Recent political developments in Iran, Turkey, Egypt and Algeria, among others, suggest the possible emergence of an indigenous Islamic path of democratic formation. However, the conventional western interpretations, of religion, and in particular of Islam, leave little room for the recognition of the actual, complex development of such Islamic countries. Defining Islam and modernity as two more or less incompatible phenomena fails to recognize the potentialities of developing modern democratic Islamic societies with their cultural elements and particularities. Many Muslim countries themselves fail to see or are unwilling to recognize their own civil societies and their dynamic potentialities and to accept, in Locke's term, ‘the sovereignty of civil society’. Although the notion of a traditional civil society in the Islamic countries is controversial, I contend that neither individualism nor democratic institutions have been or are necessary for a civil society to exist. The basis of a civil society is the existence of influential civil groups and their institutions that can, through established mechanisms counterbalance state power. Analyzing civil society in Muslim countries requires that we recognize Islam not only as a religion, but also as a political theory and the major source of a legitimization of political power.

Die Normgebundenheit des sozialen Verhaltens ist eine einfache, ja triviale Alltagserfahrung: wir geraten ständig an Kreuzungen, die mit grünen und roten Signalen versehen sind, — in soziale Situationen, die offenbar bereits von anderen entdeckt, fixiert, vorgeformt sind. Es steht uns nicht frei, diese Vorgeformtheit, diese Besetzung von Situationen mit positiv und negativ bewerteten Alternativlösungen ohne weiteres zu ignorieren. Wenn wir uns um die grünen und roten Lichter nicht scheren, wird unser Verhalten dennoch von anderen als eine Antwort auf diese Signale interpretiert, — auch wenn es gar nicht in unserer Absicht lag, uns eine Frage stellen zu lassen. So können wir in einer ersten Annäherung sagen : die Normgebundenheit sozialen Verhaltens bedeutet, daß soziale Situationen mit bestimmten Alternativen belastet sind, die auf irgendwelchen Verabredungen zu beruhen scheinen; Verabredungen, von denen man nicht recht weiß, wer sie eigentlich getroffen hat; Verabredungen, die wir nicht aus der Welt schaffen, wenn wir sie von Fall zu Fall nicht akzeptieren. Sie sind irgendwie so auf Dauerhaftigkeit angelegt, daß sie vom Einzelnen nicht beliebig außer Kraft gesetzt werden können.

The influence of Marcel Mauss' study The Gift has largely been confined to the study of the circulation of goods and the social relations in which their transfer is embedded. One of Mauss' principal aims, however, was to show the political importance of gift-giving in averting the recourse to violence. In this paper, his approach to the offering, receiving and reciprocating of gifts is used to analyse the phenomenon of pentimento – the exchange of confessions for reduced sentences by terrorists and mafiosi which has become a central feature of the effort to combat organised violence in Italy since 1980.

This paper looks at why the Franciscan order took part in the diffusion of optics, more than other medieval organisation, both religious and secular. First, clues of this social asymmetry are given. Then, an explanation is put forward: 1. An initial asymmetry existed, in the fact that Grosseteste's optics was known in the Franciscan studium of Oxford; 2. Since that date, optics spread among the order through a network effect; 3. The homophilia that presided over the conventual libraries' purchasing policy finally explains why other similarly structured contemporary organizations, similarly structured, took less of an interest in optics. In spite of an obvious topical connection, this explanation differs deeply from the analysis that has been applied to the Puritans' and Jesuits' scientific activity in XVIIth and XVIIIth century classical Europe. It does not appeal to the heavy hypothesis of ethos.

This paper examines from a comparative perspective the first historically documented case of transitional justice: the restoration of the Athenian democracy in 403 BC. It analyzes in particular the rhetoric of amnesty, justice, reconciliation and revenge and the discursive strategies informing the prosecutions and litigation which followed the transition. Comparison of the Athenian experience with modern situations of transitional justice helps to identify key features which made the Athenian reconciliation so successful.

The legitimacy of modern democratic institutions rests on the ideal of popular sovereignty. The purpose of this paper is to examine the contemporary status of this ideal.

