Into the ironic narrative of his Souvenirs, Tocqueville weaves a schematic saved-by-danger vs. destroyed-by-success scheme to illuminate the conditions under which revolutionary movements are crushed or prevail. Emergencies focus distracted minds on a single aim-in-view and moderate competitive emotions, encouraging talented members of a privileged group to pool their resources cooperatively. Contrariwise, less salient dangers creep up on privileged groups, taking them unawares, especially if they have become inured to danger by a seemingly unchallenging environment.

This article demonstrates that among violent Islamists engineers with a degree, individuals with an engineering education are three to four times more frequent than we would expect given the share of engineers among university students in Islamic countries. We then test a number of hypotheses to account for this phenomenon. We argue that a combination of two factors – engineers’ relative deprivation in the Islamic world and mindset – is the most plausible explanation.

The article analyzes in a comparative framework the Jewish historical experience as a distinct – the first monotheistic – Axial civilization and the major characteristics thereof. Special emphasis is given to the multivalence of the major components of the cultural orientations, collective consciousness and institutional premises as they bear on its long historical continuity and their major carriers, including heterodoxies. The article points out some of the major differences of the modern Jewish historical experience as compared with medieval history.

The growth in the numbers and influence of ultra-Orthodoxy – the haredim – since the Second World War has changed Judaism worldwide, even though it remains a minority culture. Growth has occurred through the maximization of family size and through the movement of t'shuva (“return”), and it has benefited from state and private subsidies to the institutions of Torah learning (yeshivot and schooling generally), which have become one of the twin pillars of ultra-Orthodoxy. The other pillar is the shidduch, the system of concerted marriage which ensures that more or less everyone gets married, and strengthens the educational institutions which inculcate among prospective brides a preference for a learned husband engaged in full-time study, and for a life devoted to sustaining him.

The Uniform Civil Code which, as written in the 1950 Constitution of the Indian Union, should be enacted, still does not (and will probably never) exist. This paper examines the tactics used by the opponents in the Constituent and Legislative Assembly (1946-1951) who succeeded to wreck a proposed “modernisation” of the Hindu Personnal Law, which could have been a first step towards that Uniform Code. In a very clever way, they never claimed to defend the dharma treatises which had codified and legitimated a Brahmanical Social Order for centuries, but only wanted to maintain the multiplicity and diversity of customs and usages of the Hindu people.