The article engages in a comparative analysis of efforts to pass international legislation for the conservation of wild birds in turn-of-the-century Europe. Obstacles to this project were not merely incompatible laws already existing in the involved countries, but the different ways of relating economic, moral, and aesthetic evaluations of wildlife to each other. Focusing on the stark differences between German and British approaches to the topic, the article shows how the way these categories were related to each other was a product of the involved practices shaping the experience of the natural environment. As a result of different practices, moral justifications in Britain were one form of argument among many others formulated by conservationists. The logic of discourse was cumulative, comprising of different arguments that were presented as compatible with each other. In Germany, by contrast, conservationists recognized the existence of a variety of arguments for conservation, yet emphasized the incommensurability of these arguments and commonly advanced only one argument as a valid justification. Taking the centrality of the experience of nature into account, the article argues for the expansion of the classical sociology of morality into an ecology of mind.

The question of how social norms and the rational pursuit of interests combine into social action continues to be one of the core puzzles of social theory. The essays by Jon Elster and Ralph Turner and the comments by Margaret Levi and Steven Lukes published in the following pages of the Archives are fine and, we believe, representative contemporary examples of how social scientists try to come to terms with this puzzle.

A major thinker and inspiring teacher, Karl Polanyi's contributions have long been influential in a variety of disciplines, notably economic sociology and economic history. Two of his innovations, substantivist economic anthropology and the “double movement thesis,” are recognized as seminal. All of the works for which he is known, however, were written late in life, when in exile, and very little is known of his Hungarian writings, virtually none of which had, until now, been translated. Despite his fame, the biographical literature on Polanyi remains modest: some studies provide invaluable insights, yet all are brief. This article attempts to make some headway in remedying these lacunae. It sketches the contours of that extraordinary historical-geographical conjuncture in which he was formed, and explores his intellectual and political engagements in the Galilei Circle and the Radical Bourgeois Party. It seeks in particular to elucidate the complex roles played by questions of nation, ethnicity and class in the life of the young Karl Polanyi.

In many Indian villages, the Dalits (Scheduled Castes or former Untouchables) are victims of daily atrocities at the hands of the dominant castes. With respect to the 2006 murder of a family of Dalits by their village’s ruling caste, we show how the police, the medical profession, the courts, and the authorities combined to deny them justice and obstruct the enforcement of laws that are aimed at protecting them – with the involvement of many Dalit officials. In conclusion, it would seem that none of the options or strategies pursued by researchers or activists is likely to improve conditions for the Dalits in the near future: a caste system that is highly adapted to globalisation is far from disappearing; nor is the "practice of untouchability" prohibited by the Constitution (1950).

Le 21 mars 1992, la majorité des électeurs de la république du Tatarstan s'exprime en faveur de la constitution d'un État souverain, « sujet de droit international réglant ses relations avec la Russie et les autres républiques sur des traités fondés sur le principe de l'égalité entre les parties ». Le Tatarstan vient-il subitement de devenir un État digne de reconnaissance internationale ? D'une superficie de 68.000 km2, campée entre la Volga, voie de communication commerciale nord-sud de la Russie et le massif de l'Oural, frontière imaginée de l'Europe, la république du Tatarstan, territoire historique des Tatars dits « de la Volga », constitue, de manière paradoxale, le cœur géographique de la Russie. Au xixe siècle, Alexandre Dumas disait déjà de sa capitale, Kazan, qu'elle « est une de ces villes que l'on voit à travers le mirage de l'histoire. Ses souvenirs tatars sont encore si frais que l'on ne pent s'habituer à voir en elle une ville russe, bien qu'elle en partage le désordre ». Le Tatarstan doit-il être considéré comme une région russe ou bien comme une nation distincte ? Si le résultat du référendum nous incite à entrevoir l'émergence politique d'une nation, l'analyse de la structure de la société du Tatarstan, ainsi que l'examen des événements et des stratégies politiques dans la république et dans les relations de celles-ci avec le pouvoir central soviétique puis russe conduit à relativiser la portée de cette volonté d' « indépendance » et à s'interroger sur les objectifs réels de celle-ci.

Black students in North American Universities calling for ‘soul’ courses and the official recognition of dialect speech; small underdeveloped nations fearing the cultural encroachment of ‘Americanization’; policy makers wishing to protect village traditions of handicraft from the technology of factory production; planners advocating decentralization and the preservation of regional or neighbourhood groups; minority ethnic group leaders attempting to maintain their religious customs, language and arts—all share one assumption, namely, that folk societies with their characteristic symbolic cultures are viable (1). Some go further and see in these small, homogeneous, proximate groups the last hope that advanced industrial secular societies can be held down to a human scale, can resist the multiple pressures to become, in the pejorative sense of the word, ‘mass societies’ (2).

