Since the mid-1960s, and with growing intensity in the 1970s, there has been an increasing sense throughout the Western world that the institution of the nuclear family has entered a state of crisis. By ‘crisis’ we mean that increasing numbers of people in and out of families have been questioning the legitimacy of this institution, its necessity, and the soundness of the claims it makes on most of us.

ThisPaper is the second of two essays devoted to a sociological examination of the emergence and attempted professionalization of psychiatry in Victorian England. The late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries witnessed the rapid growth of an institutional response to madness: first in the form of private, profit-making madhouses, and then, via direct state investment in the asylum solution, in the form of a rapidly proliferating network of county asylums coping with the ‘pauper insane’. The development and consolidation of these institutional means of coping with madness parallels that of a group of ‘experts’ in the management of the mad. For it was the existence of institutions which permitted, or perhaps it might be more accurate to say, formed the breeding ground, for this emerging coterie of specialists. During the nineteenth century, at least, ‘psychiatry’ is to all intents and purposes coextensive with ‘institutional psychiatry’.

Despite the ubiquity of illegality in today’s financial markets and the questions this raises with regard to the social legitimacy of today’s financial industry, systematic scrutiny of the phenomenon of financial crime is lacking in the field of sociology. One field of research in which the illegal dimensions of capitalist dynamics have long taken center stage is the field of white-collar crime research. This article makes available to economic sociologists an overview of the most important conceptual insights generated in the white-collar crime literature. In doing so, its aim is to provide economic sociologists with some orientation for future research on financial crime. Building on the insights generated in wcc literature, the article concludes by suggesting a number of promising avenues for future sociological research on the phenomenon of illegality in financial markets.

A scrupulous analysis of the French translation of The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism reveals an acculumation of errors which seriously alter Weber's analysis in its nodal articulations (articulation of relations of causality and affinity, intrication of ideas and interests, schemes of mediation between beliefs and behaviour). The same problem arises in relation to its central conceptual mechanism (concepts of profession-vocation, of life style, of confirmation) and in relation to its theological lexicon. The analysis concludes with the urgent necessity for a new translation.

Max Weber's Problemattk still retains its power: why did only Christian Europe amongst the world civilisations autonomously create an economic dynamism, broadly capitalist in character? This essay gives an answer to this question, but it is one, for the most part, not in the spirit of the great German sociologist. There is, of course, a major academic industry devoted to the interpretation of Weber's work, but it still remains safe to say that Weber's own explanation for the fortuitous rise of the West had to do with ideological options concerning rational economic behaviour which gained particular salience in the fifteenth century despite having been present in embryo for a much longer period.

The article analyzes in a comparative framework the Jewish historical experience as a distinct – the first monotheistic – Axial civilization and the major characteristics thereof. Special emphasis is given to the multivalence of the major components of the cultural orientations, collective consciousness and institutional premises as they bear on its long historical continuity and their major carriers, including heterodoxies. The article points out some of the major differences of the modern Jewish historical experience as compared with medieval history.

We analyze a network of 3,590 interpersonal credit ties among Renaissance Florentine elite households to determine how Florentine personal credit was socially structured. We assess the network in light of various social and economic motivations Florentines might have had to exchange credit with each other. We explore the extent of participation by people from different categories, such as neighborhoods, factions, and guilds, and we determine whether loans flowed primarily within or between such groupings. We observe considerable homophily within families and neighborhoods, but also extensive circulation of credit among the most commercially and politically active Florentines. The overall connectivity of this network of interpersonal credit transactions resembles the social structure of other contemporaneous Florentine networks, such as marriage and business, suggesting that interpersonal credit was an important and distinct domain in which elite membership was confirmed and elite social solidarity achieved.

This article explores the Durkheimian engagement with the sacred as intricately enmeshed in a personal search for meaning in intellectual labor. By situating the intellectual work of Durkheim, Mauss, Hubert and Hertz in their personal quests for the sacred, we uncover two kinds of Durkheimian thought on the sacred and two ‘species’ of Durkheimian intellectual. Weber's categories of religious experience, the mystic and the ascetic, frame this rethinking of the meaning of Durkheimian theory.

This paper examines the development of religious education policy in the government schools of New South Wales (Australia) since 1960. The New South Wales religious education curriculum features three components: (1) teacher-led “general religious education” (gre); (2) right-of-entry denominational instruction provided by visiting clergy (“special religious education”, or sre); and (3) occasional additional devotional exercises such as hymns and prayers. Between 1960 and 1980, this system underwent a partial secularization. gre was transformed from a straightforward course in Christianity built around government-produced Scripture readers to a flexible curricular component built around the academic study of multiple religions. At the same time, sre was strengthened and had its position in the curriculum secured; and devotional exercises were allowed to continue only in those settings where they formed an “appropriate” match with the community. I find that “secularizing” reforms were most consistently driven by teachers and administrators with practical motives: avoiding controversy, improving working conditions, and facilitating class management. This finding both challenges and complements recent works that interpret secularization as a political process driven by politicians and professionals primarily interested in enhancing their power or prestige at the expense of religious actors.

