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.

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.

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.

The horizon is generally conspicuous, whereas the surrounding landscape, close to us, is taken for granted. Yet, in the social and historical world (and perhaps in some measure in the physical world also), the horizon we perceive depends on our more immediate environment and its general features. A forest or a savannah, a local hillock or a hollow, make a great difference to the kind of skyline that is seen. But it is in the nature of things that what is close and familiar should also be treated with familiarity and contempt, and that its importance should normally be ignored. It is its ordinariness, obviousness, which causes us to take it for granted: but the hold it has over us is immeasurably strengthened precisely by the fact that we do take it for granted. What is noticed can be queried, but that which seems utterly obvious eludes questioning. The horizon, by contrast, errs in the opposite direction. It is often quite spuriously dramatic. If you walk to the point on the distant skyline, you may well find, when you reach it, that it is just as ordinary a place as your starting point. But as long as it remains on the skyline, it occupies the dramatic point at which the sky meets land or water, the point where the sun sets or rises. It has a striking suggestiveness, and symbolises our deeper or more ecstatic aspirations—quite unlike the close and dusty immediate locality, which tends instead to remind us of our compromises, shabbiness and mediocrity.

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.

Ever since the Enlightenment, most intellectuals on the liberal and radical end of the ideological spectrum have tended to stand for a morality and politics of authenticity, sincerity, and naturalness; while their conservative opponents defended the need for decorum, civility, and restraints. These differences were, of course, largely rooted in differing basic conceptions about the nature of the human animal. Traditionally, the conservatives had a pessimistic view of human nature and hence believed that it had to be curbed; they pitted their views against the progressive belief in the basic goodness of human-kind that emerged in the eighteenth century. When Rousseau proclaimed in Émile: ‘Coming from the hands of the author of all things, everything is good; in the hands of man, everything degenerates’, Bonald, the great critic of Enlightenment thought, answered: ‘We are bad by nature, good through society. The savage is not a man, he is not even a childish man, he is only a degenerate man’.

La procréation médicalement assistée (PMA) est un domaine en expansion retardée. La pression sociale est forte pour empêcher toute la demande potentielle de s'exprimer. Quand elle s'exprime, une partie seulement est entendue, au nom de principes éthiques. Enfin, certaines ressources essentielles sont artificiellement raréfiées : les paillettes de sperme, nécessaires dans les inséminations avec un donneur autre que le conjoint.

The initial optimistic illusions about the future of postcommunist countries have been cut short by not so encouraging developments in these societies. With the growing awareness that the postcommunist transition cannot be understood as a linear passage to a free market and parliamentary democracy, more attention is paid to the social and economic obstacles as well as to the legacy of real socialism. The feelings of increasing uncertainty about the outcome of postcommunist transformation have led some writers to characterise Eastern Europe as being in the stage of liminality (or in an inbetween stage), in which everything may happen yet little can be done (Bauman 1994: 32). Arguing from a Tocquevillian position for the need of both a strong state and a strong civil society and also adopting his insight into the importance of enlightened interest, I shall discuss factors responsible for a lack of government which operates under the rule of law, as well as discussing factors responsible for obstructing the development of civil society and the emergence of enlightened interest in the post-communist societies.

Chosen during its negotiated transition to democracy in 1989, Hungary's Constitutional Court has emerged as one of the most powerful institutions of its kind. Drawing on round table transcripts and interviews with key participants, this paper presents a bargaining model of institutional choice that demonstrates how the greater patience of the opposition parties forced the ruling party to make significant concessions that increased the authority and independence of the court.

Starting with Hans Joas’ theory of creative action and Alberto Melucci's theory of collective identity (with slight modifications), the paper specify the conditions for a useful application of newer theories of social movements. Using this (neo-) pragmatist perspective, and drawing on the example of the development of civic opposition in Poland, it endeavours to question and expand the explanatory potential of the theories of relative deprivation, political opportunity structures, network analysis and framing analysis.

Le comité de Rédaction de la revue a souhaité marquer le centenaire de Claude Lévi-Strauss par deux contributions qui, chacune à sa manière, témoignent de l’importance d’un maître dont, depuis un demi-siècle la pensée a influencé le devenir de toutes les sciences sociales.

This paper seeks to assess the validity, in a particular historical case, of two ways of thinking in functionalist literature about the role of human intentionality in social change. It does so by means of an analysis of the contribution of French provincial intendants of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries to the differentiation of state and society. It is argued that if functionalists are to build a theory of social change it is necessary that they deal more directly with the question of human intentionality. Four historical views, each positing a different relationship between intentionality and the evolution of the state in Early Modern France, are outlined as different approaches to understanding the establishment of the institution of intendants and the part they played in state-society differentiation. The historical evolution of French intendants is traced and 1066 actions by intendants and the French crown during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries are analysed to determine the extent to which intendants contributed to state-society differentiation and whether they and the crown did so intentionally.