Since space limitations do not permit discussion that would place the concept of popular sovereignty in its historical and intellectual context, we simply postulate a definition. People, by whom we mean individuals acting on the bases of their current preferences, are collectively sovereign if the alternatives open to them as a collectivity are constrained only by conditions independent of anyone's will. Specifically, people are sovereign to the extent that they can alter the existing institutions, including the state and property, and if they can allocate available resources to all feasible uses.

Kurioserweise scheint es heute nötig, den Nachweis zu führen, daß die Theorie der Revolution ein wichtiges Desiderat jeder engagierten Soziologie sein muß: so weit haben wir uns von den Erfahrungsgrundlagen und Denkansätzen der Anfänge der Soziologie entfernt. Für Comte, Tocqueville, Marx und viele Geringere war die Theorie der Revolution ein Kernstück der Soziologie überhaupt; sie standen in der Spannung zwischen der Bewältigung der Revolution des 18. und der Vorhersage derer des 20. Jahrhunderts. Liest man dagegen die Vorträge und Diskussionen des 3. Deutschen Soziologentages aus dem Jahre 1922 zum Thema »Das Wesen der Revolution« (27), dann könnte man geneigt sein, aus der sie beherrschenden Atmosphäre der Unwirklichkeit und Gleichgültigkeit zu schließen, das Problem der Revolution habe nunmehr alle Aktualität verloren. Die Diskussionen des 13. Deutschen Soziologentages 34 Jahre später (»Tradition und Revolution») bestätigen diesen Eindruck aufs Neue (28), und auch international sieht es nicht so aus, als sei das Problem der Revolution besonders brennend. Auf dem Dritten Weltkrongreß für Soziologie — mit dem Generalthema »Sozialer Wandel« — war von Revolution nicht die Rede (24); wahrend des Vierten Weltkongresses 1959 fand zwar eine Diskussion zu diesem Thema statt, doch gehorte sie nicht zum offiziellen Kongreßprogramm (25). Doch — muß man es sagen? — kommt dem Problem der Revolution aus mindestens zwei Gründen auch heute erhebliche Bedeutung zu : Einmal ist, allem Anschein nach und entgegen dem Selbstverständnis westlicher Gesellschaften, unser eigenes Jahrhundert eine Zeit großer Sozialrevolutionen in alien Teilen der Welt. Es vergeht kaum ein Jahr, in dem wir nicht von radikalen und raschen Wandlungen in irgendeinem Lande hören.

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.

[Lt ] Plus la construction typifiée est anonyme, plus elle est détachée de l'unicité de l'individu en cause et moins les aspects de sa personnalité et du modèle de son comportement entrent dans la typification en tant que pertinents pour le but qu'on se propose, raison pour laquelle le type a été construit [Gt ]

Alfred Schutz

Attempts have been made to bring economics and sociology together, in particular when they are concerned with the modelling of decision-making and human rationality. However, an enduring epistemological obstacle remains: that of the classical distinction between raison d'être and raison de connaître. This paper examines some of the conceptual and practical problems raised by the nomological aim of econometrics.

Car driving has received little attention from sociologists. Existing analyses highlight the irrationality of drivers, victims of an ‘illusion of control’, a ‘bias of optimism’ or influenced by social and cultural factors. Using qualitative and quantitative information, this article suggests a new perspective, in which driving is regarded as a ‘social activity’ (in the Weberian sense) and it is presumed that drivers operate on a cognitive rationality.

Honesty and trust affect the functioning of the state and the market, and, conversely, the quality of formal rules and institutions has an impact on interpersonal trust. This paper organizes and critiques research on the relationship between trust and government; it stresses the mutual interaction between trust and democracy and the impact of corruption. Given this context, the concluding section discusses the transition process in post-socialist countries, highlighting the tensions between interpersonal trust and trust in public institutions.

