Randall Collins' The Sociology of Philosophies: A Global Theory of Intellectual Change (1998) examines and compares communities of intellectuals linked as networks in ancient and medieval China and India, medieval and modern Japan, ancient Greece, medieval Islam and Judaism, medieval Christendom and modern Europe. The book has been the subject of many interesting and often positive reflections (for example, European Journal of Social Theory 3 (I), 2000; Review Symposium or reviews in Sociological Theory 19 (I), March 2001). However, it has also attracted a number of critical reviews (for example, reviews in Philosophy of the Social Sciences 30 (2), June 2000). Since not many books achieve such notoriety, it is worthwhile to rethink Collins' controversial approach. The aim of this paper is to encourage further debates of notions and issues presented in Collins' book. We would like, by joining two voices—sociologist and philosopher—to reopen discussion of Collins' attempt to discover a universality of patterns of intellectual change, as we think that more interpretative rather than explanatory versions of our respective disciplines can enrich our understanding of blueprints of intellectual creativity.

In an effort to identify the social sources and environmental consequences of axial thinking, and in particular of rational naturalism, three civilizational centres are compared: Ancient Mesopotamia, China, and Greece. Analysis of a series of societal features suggests that 1) axial thinking in the form of reflective intellectual networks arose in areas where a pre-axial priesthood was organizationally and functionally weak; 2) for the emergence of axial naturalism free-lance intellectuals in the midst of social revolutions appears to have been a crucial factor; 3) axial innovations were grafted onto a more archaic distinction of nature and culture; and 4) notwithstanding the form or context of Axial thinking, environmental treatment remained exploitative as a consequence of state-led political and economic issues.

Le vocabulaire de Tocqueville n'est pas sans équivoque et les deux mots qu'il emploie le plus volontiers ne sont ni rigoureusement définis ni toujours pris dans la même acception. Cependant la pensée demeure, me semble-t-il, aisément saisissable.

Les discussions sur les rapports entre catégories sociales et sur la stratification ont été longtemps dominées, en Europe au moins, par la problématique marxiste de l'opposition entre deux classes. Le concept de classe pourtant, tel que l'avaient redéfini les marxistes, ne pouvait s'appliquer concrètement qu'à une minorité ou tout au plus une moitié de la population. Mais la croyance à la possibilité d'une société sans classes, ce mouvement mystique moteur du « militantisme » socialiste permettait de rejeter provisoirement de l'analyse les groupes intermédiaires, assez dédaigneusement appelés « petits bourgeois ».

The present paper aims to unearth the rudiments of an alternative theory of action in Weber. Centring on salient descriptions of scientific practice found in Weber, I argue that one finds so-called “relational” impulses in these instances, which are at odds with the Kantian, subject-centred and dualist perspectives pervading much of Weber’s thought.

The paper consists of two parts. In the first—critical—part, after a short sketch of my relational approach, I cite some well-known “Kantian” passages in Weber’s work and demonstrate their undesirable theoretical and empirical consequences. I investigate Weber’s “official” theory of action and understanding, his concepts of rationality and psychology, and his understanding of technological mediation. In the second—positive—part, I delve into Weber’s understanding of creativity, investigating relational traits in Weber’s descriptions of scientific practice and experience. I then demonstrate how Weber’s late concept of personality is based on relational and object-oriented attitudes. Further, I investigate how the two dimensions of creativity and personality merge in his concept of Sachlichkeit. Finally, I provide certain biographical observations and discuss the conflict between existentialist and relational interpretations of Weber. At the very end of the paper, I discuss some general implications of the relational perspective.

Pardons are a well-known form of lawful but extrajudicial power over criminal classifications. They are still in regular use in rule of law regimes around the world. Attainder is the less well-known power to condemn via a legislative rather than a judicial act. Despite their structural similarities, pardon and attainder have exhibited divergent trajectories. One is ubiquitous, the other extinct. Focusing on the divergent trajectories of pardon and attainder during the framing of the U.S. Constitution and thereafter, the article advances an explanation for these phenomena based on asymmetries in the relational facts linking pardon and attainder to other thick moral constructs that constituted the moral system of the framers and their successors. Those facts mattered in their own right, but it was in light of the matrix of founding era moral interpretations that the framers grasped and institutionalized their significance.

