Marcel Mauss never provides us with his conception of politics as he conceives it as a scientific. However, this relationship would have been clear for the scholars who dealt with his life and works. The unpublished text that we present will not only enlighten this shadow zone. It also presents the idea of politics cultivated by Mauss as the scientific he was in the last moments of his intellectual life.

This study intends to reread Max Weber's Protestant Ethic with the following question in mind: where is the Catholic ethic with respect to “the spirit of capitalism”? The few short comments that Weber makes on this topic nevertheless suggest an interesting notion which he had developed in earlier texts, i.e., the “religious ethic of brotherhood”. I intend to show here that this notion could be further illuminated by the findings of the anthropology of gift giving since Marcel Mauss. This would enable us to understand how the problem of grace, so central to the debate between Protestants and Catholics, is linked to the history of the transformations in the gift giving practices; we will also discover that this problem was at the origin of the schism. While such a hypothesis leads to a different reading of Weber, it is confirmed by a work of the historian B. Clavero which brings out the complex links that existed in 16th century Catholic Spain between the order of business and that of charity. Besides the antagonism that has marked the two Christian traditions in the West, what seems to be at issue is the way in which economic practices weight on the social bond. These questions invite us to rethink the connections between them.

The trends towards falling fertility and mortality and increasing longevity, which have led to the demographic ageing of all Western industrialized societies, have not occurred in isolation. More specifically, we are also seeing a combination of forces which are resulting in the ageing of some life-transitions. While public and legal institutions may be lowering the age threshold into full legal adulthood, individuals themselves are choosing to delay many of those transitions which demonstrate a commitment to full adulthood. This shift from a high-mortality/high-fertility society to a low-mortality/low-fertility society and the ageing of family transitions within these societies have significant implications for both family structure and kinship roles. Drawing on recent demographic figures for the European Union, this paper highlights the impact of these main trends on individuals and families.

The article attempts to assess the use and usefulness of the concept of ‘social capital’. First, it assesses its differing conceptual uses in the works of four key writers, Pierre Bourdieu, Gary S. Becker, James S. Coleman and Robert D. Putnam, identifying broadly a problematic ‘social capital as social fact’ perspective associated with Putnam, and a more promising ‘contacts with influential people’ approach that can be derived from Bourdieu. It then considers the practical uses already made of the former approach in the development studies literature, before addressing some of the analytical problems associated with applying the latter in a policy environment. Finally, it takes three short examples from research in rural Central and Eastern Europe to illustrate how the concept can be used to both analyse social relations and suggest policy priorities. The article's conclusion is that ‘social capital’ of any variety is by no means the ‘missing link’ in development economics, yet ‘social capital’ of the Bourdieu-derived kind can be a useful, work-a-day concept in social analysis.

The paper analyses the new architecture of global governance which is characterised by unaccountable international institutions and scattered sovereignties. It examines the dilemmas of civil society actors (social movements and NGOs) involved in protecting the rights of local communities through strategic issue-based alliances with the state or the World Bank, whose legitimacy they question in other contexts. The cunning state remains a central actor in selectively transposing neoliberal policies to the national terrain and capitalises on its perceived weakness in order to render itself unaccountable to its citizens. The argument draws on empirical material from India around conflicts over the patenting of genetic resources, biodiversity conservation, forced displacement and privatisation of common property resources.

Everyone invokes secularism in India. So the spectrum of secularism is very large. However, it is rather the spectral ideas of “majority” (hindus) and “minorities” (Muslims, Christians) conceived in demographic (rather than political) terms which characterizes the discussion of this question. The insistence of Hindu nationalists on emphasizing that they are the majority tend to blur the difference between Hindu identity and Indian identity, coextensive with the territory of India. This concept, moreover, serves them in their legitimating of the democratic system insofar as the arithmetical rule is a first principle of this political regime. In the name of a secularism founded on the idea of the greater number (and also the supposed ideal of immemorial Hindu tolerance) India must be governed in accordance with demographic fact defined in religious terms. One of the paradoxical consequence of this “majoritarianism” is the development of “majority minority complex” of the Hindus and the increasing hate and violence (against Muslims and Christians). Today, the Hindu nationalism programme effectively dominates public debate. Its partisans has succeeded in discriminating between “friends” and “foes”, those inside and those outside, those whom one holds dear and those whom one pillories on the basis of a real or imaginary menace weighing upon autochthony, culture, religion and race, and the national (state) sovereignty.

