Pour le sociologue, le concept de pouvoir est un concept indispensable: des phénomènes de pouvoir accompagnent nécessairement tous les processus d'intégration sociale qui constituent un des objets sinon l'objet essentiel d'étude de la sociologie; on peut dire à la limite qu'il n'y a pas d'intégration, pas de société possible sans pouvoir.

Looking at the contemporary world, two things are obvious: democracy is doing rather badly, and democracy is doing very well. ‘New states are born free, yet everywhere they are in chains.’ Democracy is doing very badly in that democratic institutions have fallen by the wayside in very many of the newly independent ‘transitional’ societies, and they are precarious elsewhere. Democracy, on the other hand, is doing extremely well in as far as it is almost (though not quite) universally accepted as a valid norm. It is almost as if its success as a norm of legitimacy were inversely related to its success in concrete implementation.

This essay looks at Turkish-EU relations with a specific focus on identity narratives from the Turkish point of view. It outlines Turkey's official national narrative in its Ottoman, Turkic, and Islamic supra-national contexts and compares it with the supranational framework of EU member states' national narratives. According to the official Turkish historiography, Turkey is not part of a European family of nations. Turkey's non-European post-imperial identity is found to be comparable to that of Britain.

Les universités européennes sont des institutions historiques auxquelles la société moderne, de type industriel, impose et imposera de plus en plus des transformations profondes.

Deux faits sont à l'origine de la crise, ressentie à un degré ou à un autre, dans tous les pays d'Occident. Le premier est l'élévation du taux de scolarisation, secondaire et supérieure, c'est-à-dire du rapport entre le nombre des jeunes, garçons et filles, d'un certain âge qui continuent à étudier et le nombre total des jeunes de cet âge. Le taux de scolarisation à 17, 18 et 20 ans s'élève pour de multiples causes, les mêmes dans tous les pays industrialisés, qu'ils soient libéraux ou communistes. Le poste auquel chacun peut prétendre dépend de plus en plus de la formation qu'il a reçue. La quantité des tâches qui exigent une éducation secondaire semble augmenter avec la croissance économique. Les parents sont de plus en plus conscients de cette relation entre formation et position dans la hiérarchie sociale. lis souhaitent de plus en plus fréquemment que leurs enfants fassent des études. A mesure que le niveau de vie s'élève, les parents acceptent mieux de retarder le moment ou les enfants gagneront leur vie. Est-il besoin d'ajouter qu'il s'agit là de tendances générales et que cette attitude à l'égard de l'instruction est loin d'être encore répandue dans tous les milieux sociaux et que des différences substantielles subsistent, entre les pays, les régimes et les classes (1)?

Of the variety of travellers in Britain, circus people belong in a special category. Unlike travelling businessmen, visitors or most tourists, they travel permanently, but in contrast to homeless vagrants, they have a home in their caravans. Together with fairground travellers and various categories of Gypsies, circus people comprise the ‘nomads’ of modern Britain (for classification of travellers see Cohen 1974: 534).

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.

Since Hobsbawm published his Primitive Rebels (1959) and Bandits (1969), the study of organized banditry is slowly moving out of the dusky fringe of history and social science. In the 1970s some interesting regional and biographical studies have come to light. Apart from the encouraging example set by Hobsbawm, this has largely been the result of the increasing rapprochement between history and social science. Ordinary, rural and marginal people are being set on the stage of history. However, detailed comparative local and regional studies are still needed to test Hobsbawm's frame of analysis. Moreover, as he himself admitted, the evidence on which Bandits relies—poems and ballads—is rather ‘tricky’ and needs to be supplemented with other sources.

The paper analyzes dual citizenship in two principal manifestations in the worldde facto dual citizenship, as induced by international migrations and de jure dual citizenship, as a byproduct of Soviet imperial collapse. Factors of a social, political, cultural and economic nature that condition approaches towards dual citizenship taken by governments, political elites and grass-root actors are discussed in reference to established democracies (USA, France, Germany) and to newly independent states (the Ukraine).

Democracy, even if it is a system of self-government, rests on institutional commitments. An institutional commitment is a manipulation through rules of one's set of alternatives. I analyze the nature of institutional commitments in general and the role they play in a democracy. After drawing a distinction between committing to a rule and being committed by what a role establishes, three conclusions emerge: a) that representation is a functional commitment, b) that constitutions are commitments to rules, and c) that judicial review is not a commitment, but makes credible the commitments embodied in representation and constitutions.

