There Can be no such thing as an innocent reading of the Tale of Peter Rabbit. As that most percipient analyst of the later manuscripts, Enid Blyton, puts it: “We must pose this work the question of the specificity of its object, its relation to its object. The only reading of Peter Rabbit which speaks to us through the congealed layers of the past-becoming-present is a symptomatic reading—a reading in which we listen attentively to Beatrix Potter's silences”.

One of the more ambitious intellectual projects of recent years is the body of work by Margaret S. Archer which centres on her Social Origins of Educational Systems, published in 1979. Archer's thesis is that modern educational systems are of two basic kinds, centralized and decentralized, and that their character and functioning are conditioned by the social and political conflicts of their formative phases. The underlying contrast is between France and England: this was Archer's starting-point, and in 1971 she published Social Conflict and Educational Change in England and France 1789–1848 in collaboration with Michalina Vaughan. Social Origins of Educational Systems extended this in time, bringing the story down to the present day, and in national coverage, adding Russia and Denmark to the countries examined. A shorter ‘University edition’—reduced to 234 pages from over 800—has now been published which is again restricted to England and France.

For the last two hundred years, with the exception of a brief interval between the two World Wars, Poland has been either partitioned, or occupied, or governed by proxy. Squeezed between Russia and Germany Poles took nourishment and continuity as a historical nation from remembrance of things past whenever their sovereignty as a political nation was curtailed or abolished. Lately these efforts were inspired by a conviction that even if present day institutions could not be changed, a half-way victory over totalitarianism's attempts to destroy social solidarity would still be won if the community's history were rescued from the regime's ambition to determine not only the country's future but also its past. Thus, the wonderful intuition—that totalitarianism must destroy all context of social reality independent of its own dictate and acquire a copyright not only on what is but also on what had been—came to the Poles not because they read Orwell's 1984, but because for well over one hundred years they nurtured the idea of the Polish nation against all the odds of nineteenth century geopolitics. Once before, when they had lost their national sovereignty, the Poles had locked in on their past spiritually and it worked: Poland was resurrected. But since the Second World War, despite the dogged persistence of the Poles to reclaim their past, to go beyond, revise, and correct the government-approved version of their history manifested during every mass upheaval in the Polish People's Republic, there was never a temptation to reopen the subject of wartime Polish-Jewish relations.

L'organisation sociale des sociétés peul, sociétés distribuées dans toute l'Afrique occidentale, offre au sociologue á la fois un difficile problème théorique et les moyens de le résoudre.

Un difficile probléme de théorie, d'abord, dans la mesure oú ces sociétés manifestent paradoxalement trois traits peu compatibles entre eux: l'endogamie accusée du patrilignage y contredit d'une part une nomenclature de parenté de type iroquois (confusion des freres, sceurs et cousin(e)s paralleles) et d'autre part les types de comportement observes entre parents. La fréquence des manages avec la fille de Poncle paternel et les parentes agnatiques va de pair avec une préférence matrimoniale secondaire pour la cousine croisée matrilatérale. Cette endogamie agnatique des Peul n'a pas la meme coherence institutionnelle que celle des Arabes, ou du moins de certaines sociétés arabes. Chez ces derniéres, le mariage préférentiel avec la fille de l'oncle paternel se refléte dans la nomenclature de parenté, le cousin a un droit sur sa cousine et Ton rencontre parfois un modéle conscient traduisant la réalité des faits: dans une famille composée de deux fréres, le premier se marie é l'intérieur — mariage endogame — et le second á l'extérieur — mariage exogame — (I), l'endogamie systématique étant théoriquement impossible. Rien de tel chez les Peul oú il n'existe ni trace de cette endogamie dans la nomenclature, ni droit, ni modele conscient.

The purposes of this article are, first, to present a theoretical discussion of peasant revolts that develops an exchange model of relations between lords and peasants and second, to use this discussion as a framework for a review of some of the work on peasant activity in eighteenth-century France. The argument, therefore, begins from social exchange; it does not privilege structures at the theoretical origin. Any analysis should specify three features of exchange: what is exchanged and the terms of trade, the potential kinds of coordinated activity present in the exchange (the relationship between hierarchy and reciprocity), and the meaning of the exchange relationship to its participants. These three features are interconnected so that, for example, specifying the kind of collective action is also to specify terms of trade and meaning.

Among other things, the revolutionary period in France is notorious for two practices: the development of a civil religion and a project of linguistic standardization. The substitution of republican for religious symbols, the creation of public space for republican worship, the hostility towards intermediary bodies, all of this sought to ground a more direct relationship between the citizen and the republic. At the same time, the new order sought to consolidate its control of the church. An oath of loyalty to the republic was required from priests, as part of a plan to make priests functionaries of the state. The protest evoked, and its association with counterrevolution, however, produced equivocation on the part of regimes until the Concordat, which acknowledged the place of Catholicism in French society, without providing official recognition as the state religion, and which sought to monitor the activity of the clergy.

Dans la france en paix des annéees quatre-vingts, l'objection de conscience est identifiée le plus souvent à des images du passé : à l'eépoque de l'antimilitarisme révolutionnaire et des mouvements libertaires pour lesquels la mise en question de l'armée s'intégrait à une « contestation globale de l'État », époque des guerres coloniales aussi où l'objection, qui n'était pas encore reconnue légalement, prenait la forme de l'insoumission, ou bien encore à l'époque elle aussi révolue des contestations politiques et idéologiques des années soixante-dix auxquelles les objecteurs ont été associés — moment où ils passaient fréquemment devant les tribunaux militaires et revendiquaient un statut qui ne soit pas discriminatoire. Mais ces images sont devenues lointaines, la menace de la guerre paraît l'être, elle aussi, et l'objection, de fait, semble n'avoir plus grand rapport avec les évolutions ou les enjeux du moment.