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.

This paper seeks to assess the validity, in a particular historical case, of two ways of thinking in functionalist literature about the role of human intentionality in social change. It does so by means of an analysis of the contribution of French provincial intendants of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries to the differentiation of state and society. It is argued that if functionalists are to build a theory of social change it is necessary that they deal more directly with the question of human intentionality. Four historical views, each positing a different relationship between intentionality and the evolution of the state in Early Modern France, are outlined as different approaches to understanding the establishment of the institution of intendants and the part they played in state-society differentiation. The historical evolution of French intendants is traced and 1066 actions by intendants and the French crown during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries are analysed to determine the extent to which intendants contributed to state-society differentiation and whether they and the crown did so intentionally.

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.

What is the work of economics? How does it operate to establish facts and make them stable? Is it sometimes able to use the world as a laboratory? If so, what measures are necessary to organize the world as a laboratory for economic experiments? To what extent do these measures rely upon the efforts of nonacademic economists, and of other social agents and arrangements including think tanks, government policies, development programs, NGOs, and social movements? A recent “natural experiment” using the social world as a laboratory, carried out in Peru, produced remarkable results, enthusiastically received by economists in the United States and by international development agencies. The paper examines the work of organizing the socio-technical world required to produce this knowledge, the curious kind of facts that were produced, the connections among those involved in this work, in particular the organized work of the neoliberal movement, and the role of the new facts in making possible further efforts at economic experimentation.

This article reviews how “civil society” emerged in Eastern Europe in the 1970s and 1980s as the central concept of the new democratic opposition. Through discussion of developments in Poland, Hungary, Czechoslovakia and Yugoslavia, the article shows how the concept of civil society was used in the struggle against communist regimes, and and how that usage facilitated its transformation into a central element of the neoliberal global agenda following the end of the Cold War.