One of the fundamental ideational changes brought by modernity into Indian intellectual culture was the transformation in the idea of the state. From an institution that was traditionally seen as a necessarily limited and distinctly unpleasant part of the basic furniture of any society, the idea of the state has been transformed into that of a central moral force, producing an immense enchantment in India’s intellectual life. Indeed, in the Indian context, as distinct from the European one, it has been the primary source of modernity. This paper seeks to present an absurdly short history of the curious adventures of this idea. It also seeks to explain why, despite the global dominance of ideas of liberalisation, and a reduction of the state’s interference in social and economic life, in India this enchantment is still undiminished.

We know, more or less, what rationality means when applied to individual choices and decisions. It is less clear what it could mean when applied to policy choices. In this article I discuss three questions. First, can one assign a meaning to the idea of rational political choice? Secondly, assuming that this assignment is feasible, what is the scope for rational political decisions? Thirdly, if this scope turns out to be limited (as it will), could there be an alternative guide to political action?

The growth in the numbers and influence of ultra-Orthodoxy – the haredim – since the Second World War has changed Judaism worldwide, even though it remains a minority culture. Growth has occurred through the maximization of family size and through the movement of t'shuva (“return”), and it has benefited from state and private subsidies to the institutions of Torah learning (yeshivot and schooling generally), which have become one of the twin pillars of ultra-Orthodoxy. The other pillar is the shidduch, the system of concerted marriage which ensures that more or less everyone gets married, and strengthens the educational institutions which inculcate among prospective brides a preference for a learned husband engaged in full-time study, and for a life devoted to sustaining him.

In a deeply divided society such as Northern Ireland, where two religious communities coexist in relative physical and spiritual isolation from one another: yet where both communities are highly preoccupied with the presence of each other, one community's ‘knowledge’ of the other is comprised very largely of indirect experience and socialized teachings, rather than of first hand experience. The ideologies of one community are therefore relatively ‘autonomous’, in the sense that they are partially immune to empirical tests in day to day life. Ideology tends to structure experience rather than the other way round.

This paper is a plea for the study of ‘local justice’, i.e. the allocation by institutions of scarce goods and necessary burdens. It is largely programmatic, with few new findings to report. Later, case studies which are currently being carried out in West Germany, France, Norway and the United States will provide answers to some of the questions raised below.

Moderne Gesellschaften produzieren auf vielen Ebenen — in der Wissenschaft, in der Politik, in der Kunst, im »Alltag« — unablässig Beschreibungen ihrer Strukturen und Elemente und versuchen, Ursprung und Richtung ihrer Wandlungen abzuschätzen. Trotz der Ausdifferenzierung eines eigenen »Beobachtungssystems« in Form der institutionalisierten Sozialwissenschaften und trotz der methodischen Kompetenz, die dort mittlerweile angesammelt wurde, ist jedoch angesichts der hohen Komplexität dieser Gesellschaften nicht zu erwarten, daß diese »Selbstbeschreibungen« jemals vollständig oder abgeschlossen sein werden. Ebenso unwahrscheinlich ist es, daß Beschreibungen, die aus dem Blickwinkel unterschiedlicher Beobachter — darunter verstehe ich z.B. gesellschaftliche Subsysteme wie »Politik«, »Ökonomie« oder »Wissenschaft«, aber auch kollektive Akteure, Gruppen und Individuen — angefertigt werden, übereinstimmen. Und dies gilt in gesteigertem Maße für jene Beschreibungen, die mit sozialer Ungleichheit einen normativ in besonderem Maße »aufgeladenen« Bereich zum Thema haben.

I can distinguish four separate referents of ‘caste’ in India. I) Caste as varna. There are four (sometimes five) varna (‘colour’) in India, and in order of ranking these are, as everyone knows, Brahmans or priests, Ksattriyas or warriors, Vaisyas or men of commerce, and Sudras who are workmen. These varna are not groups but categories. They are not exhaustive, since some of the population (e.g. such non-Hindus as Muslims or Tribals, and the Untouchables of Hinduism itself) do not fall within the four categories.

The article attempts to assess the use and usefulness of the concept of ‘social capital’. First, it assesses its differing conceptual uses in the works of four key writers, Pierre Bourdieu, Gary S. Becker, James S. Coleman and Robert D. Putnam, identifying broadly a problematic ‘social capital as social fact’ perspective associated with Putnam, and a more promising ‘contacts with influential people’ approach that can be derived from Bourdieu. It then considers the practical uses already made of the former approach in the development studies literature, before addressing some of the analytical problems associated with applying the latter in a policy environment. Finally, it takes three short examples from research in rural Central and Eastern Europe to illustrate how the concept can be used to both analyse social relations and suggest policy priorities. The article's conclusion is that ‘social capital’ of any variety is by no means the ‘missing link’ in development economics, yet ‘social capital’ of the Bourdieu-derived kind can be a useful, work-a-day concept in social analysis.

The latin term millennium and its Greek equivalent chilias literally mean a period of a thousand years. According to the millenarian tradition, which is based on Jewish apocalyptic literature and on the Revelations to St. John, Christ will reappear in the guise of a warrior, vanquish the devil and hold him prisoner. He will then build the Kingdom of God and reign in person for a thousand years. Those saints who remained steadfast and gave their life for their faith shall be raised from the dead and serve as his royal priesthood. At the end of this period Satan will be let loose again for a short while and will be finally destroyed. The victory will be followed by the general resurrection of the dead, the last judgement and final redemption (1).

