TheIdea of explaining natural phenomena by appealing to laws of nature is one that is thoroughly familiar to the modern mind. This idea does not perhaps appear quite as natural as it did a century ago, when Engels proclaimed to the mourners at Marx's funeral that just as Darwin had discovered the law of development of organic nature so Marx had discovered the law of development of human history. Twentieth-century historians do not in general conceive their task as including the formulation of laws of history, and the discoveries of modern physics since Maxwell have for the most part been expressed in terms of principles and equations rather than laws. Nevertheless, despite these changes, we are still quite accustomed to thinking in terms of laws of nature; and just because it seems natural it is easy to assume that it is natural for human beings seeking to explain the phenomena of nature to do so by enquiring after the laws by which these phenomena are governed.

Le retour désabusé à la statique sociale, dont le structuralisme n'est qu'une variante, s'explique sans doute en grande partie par le refus de l'évolutionnisme des vastes constructions sociologiques du siècle dernier. En raison de la simplification outrée qu'il imposa à l'intelligence des processus sociaux, de l'exclusion dont il frappa tout autre modèle de changement, et de sa prétention non fondée à l'universalité, le paradigme évolutionniste fut à l'origine d'une réaction contre l'analyse dynamique, qui marqua profondément le développement ultérieur de la sociologie. Cette conversion fut d'autant plus radicale qu'une fois le schéma linéaire écarté, on se découvrait impuissant à comprendre la complexité des phénomènes sociaux dans leur temporalité, a réduire leur désordre apparent, et à mettre au jour les modéles du changement qui les sous-tendent. On renonça à penser dans le temps pour imaginer dans l'espace, on chercha partout l'invariant dans le mouvant, on préféra l'être au devenir (1). En dépit de l'intérêt croissant que suscite l'étude du changement, les effets de cette réaction se font sentir aujourd'hui encore comme en témoignent les résultats incertains des recherches conduites dans ce dernier domaine (2).

With the progressive development of secularism in the West, of which Spain's formally becoming a secular state in 1978 may be taken as a symbolic culmination, the Church-State problem has long receded from the foreground of the Occidental memory. Yet, in other parts of the world, where God is not dead, the analogue problem of the relationship between the hierocracy and the state merits attention. As the Islamic revolution of February 1979 eloquently demonstrates, the problem is of great importance and the sociologists' or social historians' neglect of it could only be to the detriment of their understanding.

Despite Durkheim's powerful argument that suicide is caused by social forces only (Durkheim 1966), recent studies have viewed suicide as resulting from a combination of psychological and environmental factors, as springing from the suicide's personality conjoined with his immediate social setting. ‘Suicide is both a personal and a social act’ (Reynolds and Farberow 1976: 33). Social forces alone cannot explain why only a few people commit suicide nor can psychological factors by themselves provide the necessary set of conditions for individual suicides. Certain syndromes are widespread: illness, loneliness, bereavement, shame lead to suicide in many parts of the world. But each society's structure and institutions determine the environmental setting and constellations involved in suicide. How does the society regard illness? Who will be lonely? In what relationships is loss most sharply felt? What constitutes shame? Social forces define the various trouble spots and categories and groups of people most at risk in the society. Their interplay with psychological factors outlines who will commit suicide.

Ipropose in this paper to develop a theme from an earlier article I wrote on Michels: namely, that Zur Soziologie des Parteiwesens is to be understood as the work of someone who had passed over from revolutionary Marxism into the camp of elite theory; more precisely, it is a work which takes as its starting point a problem posed within a revolutionary tradition and proceeds to answer it from within a quite different theoretical framework. We could say that it offers a Right-wing answer to a Left-wing question. It is in this conjunction that lie both the strengths and weaknesses of the work (1). One failing of much of the critical literature on Zur soziologie des Parteiwesens is that it treats the conceptual and other inadequacies in its argument as a series of isolated errors, of separate points to be challenged, rather than as arising systematically out of the particular intellectual conjunction I have indicated (2). I propose, however, to go further in this paper than simply present a historical analysis of the intellectual development of an individual thinker. I want to ask the question: How far can the inadequacies of Michels' argument be overcome from within the framework of elite theory itself, and how far can they only be overcome by breaking with some of the central assumptions of that perspective? In other words, I want to broaden out the enquiry to consider what are the limitations of an elite-theoretical approach to the study of parties and elites, particularly parties of the Left.

During the past few years there has been a rapid growth of interest in the sociological history of psychiatry. Prior to this, the history of psychiatry had been left largely to the psychiatric historian, who tended to proceed, as Thomas Szasz claimed, ‘as a socially neutral person, discovering the historical “facts” when in truth, he is a psychiatric propagandist, actively shaping the image of his discipline’ (1). Writers such as Michel Foucault, Vieda Skultans, Andrew Scull, David Rothman, Klaus Doerner, and Szasz himself have attempted to underline, as Skultans says, ‘the specific uses to which psychiatry has been put in the past, in order to make a more general claim about the nature of psychiatry as such’ (2). This aim, however, is not always made fully explicit (3). In this paper it will be argued that psychiatry, viewed as a historically constituted social activity, was characterised by a dualism. It was constituted by a medical or curative model of practice, in that psychiatry developed as a branch of medicine. Yet the ‘diseases’ which psychiatrists have historically come to regard as part of their field competence are distinguished by at least two criteria: first, their symptoms consist primarily of actions that are highly inappropriate to their social context; secondly, that their etiology is ambiguous. It will be argued here that an ambiguity regarding the etiology of mental disorder, which is often seen as both physically and psychologically caused, was central to psychiatric discourse.

Deaths of sovereigns or political leaders are generally accompanied by dramatic representation and celebration of the political order over which they have presided. The circumstances of death, funeral rites and destination of the corpse (cremation, burial or public display) proclaim the value and necessity of the ideas embodied in the ruler's office. However practically deficient or scandalous any particular ruler's interpretation of that office, the activities which surround his death reaffirm the invulnerability of the transcendent order to any local or temporary individual failings. Sometimes, however, the circumstances of a sovereign's death can be appropriated by his opponents not merely to decree that death but to destroy the ideological underpinnings of the political system itself: the trials and executions of Charles i and Louis xvi were not simply the punishment of individuals for specific crimes but rather symbolic destructions of monarchy itself staged by Cromwell and the conventionnels (Walzer 1974). Such occasions have been rare. A radical political opposition can expect at most to intervene in the timing of the ruler's death, by assassination, but draw no benefit from this, since it is likely to be even more effective than peaceful death in stimulating public affirmation of the existing order.

The relationship between Max Weber and Roberto Michels is a fascinating one, both on the biographical and on the systematic level. Almost from the very start Max Weber became interested in the young scholar Michels who had already written extensively about the development of Italian and German Socialism. From 1906 onwards Michels became a regular contributor to the Archiv fur Sozialwissenschaft und Sozialpolitik, which was edited at the time by Max Weber together with Edgar Jaffé. Although Michels was twelve years younger than Weber, the scholarly contact between them, established through Michels' contribution to the Archiv, soon developed into a lifelong intimate friendship which was soon shared by Marianne Weber and Gisela Michels-Lindner also. This friendship was not without violent ruptures, but it was the most stable and personal relationship which Max Weber ever had. Michels became a member of the Heidelberg circle which met at the Ziegelhäuser Landstraße 35, and visited it whenever he happened to be in Heidelberg, and later, after Michels had moved to Turin, the Webers were regular visitors there. There is a rich stream of letters which bears testimony to this remarkable intimate friendship, which flourished despite the fact that Michels was still at the beginning of a troublesome academic career, while Weber was well established within the German Academic Community.