Studies of class-formation have long been dominated by an espitemology of absensethe study of the absence of Marx's predicted revolutionary class consciousness among the Western working class. Katznelson's and Zolberg's pathbreaking Working-Class Formation: Ninetenth-century Patterns in Western Europe and the United States (1986) posed a major challenge to this tradition. Instead of being seen as deviant or exceptional, moreover, the individual cases of class formation are analysed as variations that can only be explained by each nation's pattern of historicalprimarily politicalformation. An instant classic, Working-Class Formation has not to date been surpassed by subsequent studies. This essay reviews the strenghts and the weaknesses of this classic volume, suggesting in the final analysis that it does not quite realize the full extent of its radical implications.

Much has been written in the last two decades on clientelism and patron-client relations. From a concept of relatively marginal concern in the social sciences, clientelism has gained analytical clarity and has been applied with greater precision to political and social relationships found in many contemporary societies.

Migration, the role of the stranger and travelling are all creativity-enhancing although for different reasons. The migrant model verifies Koestler's hypothesis that new ideas often arise out of combinations of separate frames of thinking. Simmel's theory of the stranger emphasizes the increased objectivity of limited commitments. Rudwick's recently suggested model of liminal experience might help us explain why the seemingly purposeless activity of travelling might also stimulate creativity.

There has been much discussion recently of “global civil society”. This concept evidently draws on the more familiar civil society concept as related to national societies. What are the consequences of extending the concept in this way? Is global civil society simply civil society writ large, an extension to the international plane of basically the same kinds of institutions and practices as are found in national societies? Or do we need new tools of description and analysis? This article considers various theories of global civil society, and the extent to which they map onto traditional concepts of civil society. It concludes that global civil society may express the same mixture of strengths and weaknesses as the parent concept of civil society, but with additional features of its own that may – somewhat surprisingly – make it more robust than the earlier concept from which it derives.

No sociologist was more concerned with morality and the interrelation between morality and society than Émile Durkheim; and at least sociological approaches to understand morality can be expected to clarify whether and to what extent they are willing to follow Durkheim's account.

Ever since that time we have witnessed disturbances and we cannot but look forward with dread to even greater ones that we shall have to suffer for these and other reasons. An outbreak of violence is to be expected between our Empire and Hungary […] From Poland come news of lamentable discord between three brothers, the territorial princes. We hear of continuous battle among powerful lords in Lorraine. In our own country [i.e., Bavaria] the confusion of minds has become so abominable that robbery and arson throw everything into disorder not only on the ordinary days of the year but even on days of fasting and penitence, in utter disregard of divine and human law. So heavily are we burdened by the memory of past, the onslaught of present and the fear of future vicissitudes that we are fain to yield to the sentence of death which is our lot from the beginning and to tire of life.

What makes testimony trustworthy? Based on fieldwork at a Holocaust museum, we argue that testimonies are trustworthy that because they make implicit and explicit truth claims. We argue that confidence is formed by interdependent institutions that vouch for these claims, as well as institutions that produce other cultural objects with comparable meaning, such as museums and films. These claims of truth exist in the testimony act in itself, as well as in explicit claims of truth made by the testifiers. Holocaust testimonies make explicit truth claims through assertions of institutionally legitimated information, personal experiences, and societal remembrance. After considering the creation of trust in testimony, we discuss how it can be generalized to the courtroom.

Health care systems reflect historical relationships between states and citizens, as well as predominant values and institutions marking a particular social milieu. Theories that place national health care in historical social context tend to exaggerate the forces of globalization and to underestimate the role of local specificities. A health care system and its social context, however, are shaped at the intersection of global, regional, and local factors, rather than by globalization alone. In this article I demonstrate this combined influence by tracking the transition in Soviet to post-Soviet health care Azerbaijan. I show that the dissolution of Azerbaijan’s socialized health care was due not to neoliberal globalization, but rather to the historical constellation of global, regional, and national processes, including the political choice of a petroleum-based development strategy.

The legitimacy of modern democratic institutions rests on the ideal of popular sovereignty. The purpose of this paper is to examine the contemporary status of this ideal.

