For more than a decade, the most decisive influence on the empirical study of the British class structure has been the three consecutive electoral victories of the Conservative Party during the 1950s. The widespread belief that these events reflected some underlying change in the stratification of British society stimulated a new examination of the political attitudes and behaviour of the working class. In sociology this led to the exploration of the ‘embourgeoisement’ thesis culminating in the ‘affluent worker’ study by Goldthorpe and his colleagues and it is, perhaps, a comment on the state of sociological research into the British class structure that this study, together with its associated papers, remains the centre around which much of the debate on social stratification in contemporary Britain continues to revolve. In political science, however, the investigation took a different track. Instead of seeking an explanation of the Conservative electoral successes in terms of the working class becoming more middle class, political scientists sought an explanation in terms of increased working-class ‘deference’. Bagehot was enthusiastically resurrected (a new edition of The English Constitution appeared in 1963), and a spate of studies attempted to assess the ‘deferential’ component of English political culture.

In the sociological literature, the study of inter-ethnic relations has been dominated either by the problem of the black-white conflict in the U.S.A. or by the controversy over whether social relations in colonial and excolonial countries are ‘pluralistic’. The history of the Soviet Union provides quite a different context in which various ethnic groups, each with peculiar traditions and languages and at various levels of social, political and economic development, have interacted one with another. Study of the Soviet Union enables one to compare the role of Marxist-Leninist ideology in an ethnically mixed community with the usual examples of the impact of religious and ‘imperialist’ belief systems, and it may help to clarify whether ‘ethnic group’ is a useful analytical category or whether ‘ethnic relations’ can be explained in terms of the more traditional classifications of class, status and power.

Since 1952 the elaboration of Egyptian ideology has constituted a source of conflict between the regime and the left/right opposition. In trying to capture the ideological center, the regime has inevitably drawn itself into the maelstrom of public contention characterized by mass conformity, intimidation, purges, arrests, show trials and incarceration of all who fundamentally question the principles of the leadership. Democratic cooperative socialism (‘Arab socialism’) is the official ideology, and a spate of books and articles have been published on its significance for Egyptian politics. Despite all these efforts, confusion still tends to reign over this concept, both among Egyptians themselves, and outsiders studying it.

The contents of sacred texts are not simply reproduced in the doctrines of the religions which venerate them; there must be interpretation and selective emphasis. This is most obviously true when the corpus of sacred literature is large, as in Christianity and Buddhism. Historians of these religions may therefore ask why certain doctrines and certain scriptures have been emphasized at the expense of others.

The Molokan sect, one of the strongest and most influential in prerevolutionary Russia, is today moving towards extinction. This process, however, has not gone equally far in different geographical areas of the Soviet Union. This paper puts forward an assessment of the extent of the sect's decline and attempts to explain both the general decline and its differential rate in different communities. It analyses the sect's development over a long period of time and under radically different socio-political conditions and it tries to systematize the Molokans' changing response to their different social environments, locating the sect in the typology devised by Bryan Wilson. It concludes that the severe decline in membership during the Soviet period is due to the fact that the Molokan sect is no longer an organization through which political dissent can be expressed but has fully adjusted to and affirms the values of Communist society. In the paper it is pointed out that although the sect can be typified in Wilson's terms during its early period, its changed response in Soviet society is not anticipated in Wilson's scheme. Existence in the exceptional social environment of socialist society has called forth an exceptional sectarian response. To illuminate this process we will consider both the Molokans' historical development and their religious belief, as well as their social complexion today.

In a recent essay in CSSH (16:1) Oriol Pi-Sunyer has joined in debate with our article ‘Modernization and Development…’ (CSSH 14:3). The thrust of his critique is that our model of social change in the Western Mediterranean leads us inexorably to lump Sicily and Catalonia together with respect to general social and economic developments since World War II. He argues in terms of modernization theory that Catalans long ago developed industry and have always shown a propensity to organize in corporate groups whenever the central government gives them the opportunity to do so. In short, our model is lacking in ‘time depth and political sensitivity’ (pp. 128–9) since it puts the Catalans in the same class as the Sicilians. We wish here to demonstrate that (1) in our article we discussed the differences between Sicily and Catalonia in much the same way that Pi-Sunyer did in his critique; (2) that, in fact, Sicily and Catalonia have undergone similar processes of social change since World War II, in ways that threaten the historical continuity of these societies, both formed over centuries; and (3) that Pi-Sunyer's misreading of our materials is due to his unfortunate confusion of modernization with development, which is precisely what we tried to get away from in our essay.

I suggest that the reader sufficiently interested in our debate on Catalonia consult the two original essays; in this reply to a reply, I will cover only so much of the old ground as is necessary for a rejoinder. ‘From Autonomous Development to Dependent Modernization …’ badly misrepresents some of my observations, essentially denies some of the statements made by Hansen and the Schneiders in their initial essay, injects new elements into the discussion, and is replete with ad hominem arguments. I will do my best to set the record straight.

In a recent essay in this journal Dean C. Tipps subjected the tradition/ modernity concept to a thorough ideological and empirical critique and concluded that the time has come to get rid of it. Although his ideological and empirical analyses were convincing, the methodological remarks at the end of the essay were incomplete. If the contention that we should no longer attempt to revise the tradition/modernity concept is to stick, compelling methodological grounds must be given since ideological bias and empirical inadequacy can in principle be corrected. I want to show that in so far as the tradition/modernity concept is an ideal type, efforts to make it better ‘fit’ the spread of empirical data are in principle wrong. Moreover, efforts to transform the concept into an empirical ranking device or a classificatory system are open to equally serious objections. In order to do this I will first clarify the nature and function of ideal types, empirical types and classification systems.