Le mot ethnie a un passé équivoque dans la langue française. Vacher de Lapouge est le premier à l'utiliser en 1896 pour désigner de prétendues «races» distinctes, notion dont la biologie des populations a fait justice. Le terme ne s'appliquait pas seulement aux «primitifs»; il contribua à hérisser des barrières entre les «races» dites inférieures et les «races» dites supérieures. En 1935, G. Montandon, qui se fera l'apôtre d'une certaine conception nazie de l'homme, consacre un livre à «l'ethnie française». Les administrateurs coloniaux utiliseront, quant à eux, le terme ethnie comme substitut de «tribu» ou «peuplade» avec souvent la conviction, fallacieuse, que des caractères anatomiques particuliers entrent dans les particularités du groupe ainsi qualifié. Mais Franz Boas, le fondateur de l'anthropologie culturelle aux États-Unis, réagit avec vigueur. II déclare fermement dès 1932 : « Les résultats des matériaux extensifs amassés au cours des cinquante dernières années ne justifient pas l'hypothèse d'une quelconque relation entre types biologiques et forme de culture » (Boas, 1932, cité par Condominas, 1980, p. 89). Cette conviction sera largement partagée par la majorité des ethnologues, sauf en Allemagne. Dérivé du grec ethnos (peuple) le terme ethnie entre dans le vocabulaire scientifique avec une connotation exclusivement culturelle. Mais ce concept se voit attaqué depuis une dizaine d'années sur le terrain même de l'ethnologie où il s'est developpé. Quelques chercheurs français s'ingénient à démontrer que leurs prédécesseurs, travaillant principalement en Afrique, ont eu le tort de donner consistance à de fausses entités.

La mise en gage: état des données pour l'Afrique et l'Asie du Sud-Est ; objet et problématique de cet article

On appelle dans la littérature africaniste (I) «mise en gage» (angl. pawning) le fait de placer quelqu'un auprès d'un créancier en garantie d'une dette (ou comme sécurité d'un emprunt). Le «gagé» (quelquefois appelé «otage»; angl. pawn ou plus rarement pledge) est au service du créancier et lui doit tout son temps de travail ou presque. C'est là une forme de dépendance, sinon d'asservissement, qui a souvent été confondue avec l'esclavage pour dette, d'autant plus facilement que le gagé risquait à terme d'être réduit en esclavage (et l'était effectivement dans la plupart des cas) si la dette n'était pas remboursée. Or ce sont là deux institutions tout à fait différentes.

Contrary to a number of his contemporaries, Montesquieu did not consider that an inescapable antagonism existed between the republican government, based on the virtue of citizens and their dedication to the public good, and commercial activity, which was aimed at material interests. Well aware of the recurrent historical phenomenon of commercial republics, Montesquieu detected various mechanisms by which the commercial spirit could in fact encourage the formation of the psychological mindframe and behaviour necessary for republics. These included, in particular, a respect for rules, a distrust of emotions, a taste for individual independence acquired through work, and allegiance to a noncapricious government.

This article discusses the theory and practice of multicultural citizenship in liberal states. Regarding theory, I point to the shortcomings of both ‘radical’ and ‘liberal’ approaches to justify minority rights. Regarding practice, the state-centered notion of multicultural citizenship defects from the decentered accommodation of multicultural minority claims in functionnally differentiated societies. It also runs counter to a trend toward de-ethnicization in liberal states, in which the cultural impositions of the majority on minority groups are growing thin, thus removing the case for minority rights.

I must start with a personal disavowal. This essay employs an explicitly Lévi-Straussian procedure but it is not intended as a guide to wider aspects of Lévi-Strauss thought. Although I feel reasonably safe with Lévi-Strauss's concept of structure, I am quite out of my depth when it comes to the related but subtler notion of esprit. Lévi-Strauss's esprit appears in sundry guises. In 1952, originally in English, he/it was a personalized “human mind”, an uninvited guest who took his place around the conference table among a group of American linguists and anthropologists (I); in the earlier chapters of La pensée sauvage he is perhaps the bricoleur—handiman—who is busy contriving culture from the junk of history and anything else that comes to hand (2); at the conclusion of Le cru et le cuit (3), in more abstract and more serious vein, esprit seems to be a kind of limiting characteristic of the human brain mechanism and appears as part of an extremely involved interchange relationship in which it (esprit) is the causal force producing myths of which its own structure is a precipitate. Elsewhere again (4) esprit seems to correspond to that very mysterious something which is a mediator between “praxis et pratiques” and which is described as « le schème conceptuel par l'opération duquel une matière et une forme, dépourvues l'une et l'autre d'existence indépendante, s'accomplissent comme structures, c'est-à-dire comme êtres à la fois empiriques et intelligibles ».