Die Normgebundenheit des sozialen Verhaltens ist eine einfache, ja triviale Alltagserfahrung: wir geraten ständig an Kreuzungen, die mit grünen und roten Signalen versehen sind, — in soziale Situationen, die offenbar bereits von anderen entdeckt, fixiert, vorgeformt sind. Es steht uns nicht frei, diese Vorgeformtheit, diese Besetzung von Situationen mit positiv und negativ bewerteten Alternativlösungen ohne weiteres zu ignorieren. Wenn wir uns um die grünen und roten Lichter nicht scheren, wird unser Verhalten dennoch von anderen als eine Antwort auf diese Signale interpretiert, — auch wenn es gar nicht in unserer Absicht lag, uns eine Frage stellen zu lassen. So können wir in einer ersten Annäherung sagen : die Normgebundenheit sozialen Verhaltens bedeutet, daß soziale Situationen mit bestimmten Alternativen belastet sind, die auf irgendwelchen Verabredungen zu beruhen scheinen; Verabredungen, von denen man nicht recht weiß, wer sie eigentlich getroffen hat; Verabredungen, die wir nicht aus der Welt schaffen, wenn wir sie von Fall zu Fall nicht akzeptieren. Sie sind irgendwie so auf Dauerhaftigkeit angelegt, daß sie vom Einzelnen nicht beliebig außer Kraft gesetzt werden können.

In this article, we reorient the literature on colonialism and ethnic violence by exploring how different types of communalizing colonial policy (CCP) affected postcolonial patterns of ethnic warfare. We hypothesize that CCPs have limited or mixed effects when they simply recognize or empower communities but that they promote ethnic warfare when explicitly favoring some communities over others, especially when this discrimination affects the power of communities. To test these hypotheses, we combine a statistical analysis of the British Empire with a focused case study of Myanmar. We find that two relatively non-discriminatory CCPs—the use of communal census categories and high levels of indirect rule—had limited or mixed effects on postcolonial ethnic warfare. Unequal communal representation in the legislature and security forces and a mixed use of indirect rule, on the other hand, are three highly discriminatory CCPs, and we provide evidence that they increased the odds of postcolonial ethnic warfare.

The brief essay is a response to an article by the French sociologist Loïc Wacquant which critiques the concept of “racial capitalism” that has gained much prominence and currency in recent times. It offers a historical analysis of the emergence of “race” as a concept in the Euro-Atlantic sphere and points to the complexities in extending it beyond that space, into the Indian Ocean world for example. As a consequence, the ambitious claims made by some theorists of “racial capitalism” appear difficult to sustain.

Le livre de F. A. Hayek a été ignoré ou presque en France et beaucoup de ceux, en Grande-Bretagne et aux États-Unis, qui auraient dû le lire, l'ont négligé, hostiles d'avance aux thèses de l'auteur du Road to Serfdom. Personnellement, j'approuve sans réserves la formule du professeur J. W. N. Watkins :

One of the major areas of dispute among social scientists working with South Asian material has been over what criteria enable one to isolate and define those characteristics attaching to the phenomenon of caste by which it can be described and analysed. Some scholars posit a set of fundamental attributes pertaining to caste which are so constituted as to limit caste solely to a Hindu context, while other scholars postulate a series of primary principles which permit comparative undertakings. One of the most vigorous and sophisticated proponents advocating the limiting of caste to the Hindu social system is Dumont. Dumont denies the validity of applying the term caste to non-Hindu social systems because for him the essential structural principle underlying caste is the polar opposition of purity and impurity. Hierarchy arises because of and is structured by this polarity. In turn, the requisite condition permitting the development of pure hierarchy is that ritual status and secular power must be conceived as completely separate domains and that status be made superior to power, the priest taking precedence over the ruler (Dumont 1972, p. 114). Caste exists only where this necessary disjunction between status and power is present and, furthermore, this disjunction is only found within the Hindu social system.

The author discusses the discourse-theory of the so-called ‘Cambridge School’ (Quentin Skinner, John Pocock), which is favorably compared to alternative approaches in the field of the intellectual history of political thought. Some conceptual problems of this kind of discoursetheory are discussed and some remedies proposed, resulting in the formulation of a general model, which could be applied to contemporary debates, exemplified by a short analysis of the discursive situation of modern liberalism.

The authors contrast two political inquiries in light of Luhmann’s system theory of procedure. The article asks whether and to what extent these inquiries can be considered as procedural systems, meaning as distinct frames of action that generate specific meanings and relevancies. Starting from the micro-sociological analysis of interactions in the British “Hutton Inquiry” and the European Union’s “CIA Inquiry” the authors reconstruct the specific functionalities of each with regard to their different ways of engaging and enabling self-referential processes of communication, knowledge production, and decision-making. As a system, each merges these three processes into a consistent, relatively strong or weak procedure, but they do so to different degrees. Overall, the article encourages a sociological understanding of the procedural mechanism as well as an empirical qualification and variation of system-theoretical assertions.