derived from child psychology; the need to reconnect political socialisation to the sociology of family; the benefits of renewing methods for understanding the world of child politics; and a new account of social inequality in the process of political socialisation. It then explores lifelong political socialisation and how it has developed around four research dynamics: the study of civic and political socialisation of school-age adolescents and young adults; the generational renewal; the socialising effects of political mobilisation; and the processes and agents of the secondary political socialisation of adults. The final section raises the major question of what is political in political socialisation.