A year ago Dr. Jacek Kurczewski asked me to take part in a symposium which he organized with the Polish Sociological Association, on the sociology of everyday life. The subject of my session was to be the sociology of the queue. As a psychologist I could, of course, interpret the phenomenon of the queue in terms of the interdependence of individual interests and social justice. Theses of social psychology, based on empirical grounds, provided some explanations of the mechanisms of behaviour in a queue. These explanations, however, led to trivial conclusions, though expressed in scientific terms. Therefore I decided to choose phenomenological analysis to deal with queue behaviour. This paper is a widened and more analytical version of my speech at the PSA seminar (I). I was inspired by three events from my personal experience:

1. In Western Europe (especially in Belgium) I frequently encountered the following phenomenon. In a shop someone would come up to the counter and ask for some article, paying no attention to the fact that there were also others who were waiting to be served. To me that fact was an open violation of the rules of community life. My emotion urged me to intervene. I was held back however by the fact that the others in the shop seemed not to notice anything wrong. This would suggest that my notion of customers' rights and duties differed from that of Belgians or Dutchmen.

It is difficult to discuss a phenomenon when one does not know precisely what it is. This problem is particularly vexing in the case of the Mafia. It has been argued that ‘the need for a definition [of the Mafia] is crucial; not just for any definition with some degree of contingent empirical plausibility, but for a definition with some analytical clout’ (1). The word ‘Mafia’ itself has travelled far to distant lands, such as the former Soviet Union. For instance, according to Arkadii Vaksberg, Russian journalist and author of The Russian Mafia, the Mafia is ‘the entire soviet power-system, all its ideological, political, economical and administrative manifestations’ (2). In an article published in a magazine for British executives dealing with Russia, the label Mafiosi is used to lump together bureaucrats, smugglers from the Caucasus, the CPSU nomenklatura accused of embezzling state funds, the late British businessman Robert Maxwell and many others (3).

The ‘Dutch model’ has become a catchphrase for progressive European politicians pondering the possibilities of a ‘third way’ between Anglo-American deregulation of labour markets and the bloated stagnation of European dirigiste economies. Foreign politicians, central bankers and union leaders alike praise the combination of fiscal conservatism, wage moderation, consensual welfare reform, job creation and the maintainance of overall social security. They highlight the extraordinary proportion of Dutch people, male and female, in part-time jobs; the sustained policy of wage moderation by the trade unions; the success in holding the course for EMU and the absence of social unrest. Best of all, they observe, the Netherlands is the only EU member state to have more than halved its unemployment rate during the past decade, from 13-plus per cent in 1983 to just over 5 per cent in 1998. Its annual growth rate in jobs of 1.6 per cent is four times the European average, and as good as the American ‘job machine’, but without the US' sharp increase in earning inequality and life-chances.

Nous cherchons l'homme qui a pu prononcer publiquement cette phrase, nous voulons retrouver un Max Weber qui n'est pas seulement le spécialiste de problèmes sociologiques ou économiques, mais qui est en même temps aussi le penseur et le guide de la jeunesse intellectuelle. La recherche minutieuse qui s'impose ici n'a été faite que d'une manière tres incomplète (1), sans doute parce que les différentes filiations, afnnités, fréquentations intellectuelles qui pourraient aider à définir la pensée wébérienne apparaissent sous un jour encore plus déconcertant que les recherches concretes du grand sociologue: le caractère encyclopédique de son savoir, là aussi, l'emportait vers un nombre invraisemblable de doctrines et de systèmes. Ce sont ees fils qu'il nous faut dégager à grand-peine des courants de pensée de la deuxième moitié du XIXe siècle, où ses convictions fondamentales situent Weber. On accordera volontiers que cette richesse, ce foisonnement intellectuel — en contraste avec la richesse de sa sociologie proprement dite — ne pouvait guère conduire Weber qu'à une sorte d'éclectisme philosophique. Mais le lecteur ainsi averti se souviendra sans doute que le «désenchantement»idéologique ne diminue en rien l'importance de la riche contribution qu'apportait Weber à la science, à la sociologie.