Norbert Elias went to Ghana as Professor of Sociology for two years. Nevertheless he continued to refer to its inhabitants, despite their rural development, as naturvolk which the civilising process had not touched. That process apparently took off in Europe at the time of the Renaissance and never reached the Third World. The Ghanaians had different kinds of super-ego which did not restrain their behaviour in the same way as Europeans. The lack of restraint is shown in blood sacrifice and in their art, which gives a more direct expression of feeling. Elias' observations were necessarily superficial as he did not carry out fieldwork or learn any languages. He employed them simply to bolster the themes he had developed in a European context rather than using them to modify those themes.

This article of fiscal sociology suggests an analytical review of the corpus of models and data relative to the avoidance (legal or not) of the tax so as to establish a cognitive theory of the rationality of the taxpayer. It aspires also to catch the attention of the sociologists for this promising field of research, though still neglected. On the basis of labelling theory of the deviance, of the tax revolt history and fiscal (social) psychology, the rational approach of the taxpayers insists on the importance of the concrete cognitive relation towards tax to explain the phenomena of tax avoidance (or not). It consists both in underlining the limits of the self-interest standard model and in emphasizing the political dimension of the taxation to give credence to the reality of a citizen's conception about the fair taxation (‘contribution-tax’) of the fiscal State in a given context.

Each of the main sectors of society—the state, the market and the voluntary non-profit sector—is characterized by a distinctive accountability regime, focusing on a different subject of accountability (actions, results and intentions, respectively) and a different mechanism of accountability (hierarchy, competition and cooperative networking, respectively). Those different regimes can complement one another, enhancing the democratic accountability of the system overall. They can also undercut one another, if their differences are not respected. Bringing the Third Sector under a market-style accountability regime, through “public-private partnerships” based on competitive tendering, undermines the distinctive contribution that the Third Sector might make.

Randall Collins' The Sociology of Philosophies: A Global Theory of Intellectual Change (1998) examines and compares communities of intellectuals linked as networks in ancient and medieval China and India, medieval and modern Japan, ancient Greece, medieval Islam and Judaism, medieval Christendom and modern Europe. The book has been the subject of many interesting and often positive reflections (for example, European Journal of Social Theory 3 (I), 2000; Review Symposium or reviews in Sociological Theory 19 (I), March 2001). However, it has also attracted a number of critical reviews (for example, reviews in Philosophy of the Social Sciences 30 (2), June 2000). Since not many books achieve such notoriety, it is worthwhile to rethink Collins' controversial approach. The aim of this paper is to encourage further debates of notions and issues presented in Collins' book. We would like, by joining two voices—sociologist and philosopher—to reopen discussion of Collins' attempt to discover a universality of patterns of intellectual change, as we think that more interpretative rather than explanatory versions of our respective disciplines can enrich our understanding of blueprints of intellectual creativity.

This paper asks whether it is possible to study “elite” professional migrants in Europe with the same concepts and theories being used to explain the incorporation and/or integration of “ethnic” (i.e., non European) migrants in Europe; that is, in terms of their social mobility and social power in their new host countries. While globalisation may in theory make it easier for these professional migrants to transfer their “social capital” to other national contexts, observations of the personal and professional trajectories of European professional migrants in Brussels—particularly their difficulties establishing a true social power in a foreign national—suggests that theorists often overstate their arguments about “global cities” and the decline of the nation-state, at least as far as Europe is concerned. The paper links these empirical concerns with theoretical issues arising from the work of Bourdieu, Mann, Coleman, Castells and Portes, aiming to build a bridge between current work in ethnic and migration studies and core current issues in social theory.

Disaggregating property rights into abstract bundles of rights over the use, control, and alienation of property facilitates the systematic comparison of property regimes across time and space. However, because these analytic distinctions ignore the criteria by which individuals choose among competing claims of ownership, they cannot capture the moral reasoning that ultimately institutionalizes a property regime. Using focus group debates over competing claims of ownership to newly privatized urban real estate, this essay identifies four grounded logics of entitlement by which Shanghai residents determine just claims in one post-socialist property regime: a logic of family justice, a logic of state regulation, a logic of the market, and a logic of the family estate. Of note is that the primary criteria by which individuals decided among different logics of entitlement were the rules of the property regime at the time the dwelling first became the family home rather than differences attributable to societal inequalities tied to distinctions of gender, generation or occupation.

