Why do similar modern nations accord religion different roles in their public institutions? This paper engages this question by examining trends in religious instruction in the public schools of the United States and Australia from 1850 to 1950. I find that American education secularized farther and faster than Australian education because of its decentralized system of educational administration. In the United States, decentralized educational administration facilitated challenges to religious exercises by religious minorities, fostered professional development among educators, and allowed novel educational practices oriented in new educational theories rather than religion to spread. In Australia, by contrast, centralized state control over education insulated majoritarian religious exercises from minority criticism, suppressed professional development, and helped maintain traditional educational practices that sustained religious instruction. The state thus has both mediating and constitutive effects on secularization, a finding which opens new directions for research into the dynamics of secularization.

Doctrinal differences within the military profession have long been a central feature of the development of tactics and strategy, and in earlier periods of history there have been controversies over the appropriate employment of certain arms and units, such as the relative merits of infantry in line or column and the use of cavalry for firepower or shock, as, for example, discussed by Oman (1929) and Quimbey (1957). More recently there has been the question as to the effectiveness of so-called ‘Strategic Bombing’, and the tendency of U.S. doctrine to undervalue the morale factor of guerrillas in their military calculations (Wilson 1970: 142–146).

Des données en nombre croissant montrent que dès la fin du Ve millénaire B.C., les sociétés de la Palestine ont connu de profondes transformations sociales et technologiques. Certaines d'entre elles sont attestées par l'apparition de lieux de culte, de sanctuaires et de cimetières, par la spécialisation artisanale, et la métallurgie, en relation avec une formidable augmentation de la population et l'organisation de sites en entités hiérarchisées avec des centres qui régulaient tant l'organisation socio-économique que les activités religieuses. C'est au cours du IVe millénaire B.C. que se sont constitués les fondements de toutes les sociétés historiques du Levant. En termes archéologiques, cette période protohistorique, datant de 4500 à 3200 B.C., est appelée chalcolithique.

La sociologie, telle que l'ont conçue ses fondateurs au siècle dernier, était à la fois interprétation et justification, défense et illustration de la société moderne. Elle ne voyait dans les institutions représentatives qu'un aspect secondaire de la société moderne, voire un héritage du passé, une survivance de la phase transitoire. Cette appréciation de la modernité et cette dépréciation du parlementarisme — en dépit du caractère démocratique que les fondateurs de la sociologie attribuent à la société en train de naître — caractérisent Auguste Comte aussi bien que Karl Marx, mais non Herbert Spencer, comme le montre T.B. Bottomore.

This paper places in a broader perspective a recent dramatic attempt by privately organized wealth and power to dominate the most fundamental institution of modern capitalist society—the market. This perspective derives from my initial, first-hand work with familiesof old wealth in Galveston, Texas, a once thriving port on the Gulf of Mexico, and later with certain families in Houston, which eventually overshadowed Galveston as the regional metropolis. Because of the similarity in historic conditions nation-wide by which certain fortunes, accumulated in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, became dynastic organizations, I came to view my Galveston subjects on a broader canvas. Over the past century, the generally uniform and rationalized ways of preserving dynastic wealth have had a basic shaping function for such family-fortune organizations, making them an appropriate subject matter for comparative study.

With the astonishing resurgence of nationalism in various parts of Europe subsequent of the end of the Cold War, attention has once again been focused on the normative issues posed by the politics of nationalism. This article wresdes with some of these normative issues by reviewing a profund theoretical dialogue conducted between two British neo-Marxists, Tom Nairn and Eric Hobsbawm, going back to the 1970s. The article also gives some attention to Ernest Gellner's sociology of nationalism, which heavily influences Nairn's sociological understanding of nationalism (though Gellner in no way shares Nairn's enthusiasm for neo-nationalist movements). The article concludes, in response to Gellner, that no amount of sociology can relieve us of the obligation to engage at the normative level with the challenges posed by nationalism.

La notion de « théorie » a probablement une signification plus incertaine dans les sciences sociales et particulièrement en sociologie que dans d'autres disciplines. Dans un passage de Social Theory and Social Structure, R.K. Merton (1) soulignait, dès le début des années 1950, que le mot théorie était employé par les sociologues dans sept acceptions différentes dont une seulement est recevable. Ce sont: (I) Méthodologie; (2) Idées directrices; (3) Analyse des concepts; (4) Interprétations sociologiques post factum; (5) Généralisations empiriques; (6) Théorie; (7) Dérivation et codification.

I respond to the reactions of Gurminder Bhambra, John Holmwood, and Sanjay Subrahmanyam to my dissection of the concept of “racial capitalism.” I reiterate my critique of the latter on grounds of semantics, logics, and heuristics. I warn that racial capitalism erases historical variations, interludes, and contingencies to replace them with monolithic depiction and mechanical necessity. We cannot assume that racial division, colonial or metropolitan, is functional to capitalism across all lands and epochs. We need to recognize and theorize the varieties of regimes of racial domination, anchored by the ideal-typical distinction between “genuine race-divided societies” and “societies with race,” much as comparative political economists have taught us to dig into the varieties of capitalism. Combining these two dimensions serves us well to decouple capitalism and race analytically so that their historical conjunction may be studied empirically.

This article discusses Roger Brubaker's contribution to a new sociology of the state, which considers the state not as a strategic actor or a territorial organization but as a culturally bounded membership association. After pointing out the novelty of Brubaker's approach in light of previous theories of the state, I address some of its shortcomings—a formalistic concept of citizenship, an exclusive focus on elites, a mechanistic fashioning of the relationship between ideas and interests, and no mention of the pending Europeanization of citizenship.