MyQuestion is not whether we need a theoretical understanding of the political process in modern states, but whether we need a theory of the state in the grand manner of the acknowledged ‘great’ theories, ranging in modern times from, say, Bodin and Hobbes to Hegel and the nineteenth century juristic theories of sovereignty, and on to the less ‘great’, but in intention equally grand, theories of Green and Bosanquet and such twentieth century thinkers as Barker and Lindsay and MacIver.

The paper addresses the question whether national decision-making has become increasingly interdependent in recent decades, and what role “world models” play in any such trend. These questions are scrutinised by utilising the “Historic Hansard” corpus, which contains all records of the UK Parliament from 1803 to 2005, complemented by other corpora. The results show that references to other countries were most frequent in parliamentary debates very early in the 19th century. However, allusions to other countries have evolved from referencing case examples to referencing policies that are constructed and branded as models. The idea of transferable models caught on particularly strongly from the 1950s onward. The other corpora used for the study confirmed that these changes reflect a global trend. Hence, the post-war era has witnessed a worldwide spread of the idea of model as a precondition for a global proliferation of named models.

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 article considers aspects of the use of class in sociology and anthropology since the period around 1970, when Neo-Marxism became important in the social sciences, and is concerned primarily with Marxist and Weberian uses of the concept. It considers changes in the use of class in terms of two dimensions. One is the degree to which class is placed in a more macroscopic or more microscopic frame. The other is the degree to which class is defined in more objectivist terms or relies more on the way that the people being studied use the term. It is argued that since around 1970 writing on class has tended to become more microscopic and subjectivist. This tendency is related to changes within the two disciplines and within society more generally. The article closes with a consideration of some of the costs of this changing scholarly orientation to class.

Les saints de la confrérie mouride sont habituellement décrits, par les observateurs extérieurs, comme une aristocratie d'élus auxquels l'exploitation économique d'environ un demi-million de disciples, paysans pauvres, procure d'importants privilèges matériels.

Minority and majority are correlative terms: to say the one necessarily implies the other.

The notion of minority and majority has for a long time now been part of the Western political vocabulary. How did this happen ? It is a natural question to ask since neither the Latin words from which they are derived, i.e., minor and maior, nor their particular derivations in various European languages originally had a political bearing or implication. In English (and French) for instance minority and majority indicated simply the age of a person, having regard to issues of legal competence. A minor could not act in his own behalf. In due coursethe minor will be able so to act, and we then say that he has attained his majority.

Auf den ersten Blick scheint es fast eine Selbstverständlichkeit zu sein, daΒ die Soziologie ein «Menschenbild» haben müsse; und es erscheint sogar als wahrscheinlich, daΒ die Soziologie ein besonderes, aus der Eigenart ihrer Themenstellung und ihrer epochalen Rolle bestimmtes «soziologisches Menschenbild» besitzen könnte (i). Die Soziologie ist eine der Wissenschaften vom Menschen. MuΒ deshalb ihren Bemühungen um die Erforschung und Deutung menschlichen Zusammenlebens nicht ein Bild von Menschen zugrunde liegen, auf dem alles weitere Denken und Forschen aufbaut? Freilich hat die Soziologie nur einen Teilaspekt menschlichen Lebens zum Thema : die sozialen Strukturen. Auch beschäftigt sich der Soziologe hauptberuflich nicht mit alien sozialen Erscheinungen. Die sogenannten «primitiven» Gesellschaften überläΒt er — trotz mancher sehr wichtigen Querverbindungen, die zwischen den Disziplinen bestehen — den Ethnologen. Was die Gesellschaften der Vergangenheit anbelangt, so muΒ sich der Soziologe vielfach auf das Urteil der Historiker verlassen, so wünschenswert es ist, wenn er auch selbst etwas von der Geschichte und der Arbeitsweise der Historiker versteht. Im wesentlichen beschränkt sich die Forschungsarbeit der Soziologie und damit auch die Legitimität der speziell soziologischen Aussagen auf die nach abendländischem Muster hochzivilisierten Gesellschaften der Gegenwart. Das heiΒt : die eigentlichen soziologischen Aussagen beschränken sich auf einen bestimmten geschichtlich und geographisch lokalisierbaren Teilbereich des menschlichen Daseins. Ihre Aufgabe ist nicht, Aussagen über den Menschen zu machen, sondern nur über Ausschnitte aus dem Leben bestimmter Menschen.