Les préhistoriens ont récemment fait faire des progrès décisifs à leur discipline, loin de son statut originel d'enquêtes par des amateurs et des érudits locaux et dans un sens de plus en plus rigoureux et compréhensif. De son côté la sociologie, telle du moins que les Archives européennes de sociologie la conçoivent, se donne pour champ d'études l'aventure entiere des hommes. Après avoir intégré à nos analyses et à nos réflexions la matière couverte traditionnellement par l'histoire et l'ethnographie, le moment paraît venu de parachever l'effort en nous intéressant aussi aux sociétés préhistoriques. Pour une première tentative, il est bon de s'attaquer d'emblée au problème fondamental, celui de la mutation néolithique. De sa solution dépend la vision même que nous pouvons avoir des destinées historiques et sociales, sinon du genre Homo en général, du moins de l'espèce Homo sapiens sapiens apparue, on ne sait ni comment, ni même où, encore moins pourquoi, il y à trente-cinq a quarante mille ans. D'autre part, la question a bénéficié, ces dernières quinze années, d'une masse considérable de travaux, qui permettent de la poser sur des fondements plus solides et qui réclament peut-être une conceptualisation nouvelle. Comme il arrive toujours quand un champ scientifique est parcouru à vive allure, les athlètes manquent de recul et en perçoivent mal les lignes de force. Sans prétendre se substituer aux praticiens, il est permis de mettre leurs efforts à profit pour tenter de renverser la problématique en la «sociologisant».

In recent months a number of lively and stimulating papers have been published dealing with the meaning of history within the discipline of anthropology (Bermann 1978, Boon 1980, Cannon 1978, Cohn 1980, Higonnet 1980). In the literature, however, relatively little emphasis has been given to the variation in anthropological ideas within the tradition of anthropology. One very important aspect of such variation is to be found in the relationship between particular national cultural traditions and the development of anthropological ideas. Writers who have tended to see the history of the discipline in terms of biological paradigms, utilitarian behaviorism, and various conceptions of anthropology as 'objective' science, have failed to grasp adequately either the continuity or the range of variation within the anthropological tradition. Therefore, anthropologists and those thinking about the history of anthropology need to analyze anthropological ideas in historical context. Such an attempt to reconsider the past arouses opposition because it necessarily contradicts rationalist assumptions about anthropology as a science akin to the natural sciences, obedient to the laws of progress and independent of humanpreoccupations, a curious claim anyway for a science of man.

Dès le début des révolutions industrielles, la société a appris à se penser comme fille de ses œuvres. Mais la violence et la nouveauté des transformations techniques et économiques tout autant que les particularités de l'industrialisation européenne, libérale, soumise à un très faible contrôle politique et marquee par un décalage exceptionnel entre la production de masse d'un côté, la consommation et la démocratic de masse de l'autre, ont donné à cette prise de conscience son caractère propre.

Quiconque s'est occupé du problème des révolutions n'a pas manqué de se heurter à celui, combien irritant, de la définition. Le mot de révolution s'est chargé, au cours des siècles, de tant de résonances puisées à la réalité ou aux aspirations, que le même mot peut recouvrir des champs scientifiques — sans parler des champs idéologiques — les plus divers (1). II semble, pourtant, qu'on ne puisse pas éviter d'inclure dans son acception une référence au pouvoir et 'entendrai done par révolution toute prise illègale du pouvoir. La définition retenue est suffisamment large pour designer des faits aussi variés qu'une révolution de palais, un coup d'État militaire latinoaméricain ou les révolutions anglaise et francaise. Je maintiens qu'une définition aussi large est nécessaire, si l'on veut éviter le risque de manquer des phénomènes essentiels à la compréhension des sociétés. La littérature sociologique sur les révolutions — combien pauvre et limitée — manifeste le mépris le plus définitif pour les coups d'État militaires. Ce qui ne laisse pas de m'étonner. Car de quel droit décidet-on du degré d'intérêt scientifique d'un probléme? Si un coup d'État peut être de peu d'enseignement, leur retour périodique est, par contre, l'indicateur le plus important de l'état d'une sociét. De plus, une définition plus étroite que la mienne repose sur une décision arbitraire, qu'une autre décision tout aussi arbitraire peut venir contredire.