‘Si vous voulez mûrir votre pensée, attachez-vous à l'étude scrupuleuse d'un grand maître, démontez un système dans ses rouages les plus secrets. C'est ce que j'ai fait et mon éducateur fut Renouvier» (I). C'est le conseil que Durkheim avait donné un jour à un de ses él`ves et qu'il est un peu agaçant pour un sociologue de 1962 de retrouver chez le « père de la sociologie scientifique », chez le « premier sociologue qui ait fait de la véritable recherche empirique ». Simplement parce que, bien souvent, le sociologue européen de 1962 est quelqu'un à qui on avait conseillé, quand il faisait sa classe de philosophie, de faire exactement cela.

Objectives. The article examines the opinions of Europeans concerning genetically modified (GM) foods. It first deals with the socio-cultural variables that favour acceptance of such products. It then analyses the minority of respondents who exhibit greater openness towards GM foods. Methods. Mokken Scale Analysis (MSA) is applied to 2002 Eurobarometer 58.0 data to construct an index of acceptance of GM foods. Results. The acceptance of GM foods is associated positively with trust in biotechnologies and negatively with concerns about the environment. The minority consisting of respondents in favour of GM foods possesses specific characteristics. Unlike the rest of the respondents, these principally consider the opportunity to spend less, the absence of fats, and the taste of foods. Conclusions. The analysis confirms that high education level does not favour acceptance of GM foods.

“ Qu'est-ce que le fouriéisme? Je ne sais pas ”Charles Fourier, Lettre à l'éditeur de La Gazette de France (décembre 1835)

Up until what point should liberal democracies allow free entry and free settlement for foreigners? Aside from the case of refugees and family reunion, there are two possible arguments for free access: the extension of individual liberty, and as a means of ensuring global redistribution. These arguments are insufficient and, in a counter-utopian reasoning, the author invokes the need for stability and the defence of national interests, which justify the use of 'differentiated' filters for immigrants.

In this article, I review my recent book Protestant Modernity. Weber, Secularisation and Protestantism, which reconstructs Weber's theory of secularisation and argues that this is formulated within a liberal Protestant framework. I argue that this theory is a part of his Protestant account of modernity. I also sketch some of the major issues involved in developing a Catholic account of modernity and provide some worked through examples of the sociological implications of this change of confessional presuppositions.

One of the most controversial and complex questions which has aroused a good deal of scholarly interest in recent years has to do with the conditions necessary to transform the peasantry, or a significant portion of the peasantry, into a revolutionary force (I). In this article, I want only to discuss one of the most crucial, but neglected, variables—the revolution of communications which is breaking down the cultural isolation of the village.

Weber could very well have been referring to the England- Scotland borderlands when he characterized the basic relation which ‘transcends the boundaries of neighborhood, kinship, group or tribe’ (Economy and Society, I: 637) as taking one of two forms—war or trade. He also said of the market, as a particular form of the trading relation: ‘It is […] only this physical assemblage which allows the full emergence of the market's most distinctive feature, viz. dickering’ (Economy and Society, I: 635). The lamb auctions which are the focus of this paper do involve a physical assemblage of individuals from different sides of the border who dicker over the value of lambs. But as implied by Weber, this is not just a simple trading relation. It is a meaningful exchange of value in which sheep embody for the Scots a distinctive world and in which the haggling over the price of sheep is about the distancing of this world from the over-whelming social, economic and political power of England. In sum, auctions in the Scottish borders occur at and are partly constitutive of social boundaries.

De nombreuses sociétés africaines connaissent et pratiquent la fraternité par le sang telle que la mentionne déjà Hérodote parlant des Scythes (1). Souvent, l'auteur qui décrit la conclusion du pacte relate une expérience personnelle : après avoir mêlé son sang à celui d'un chef indigène et prononcé une formule imprécatoire, parfois léché la blessure de son partenaire ou partagé avec lui un mets arrosé de leurs sangs respectifs, le voyageur était assuré d'une entière protection sur l'étendue du territoire que contrôlait son frère de sang. La facilité avec laquelle un total étranger se voyait offrir un lien en apparence aussi étroit a surpris plus d'un. Contre son gré et quelque répugnance que lui inspirât la cérémonie, Stanley dut s'y soumettre à plusieurs reprises pour pouvoir continuer sa route.