Since space limitations do not permit discussion that would place the concept of popular sovereignty in its historical and intellectual context, we simply postulate a definition. People, by whom we mean individuals acting on the bases of their current preferences, are collectively sovereign if the alternatives open to them as a collectivity are constrained only by conditions independent of anyone's will. Specifically, people are sovereign to the extent that they can alter the existing institutions, including the state and property, and if they can allocate available resources to all feasible uses.

Rogers Brubaker in his 1992 path-breaking study proposes a theory of citizenship as a coherent world view: the French liberal model identifies citizenship as a community based on territoriality; the German ethno-nationalist model bases citizenship on blood-line. Rogers Smith challenged Brubaker and, based on a 1997 study of United States immigration laws, claims that the American concept of citizenship is a non-coherent mix of various principles: liberal, ethno-nationalist and republican at the same time. Both authors inspired a great deal of research, but all studies so far have attempted to adjudicate between the two competing theories by looking at inclusionary practices, at the various ways citizenship is granted in various countries, and their results are inconclusive. This paper reports findings for a study which looked at exclusion. The data on United States laws and legislative debates about the states’ rights to revoke, and citizens’ privilege to renounce, citizenship lends support to Rogers Smith’s arguments regarding inclusion and citizenship, while underlining war as an independent sociological source for the genesis, persistence and dispersion of these bundles or equilibria.

Social and political relations between Europe and the Muslim world are politically fractious. Attacks in Madrid (March 2004) and London (July 2005), and the riots in suburban Paris in November 2005 and November 2007, have all been attributed to “Muslims”. Political parties in Europe (for example the Front National in France, which placed second in the presidential elections of 2002), have mobilized opinion against a Muslim threat to Europe. Relations between the countries and societies of the European Union and the Muslim World have therefore become politically consequential on a number of dimensions – foreign policy in regard to the Middle East; new membership into the EU; and the vast migration of Muslim populations into EU states.

Recent interptetive work suggests ways of historically situating French post-structuralism as a mingling of Nietzschean philosophy with elements of Durkheimian sociology. This article aims to demonstrate the presence of Nietzschean themes in the life-work of the Durkheimian Robert Hertz and to recognize him as a key figure in the history of this intellectual confluence. An examination of published and private sources reveals Hertz as a prototype of the Nietzschean/Durkheimian intellectuel pathitique of the inter-war period in France.

This article weighs the meaning, potential, and pitfalls of the concept of “racial capitalism” for studying the nexus of racial division and the economy. The concept has spread like wildfire in Anglophone social science since its≠ introduction in Cedric Robinson’s revisionist account of the rise of capitalism as racializing, but it remains epistemically inchoate and analytically problematic. The critique of leading uses and common corollaries of the term shows that it stipulates that which needs to be explicated, namely, the “articulation” of capitalism “through race,” which is not a structural invariant but ranges from coevalness and synergy to parasitism and disconnection. The notion cannot accommodate the varied bases of race as a naturalizing and hierarchizing principle of vision and division as well as the historical peculiarity of the economic variant of slavery in the Atlantic world. Advocates of “racial capitalism” need to put in the hard work of epistemological elucidation, logical clarification, and historical elaboration needed if they are to make the label more than a “conceptual speculative bubble.”

Even a cursory survey of the relevant literature reveals a marked uncertainty on the part of scholars concerning the application of the term ‘peasant’ to therural population of Africa, either historically or in terms of contemporary analysis. Most writers either evade the issue, display analytical uncertainty, or forthrightly reject the term (i). These variations seem to indicate that at present we lack a theoretical basis adequate for the analysis of rural Africa. The formulation of such a theory is therefore a prime duty of africanists. We have to ask ourselves whether the phenomenon of apeasantry appeared in parts of Western Africa before the colonial conquest, and if so under what conditions. Further, we have to decide whether this phenomenon has been extended since those conquests and, again, in what circumstances. In short, this essay is concerned with a process of societal evolution (i.e., combining economic, social and political changes) which has included as one of its main features what is called here—purely for want of a better term—‘peasantization’, the process of becoming a peasant. The present discussion has a second focus, the relation between peasantization and various political forms which have emerged in rural Africa in the colonial and post-colonial periods. Like other social scientists, students of politics seem rarely tohave considered the implications of the use. of the word ‘peasant’ in discussing African phenomena (2). Just as the first part of this paper will deal with various theoretical questions related to peasantization, so the second part will concern itself with some of those implications.