At the same time as the arsenal of tools—for example, highly developed statistical methods—has tremendously increased, research in sociology and social psychology has become more and more fragmented, detailed works bearing hardly any relation to each other, and the lack of a coherent theory that is general but exact enough to be taken seriously in empirical work has been felt more acutely than ever. Is this a paradox?

It is A well-established fact that families vary quite widely in their educational practices. In the past twenty years a certain number of studies on socialization have revealed a clear relation between the socioeconomic status of the parents and their educational style. Kohn (1977), for example, has shown that the emphasis parents put on discipline and immediate conformity is more pronounced in lower-class groups, whereas middle class groups value more the internalization of instructions and the development of personal motivations. In the same vein, psychologists and social psychologists have observed that the ‘authoritarian’ style of parent-child relationship (consisting of strong control and weak support) prevails more often in lower-class groups than in middle class groups, the latter being more prone to exercise strong support combined with marked control in their child's education (Bronfenbrenner 1958). Family sociologists have produced quite exhaustive articles covering the literature in this field (Gecas 1979; Peterson and Rollins 1987).

ONE OF THE CURIOUS DEVELOPMENTS in intellectual circles over the past few years is that the subject of imperialism is no longer a bailiwick of the Left. To be sure, so long as colonial empires were in strength, there was no denying the reality of European and American imperial expansion. But over the course of the post-war era, as decolonization rippled through the Third World and the formal mechanisms of colonial control were thrown overboard, any insistence on the continuing salience of imperialism became identified with left-wing ideologies. If it did enter mainstream debates, it was inevitably Soviet or, more generically, Communist imperial ambitions that were subjected to scrutiny.

Edward Tylor's animist theory, and his theory of the survival of the soul were the basis for a large anthropological movement which grouped together a number of disciplines involved in the reconstruction of human prehistoric religion, as well as the identification of the savage components of civilised religions. From 1884 onwards, this British movement spread to France through a number of authors who are not very well known today. Their writings are nevertheless useful for their characterisation of religious studies of Tylorian inspiration.

During the past two decades the use of rational decision models, especially those which assume self-interest motivation, has diffused widely throughout sociology, including the fields of collective behavior and social psychology. This trend is interesting as a datum for study in the sociology of sociology, for what it reveals about changing assumptions concerning the nature and dynamics of social behavior, and as a trend that is sometimes beneficial and sometimes deleterious. My objective is to raise questions based on these three kinds of interest, and to suggest some answers.

Dominant theories fail to explain the use of terror during the Second Palestinian Intifada. Notably, they fail to explain Hamas’s abandonment of suicide attacks by 2005. We classified the universe of fatalities on both sides and examined the conflict’s patterns of lethal violence. Our analysis of fatality ratios and rates of change by fatality category supports a dual-arena theory of terror. Noting a rapid increase of indiscriminate Israeli civilian deaths and a relative evening out within this category in the conflict’s initial phase, we demonstrate that externally Hamas aimed to improve the balance of forces to compel Israel to negotiate on equal terms using the “out-suffering” mechanism. Internally, Hamas used terror to build confrontational capacity by attracting Palestinian factions to a resistance pole and isolating conciliatory elites. When their continued deployment became too costly relative to emerging options, the campaign was swiftly called off. In the end, while based on strategic calculations, Hamas’s use of terror proved to be a failure.

A logic of exclusion-inclusion nowadays dominates the debate on poverty and social policies, namely through categories such as underclass and social exclusion. Thus, poverty becomes an essentially moral problem, rather than political, and the poor are treated as a group apart. Though different, both concepts work to reinforce the fracture separating the poor, and increasing a process of erosion of citizenship ties—what Madeleine Rébérioux denounces as being today a crisis not only of work, but of political and civic ties as well.

The material which I will try to analyse is largely historical and relates to the initial period of Basque nationalism at the turn of the last century. Moreover, the historical material will be presented only cursorily since the main emphasis of the paper is theoretical. It is believed that the Basque nationalism of today is incomprehensible if there is no theoretical understanding of the factors which led to its emergence in the 1890s. Furthermore, this paper does not purport to prove its conclusions. It is rather a tentative exploration of one theoretical line which may or may not be eventually useful. The paper is divided into three sections. The first section presents the historical material. The second will give an analysis of the specific character of Basque nationalism. By modifying the theory of Ernest Gellner and illustrating with the Basque material, the third part will attempt to put nationalism into a general theoretical framework.

Reflecting on the notion of responsibility, Václav Havel offers, in one of his Letters to Olga, what he calls a trivial illustration:

at night, I board the rear car of a tram to go one stop. The car is empty, and since the fare is paid by dropping a crown into a box, not even a conductor is present […] So I have the option of throwing the fare into the box or not: if I don't, no-one will see me, or ever find out: no witnesses will ever be able to testify to my misdemeanor. So I'm faced with a great dilemma, regardless of how much money I happen to have with me: to pay or not to pay.

These three statements distil the dilemma of the armed forces in Britain—a dilemma compounded of obscure and conflicting goals, a pervasive anxiety as to the nature and viability of military professionalism and internal conflicts and misunderstandings which themselves symbolise a deeper alienation from contemporary British society.

While the progressive European politicians are on the lookout for a new model of ‘third way’ capitalism with a human face, after the (temporary?) defeat of the Swedish, Dutch welfare state reform occupies a prominent place in many commentaries.Although it attracted only international attention in the mid- 1990s, the ‘Dutch miracle’ has its basis in policy changes in the early 1980s. For a full explanation of the Dutch experience we must go back at least fifteen years, and study the combination of problem loads, power shifts, institutions, politics and ideas, in three ‘tightly coupled’ policy domains of the Dutch welfare state: industrial relations, social security, and labour market policy. The return to wage moderation took place in the early followed by a series of reforms in the systems of social security in the late 1980s and early 1990s. From the mid-1990s, finally, the adoption of an active labour market policy stance, in order to enhance overall efficiency and create a new domestic balance between wages and social benefits, gained political currency. In this article we present a stylised narrative of these policy changes—what happened, how it happened and what it meant. We demonstrate that these three policy shifts, although embedded in different corporate actors, were interrelated; they created the conditions and the demand for one another, and neither of these policies could have been successful on its own.

Weingrod, writing of Sardinia, distinguishes between ‘patronage’ in the social anthropological sense of “patron-client relationships” —”how persons of unequal authority, yet linked through ties of interest and friendship, manipulate their relationships in order to attain their ends”; and ‘patronage’ in the political scientist's sense of “party-directed patronage”—”the ways in which party politicians distribute public jobsor special favours in exchange for electoral support”. Weingrod goes on to argue that the former conception is no longer relevant to an analysis of modern Sardinian political behaviour: with the narrowing of the gap between village, city and state, and the evolution of national parties at the local level, the conception of party-directed patronage is more appropriate.