When scientists account for changes in a theory or the theory's position within the world of the science, they usually do so in terms of the intellectual content of the theory. For example, the rise of quantum mechanics is attributed to the fact that quantum mechanics was able to solve problems which the preceding theories could not handle. This represents one way of describing occurrences within science and is a major component of the attitudes which scientists possess about their world. Another manner of viewing the changes which take place in science is that of the sociology of knowledge. From this perspective science is viewed as an activity carried on by the men who create the scientific ideas. The history of science is analyzed in terms of the-scientist-who-does-something-within-aparticular-social-context; that is the ideas are viewed as inseparable from the men who put them forward and the social environment in which they occur (1).

This article identifies the chief factors which transform a group of people into a “community of fate”. A community of fate refers to a temporary form of existence, born of duress and social emergency, which cuts across familiar divisions to elicit something socially consequential. One such community materialized during the 2003 Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (SARS) outbreak in Hong Kong. It is examined here in detail together with a range of other crisis communities – from Montreal battling smallpox, to the captives of the Warsaw Ghetto.

I am not the first to discover the pitfalls which surround the term ‘revolution’, as if to guard its explosive practical potency from scholarly vivisection. Eight years ago Hannah Arendt devoted more than three hundred pages of her-as usual-magnificent erudition to dissecting the elusive meaning of the term. She established that the term was used for the first time in 1688 to denote “bringing things back” rather than “pushing them forward”; she reminded us that when the duke de la Rochefoucauld-Liancourt, on July 14th, 1789, retorted bluntly: “Non, Sire, c'est une révolution” to the Louis XVI' abashed “C'est une révoke”, he had been inspired by the impressive inevitability of freshly discovered motions of celestial bodies, rather than by modish ideas of les philosophes du progrès All this said and done, Hannach Arendt ends up with one more partisan definition, which is exactly the result one could have expected. A quarter of century before this, Crane Brinton choose the seemingly most reasonable path of comparing four, historically well described, events, which nobody would refuse to call ‘revolutions’—only to show once againthat it is the theoretical assumption which shape the empirical data rather than the other way round. Only two years had elapsed at that time since the Henderson-Livingstone translation introduced the Pareto's concept of ‘equilibrium’ to the American scholarly scene. As it has not yet been turned by Talcott Parsons into a symbol of abstract academic sterility, the concept could have seemed to Brinton the right tool of selecting the ‘revolutionary essence’ from the host of ‘empirical data’ on revolutions.

The problem of the ‘new working class’ is located in the events of recent political history, specifically in the three successive electoral defeats of the Labour Party. In attempting to explain the failure of the traditional working class party to increase, or even retain, its support among the wage-earning population, a good many generalizations about the causes and consequences of secular changes in the class structure have been advanced and disputed. The salient thesis is that which seeks to account for the conservative drift of the working class in terms of their growing prosperity and their gradual assimilation to the middle class in an economy of full employment and rising expectations of material welfare. As one writer puts it: “The whole working class finds itself on the move, moving towards new middle class values and middle class existence” (1).

Lesacrifice royal de l'aśvamedha (I), tel que les textes védiques nous le font connaître, comporte l'étrange cérémonie que voici: le cheval que l'on s'apprête à immoler est attaché, comme il est de règie pour les sacrifices sanglants, à un poteau sacrificiel (yūpa); mais il n'est pas, en l'occurrence, la seule victime. De part et d'autre du poteau central, d'autres poteaux sont dressés, auxquels sont attachés d'autres animaux, destinés aussi à être immolés. La liste de ces victimes annexes est variable; mais toujours il doit s'agir d'animaux «villageois» (grāmya). Or à ces victimes «villageoises », effectivement mises a mort, s'ajoutent des quasi-victimes, qui se distinguent des victimes réelles par trois traits: ce sont des animaux « forestiers » (āranya); on les maintient dans les intervalles (āroka) entre les poteaux; enfin de compte, on ne les immole pas, mais on les relâche, et un des textes donne cette explication: c'est pour qu'ils ne subissent point de violence (ahimsāyai). La liste des quasi-victimes, variable, elle aussi, comprend nécessairement l'homme (2).

The trends towards falling fertility and mortality and increasing longevity, which have led to the demographic ageing of all Western industrialized societies, have not occurred in isolation. More specifically, we are also seeing a combination of forces which are resulting in the ageing of some life-transitions. While public and legal institutions may be lowering the age threshold into full legal adulthood, individuals themselves are choosing to delay many of those transitions which demonstrate a commitment to full adulthood. This shift from a high-mortality/high-fertility society to a low-mortality/low-fertility society and the ageing of family transitions within these societies have significant implications for both family structure and kinship roles. Drawing on recent demographic figures for the European Union, this paper highlights the impact of these main trends on individuals and families.

There is now increasing interest in the study of ideology in anthropology. We are disenchanted with community studies. They are obviously useful; but they provide a flat, two-dimensional picture; they are essentially a relic of the times when anthropologists were exclusively interested in primitives and when it was deemed possible to study an entire ‘tribe’ single-handedly. Turning to study the Tamils, Sinhalese, Turks, Kurds, or Circassians, if the anthropologist digs himself into a small peasant village, it is likely that most of the important and significant issues facing these cultures at that time will be lost.