New political legitimacy is the sticking point of Chinese modernity, which has puzzled Chinese intellectuals for centuries. Since Mao's death in 1976, the debate about the necessity, conditions, and strategy of democratization in China has taken place among scholars of all factions and tendencies. However, only the process of reform provides the possibility discuss of such sensitive questioning; however only eventual democratization could help us carry this process through.

A RATHER dim recollection of Thomas Nagel's books over the decades leaves the impression of an extraordinarily perceptive and deep thought, straightforwardly revealing the essentials of the topic, yet remaining at a high level of abstraction and generality. We now have, on this latter aspect, exactly the opposite, since the topic is the taxes you pay, while keeping the former virtue in focussing on the basic divide of normative politics. Here, indeed, two outstanding philosophical minds stoop over one of the most mundane of issues, the rightfulness of taxation. Economists, politicians, lawyers and laymen will all be delighted about this new dimension of the debate. This issue—let us recall—is of some importance since the public sector commonly consumes about half of national products.

This article discusses some contemporary transformations of citizenship across Western states, with a special emphasis on Europe. It is argued that citizenship is subject to countervailing “de-” and “re-ethnicization” pressures, the first pushing toward incorporating immigrants, the second toward retaining ties with emigrants abroad. While grounded in the dual nature of the modern state as a territorial and ethnic unit, and reinforced by contemporary globalizing and transnationalizing processes, de- and re-ethnicization are identifiable projects of the political left and right, respectively. Which trend prevails is then a simple function of who has the political majority.

The study of transitional justice—trials, purges and reparations after regime transitions—is emerging as a vital field of scholarship. Virtually all writings on the topic, however, are limited in two ways. First, they tend to focus on the twentieth century. Second, they usually limit themselves to transitions to democracy. In this article I transcend these limitations by considering transitional justice in the restoration of the Bourbon monarchy with an analytical framework for the study of transitional justice. I discuss the 1814 and 1815 restorations, with main emphasis on the political constraints on transitional justice that followed from the fact that these were negotiated transitions. I consider public and private retribution, before turning to the issues of restitution and compensation.

Being an ‘antiglobalizationist’ comes easy as a political label but as a theoretical endeavor, it is more difficult. Globalization encompasses a bundle of meanings. The paper disentangles some of the multiple implications of globalization and its purported enemies through the Big Mac-Roquefort opposition; it examines the taste differential of the two products, their symbolism and their stakes in the construction of ethnic, cultural and class identities. The simplistic opposition between globalization and its enemies is reinterpreted in the context of commercialization, Americanization, democratization, high-and massculture and-consumption, only to be cast in the age-old tensions of modernity.

The blurbs on the jacket of this book are unusually misleading. A U.S. senator avers that it ‘conveys a sweep of historical analysis that gives us deep insight… into the American character’, and ‘sheds light on America's present and possible future as well as its past’. Since it contains virtually no historical or sociological evidence about the United States, it is hard to see how it might do this. One Harvard professor calls it ‘a major work of political theory’, and another ‘an enduring work of political theory in its own right’. But while the author conveys his disaffection with contemporary American democracy, he nowhere clearly and succinctly formulates anything that might reasonably be called a theory. A Johns Hopkins professor thinks that it ‘shows us how pertinent Tocqueville remains for democrats today’. Incidentally, it may perhaps do this, though this is hardly the author's intent, since he emphasizes the archaic and feudal quality of Tocqueville's final account of democracy.

REVOLUTION entered modern politics in the form of a bold and ambitious political judgment, aimed both at grasping something momentous, which was unmistakably happening, and at gauging its limited susceptibility to intentional control. From the outset that judgment, and the term in which it was precariously embodied, picked out one key image: the necessitated and ineluctably hazardous resolution of a profound crisis within a particular society, which must and would transform through intense political and social struggle its forms of government and social organization, and very possibly also of economic life. Over time every element in that judgment has proved as vulnerable as it was always bound to be contentious. But for all its manifest exposure and inevitable provocation, for almost two centuries, it went a long way towards setting the agenda for modern politics the world over. The two most inflammatory elements in the judgment were clear from quite early on in the French Revolution. One was the sense of crisis as the working through of a clearly intelligible fatality. The other was the fond hope that, once compelled to begin, that crisis must in due course issue in a resolution of the acute strains which had occasioned it in the first place. Jeff Goodwin's title does not explicitly affirm either element; but it contrives to evoke both, and do so in their most politically insinuating form.