Few terms have had more complex fortunes than “alienation” and “intellectuals”; few at this time are more modish and less clear. It would be instructive to devote an entire paper to tracing their histories and plotting all their variations in present usage; it would be no less enlightening to determine just why these two concepts are so often coupled. Perhaps the single most important reason is to be found in the numerous attempts to classify and explain the great modern revolutions, particularly those of France and Russia. These have been frequently characterized as qualitatively different from all those that preceded them. Inspired by, or producing in their course, total ideologies, these revolutions have produced a new style of politics. Its origins and patterns of development have received increasingly close scrutiny. Among the most consistently favored hypotheses has been that linking revolution to intellectuals. This theory need not be phrased as did Burke and Taine, who seem to have believed that the world would be spared great political convulsions, if only there were no radical intellectuals, subverting by their impractical speculations, the bases of society and politics. Tocqueville, whose views are occasionally confounded with those of Burke and Taine, did assert that thorough-going revolutions cannot occur without the existence of a general theory about the nature of the good society, a theory that cannot be realized except by changing completely, and possibly violently, the status of persons and property under the existing order (1).

Class structure in Italian society presents some important specific characteristics in relation to other ‘advanced’ capitalist countries. I shall deal with these specific characteristics especially, using statistical and descriptive material which has only recently become available, following on new research and studies in this field. Then, as a conclusion to this paper, I shall deal with the problem of interpreting these specific characteristics, asking particularly whether they should be put down to the ‘backwardness’ (or insufficient development) of Italian capitalism, or, whether we should rather see them as the expression of the Italian economy's ‘peripheral’ position inside the Western capitalist system.

For all the controversy that continues to surround the course of events in France between the summoning of the Estates-General and the fall of Brienne in the summer of 1788 and the summoning of the Convention and the fall of the monarchy in the summer of 1792, it is nowhere in dispute that they constituted a revolution— that is, in the definition of the Oxford English Dictionary (s.v. III.7), ‘a complete overthrow of the established government in any country or state by those who were previously subject to it’. Indeed, they constituted such an overthrow in a manner and to a degree without precedent. Neither the English Civil War (and still less the ‘Glorious Revolution’ of 1688) nor the War of American Independence are properly comparable with them. In calling the French Revolution ‘unnecessary’, therefore, I am not seeking to minimize either its importance (of which more later) or its novelty. Nor do I maintain that the problems by which the ancien régime was confronted could have been resolved by any scheme of reform which would have preserved intact the existing forms and distribution of power. I mean only that the Revolution was unnecessary in two different senses: first, it only took place as it did because of a wholly unfore-seeable series of coincidences; second, its eventual outcome in terms of the broad difference in social structure between eighteenth-century and nineteenth-century France would have happened in any case. These assertions, moreover, are not—or so I hope to show—as controversial as they may seem: properly stated, both should be equally acceptable to ‘orthodox’ and ‘revisionist’ historians alike.

For the past half-century economic anthropologists have been trying to come to terms with the obvious, recognised, indisputable fact that non-industrial economies “feel different” from industrial ones. How to express and communicate that difference? Some people thought they could do it sociologically, preserving as much as possible offormal economic theory, explaining deviation by invoking social influence on universalrationality, allowing the possibility that their evidence and insights might contributeto the proper development of a body of theory acknowledged imperfect and unstable (i). Others thought they could do it economically: they invoked distinct principles of integration and gave them an analytical status equal to rationality (2). For the most part different people took these rather different paths; they were academics and quickly engaged in controversy, tied labels to their opponents (formalist to the first, substantivist to the second) and held no truck with them. Firth alone tried to avoid entrenchment and was prepared to make propositions in both modes (3).

The influence of Marcel Mauss' study The Gift has largely been confined to the study of the circulation of goods and the social relations in which their transfer is embedded. One of Mauss' principal aims, however, was to show the political importance of gift-giving in averting the recourse to violence. In this paper, his approach to the offering, receiving and reciprocating of gifts is used to analyse the phenomenon of pentimento – the exchange of confessions for reduced sentences by terrorists and mafiosi which has become a central feature of the effort to combat organised violence in Italy since 1980.

One of the major developments in the history of western Europe between 1100 and 1300 was the construction of large-scale political organizations. Before 1100 political life had often been intensely local, its horizons limited to the village, parish, or county. But in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries the old local communities of post-Carolingian Europe were aggregated into the kingdoms and city-states that formed such a prominent feature of European life in the high Middle Ages. This essay is concerned with one aspect of this process of political construction: the factors that determined the possible pathways that a local community could follow as it was incorporated into a larger political organization.

This paper focuses upon the distinction which Maine and others have drawn between relations of status and those of contract. The particular aspect of contract which interests us is that, due to its characteristic impersonality, it enables individuals and groups who are socially unequal because of stratification, or who have no social links and hence no status at all vis-à-vis each other—enables them to negotiate and enter into binding agreement with each other as political and legal equals. Contract can do this because, unlike status, the former splits the whole-person, enabling him to offer for the purpose of transaction only a singular and specialized aspect of himself to a singular and specialized aspect of another or other partners: the social persona of each participant is set aside. Through this impersonality, contract not only cancels out any social consideration or difference between the participants, but also achieves temporal specificity (delimiting, in advance, the duration of the tie established by the transaction),—whereas interpersonal dealings bind the partners in a relationship that has temporal continuity.