The battlefields are spaces of death and destruction. In the combat zone soldiers fight and kill while witnessing the death of their comrades. These unprecedented life experiences are regularly shaped by strong emotional responses. In this paper I analyse the complex emotional dynamics of fighting and killing in the combat zone. I explore the war-time experiences of ordinary soldiers who fought in the 1991-1995 wars in Croatia and Bosnia and Herzegovina. The paper is based on the interviews I conducted with the members of the Croatian Army and the Bosnian Serb Army who had direct experience of the battlefield. The focus is on the relationship between emotions and violence in the theatres of war with a spotlight on the personal experiences of fighting and killing. The paper challenges the existing interpretations of this phenomenon and argues that the killing in war is neither uniformly easy nor unvaryingly difficult but is context-dependent, variable and highly contingent. Furthermore, the acts of fighting and killing do not automatically trigger pre-existing and stable emotions but the violent processes themselves generate distinct emotional dynamics. Rather than simply following the violent actions emotions are in fact often made in the very acts of fighting and killing.

Gewiss war Aristoteles ein Kind seiner Zeit, als er behauptete, es gäbe Herren und Sklaven »von Natur«. Aber solche Ideologiekritik seiner These sagt uns wenig über das Problem, um das es Aristoteles ging, und über den Weg, den er zu seiner Lösung beschritt. Das Erregende an Aristoteles' Überlegungen zur Frage der Ungleichheit unter den Menschen ist, daß er mit ihnen beinahe zum ersten Soziologen geworden wäre — und es dann doch nicht wurde, weil er die Chance der soziologischen Erklärung eines Problems an eine, zudem zweifelhafte, philosophische Anthropologie auslieferte. Es ehrt diesen Irrtum, daß er sich nahezu 2000 Jahre lang unangefochten erhielt und noch heute gelegentlich auftritt. Doch bleiben auch ehrwürdige Fehler falsch, und es bleibt daher wichtig zu ergründen, wie sie zustandekommen konnten.

By examining the history of the development of the tobacco industry, a key state industrial sector in China's reform era, this article shows how market-building processes and state-building processes have produced and reproduced each other in economic transitions from planned toward market economies. First, the market competition between state-owned tobacco firms and non-state tobacco firms in the early 1980s resulted in the establishment of a vertical bureaucracy, through a statemonopoly institution. Second, new market dynamics resulted in the transfer of monopoly power from the central government to the local governments. During this process the horizontal bureaucracies governing the tobacco industry in localities were driven into market competitors, while the vertical bureaucracy was greatly undermined. The evidence from the Chinese tobacco industry shows that the project of market-building for postcommunist countries is not a unilateral process. To obtain a complete understanding of transitional economies of postcommunist countries, I suggest that the key is the interaction between state-building and market-building, with a focus on how the specific market dynamics have rebuilt the state structures.

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.

The main characteristics of public space are accessibility and usability for all citizens. Current developments primarily observed in cities, however, point to the fact that the distinction between public and private is becoming blurred. Instead urban spaces of hybrid character are emerging. Spaces with public functions like train stations, parks or pedestrian areas change character; semi-private spaces like malls or plazas expand. In order to obtain a realistic assessment of these developments the paper offers a critical appraisal of recent privatization trends followed by a brief systematization. After a discussion of feasible reasons for the loss of public space, the paper considers potential implications for the future of citizenship.