The article analyzes the emergence of moral concern for animals in late eighteenth and early nineteenth-century England. This concern was fuelled by a developing aristocratic discourse on civility that was accompanied by a drastic increase in the factual visibility of violence inflicted on animals in the growing cities. In opposition to interpretations based on the concepts of discipline and distinction, the article elaborates the way in which the emergence of moral concern for animals was class-structured without being class-interested.

The Verstehen controversy, which stems from Wilhelm Dilthey, has today become an academic question. But, recently, cognitive sciences and new developments in action theory provided an interesting renewal of the topic. The classical problem of explanation vs. understanding has been reformulated in terms of explanation by causes vs. explanation by reasons. The paper relies on these new issues in order to clarify the original distinction by making explicit its three basic dimensions: ontological, logical and ethical. It also draws some consequences of taking into account the normative facts in sociological analysis.

In an effort to identify the social sources and environmental consequences of axial thinking, and in particular of rational naturalism, three civilizational centres are compared: Ancient Mesopotamia, China, and Greece. Analysis of a series of societal features suggests that 1) axial thinking in the form of reflective intellectual networks arose in areas where a pre-axial priesthood was organizationally and functionally weak; 2) for the emergence of axial naturalism free-lance intellectuals in the midst of social revolutions appears to have been a crucial factor; 3) axial innovations were grafted onto a more archaic distinction of nature and culture; and 4) notwithstanding the form or context of Axial thinking, environmental treatment remained exploitative as a consequence of state-led political and economic issues.

The purpose of this paper is to discuss the meaning of giftgiving and reciprocity in modern society and thereby following the pointers left by Marcel Mauss. A critique will be made of the dichotomy of self-interest and normatively orientated action that forms the basis of sociology. For this conceptual dichotomization has caused forms of social interaction that cannot be localized either on the side of self-interest or on that of morality. It is the logic of the gift and the reciprocity thus evoked that in our view accompanies and structures all forms of interaction, from the social micro to the macrolevel. It is shown that in modern societies gifts and reciprocities form their own orders of interaction, and not only on a microsocial level. The principle of reciprocity even accompanies as a rule transfers owing to (state) compulsion as well as economic, selective exchange. As a basic principle of processes of sociation it is, fundamentally, present everywhere and in some areas it is explicitly and openly in effect (for example in welfare state transfers). Sociology has for too long overlooked the fact that this principle cannot be traced back either to normativist or to utilitarian explanations and nevertheless represents a principle of construction of modern societies.

This article argues that Shmuel N. Eisenstadt’s theoretical framework contains some elements of modernization theory threatening to neglect the contingencies of social processes and the possible breaks within historical trajectories. This is demonstrated via an analysis of the history of the US-American South that cannot be interpreted with an Eisenstadtian framework without seriously misrepresenting this particular region. It is argued that the development of “Dixie” was not a predetermined process which led to a smooth integration into US-society, but a path which was decisively influenced by many unforeseen factors and events in various periods of its history.