This article argues that the transition between early-modern and modern organization of empires—especially the administrative outlooks and institutional logics used to govern them—revolved around how moral conflict was viewed within imperial organizations themselves and by metropolitan audiences. Early modern imperial organizations were deeply patrimonial, and hence relied on a style of embedded moral reasoning that distanced and segmented their affairs from the metropole. By contrast, modern empires order what they govern in hierarchies that are nominally objective and whose criteria seem universal. Using a case study of the British Empire’s crisis and transformation at the turn of the 19th century, I argue that modern imperial administration emerged because networks of moral justification, which provided the scaffolding for patrimonial early-modern empire, eroded in the face of “disinterested” metropolitan scrutiny. This scrutiny created an audience for bitter political and moral conflicts among imperial administrators, who then used disembedded moral claims to mobilize support.

In a status society, such as early modern Europe, the development of the market economy threatened social hierarchies. At a time when religion was the source of power, priests and warriors strove to protect themselves from what was a foreseeable attack going to the very root of their domination, which was jeopardized by the potentialities of the capitalist economy. They therefore developed religious, legal and moral tools to counter capital accumulation and interest-bearing loans in order to break the motor of capitalism. Avarice, one of the Seven Deadly Sins, and usury, which was punished by excommunication, were the moral weapons used to exclude those from the community who hoarded money or who charged, however little, interest on loans. But whereas greed, the disease of market exchange, was considered one of the Seven Deadly Sins, prodigality, which lies at the heart of aristocratic exchange, was considered one of the Seven Heavenly Virtues. Contemporary theatre, with its misers and spendthrifts, is a perfect place to hear echoes of the struggles between the antagonistic values in society, and to follow the way in which individuals reacted to the conflicts that these struggles provoked.

The essay is based on literary works reflecting behaviors that could also be echoed in judicial archives and in texts from writers of the time. It analyses plays from Shakespeare (Timon of Athens, The Merchant of Venice), Ben Jonson (Volpone) and Molière (The Miser).

The article engages in a comparative analysis of efforts to pass international legislation for the conservation of wild birds in turn-of-the-century Europe. Obstacles to this project were not merely incompatible laws already existing in the involved countries, but the different ways of relating economic, moral, and aesthetic evaluations of wildlife to each other. Focusing on the stark differences between German and British approaches to the topic, the article shows how the way these categories were related to each other was a product of the involved practices shaping the experience of the natural environment. As a result of different practices, moral justifications in Britain were one form of argument among many others formulated by conservationists. The logic of discourse was cumulative, comprising of different arguments that were presented as compatible with each other. In Germany, by contrast, conservationists recognized the existence of a variety of arguments for conservation, yet emphasized the incommensurability of these arguments and commonly advanced only one argument as a valid justification. Taking the centrality of the experience of nature into account, the article argues for the expansion of the classical sociology of morality into an ecology of mind.

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.

This article shows how voluntary social work in late 19th/early 20th century Copenhagen emerged as the result of several creative re-interpretations of the cultural schemas of revivalist Protestantism as urban revivalists faced the social question. Informed by pragmatist cultural sociology, the concept of “collective soteriology” is introduced as a way of analyzing the Protestant reinterpretations in terms of doctrine, ideals of community, and recipes for action. It is shown how Lutheran revivalist ideas at the same time encouraged, constrained, and shaped the voluntary social action undertaken. The paper aims to uncover a sociologically neglected European tradition of civic action, to contribute to the sociology of Protestantism’s influence on civil society, and to develop a theoretical framework for analyzing the role of ideas in non-contentious collective action.