why do actors participate in the democratic process? the sociological theory of democracy offers five modes of democratic action and democratic order: economic theory of democracy: strategic action and democracy as efficient market order. normativistic theory: emotional bounded action and solidarity with the great community. communitaristic theory: action as strong valuation and democracy as moral order. deliberative theory: communicative action and democracy as order of formal procedures. constitutional theory: reflexive or creative action and active trust in negotiated democratic orders.

Recent work by sociologists, geographers and anthropologists has drawn attention to the “de-territorialization” of money, and to the emergence of “alternative” monetary forms such as e-money and complementary currencies. The increasingly diverse nature of these forms raises doubts as to whether “money” is a sufficiently coherent entity to be covered by a single definition. In this paper, these doubts are explored through a critical evaluation of the work of four prominent scholars of money: Cohen, Ingham, Zelizer and Hart. I argue that, despite their empirical richness, these approaches are undermined by a number of conceptual confusions: for example, by a tendency to refer to “money” and “currency” as if they were synonymous. The paper concludes by suggesting that Simmel’s “pure concept” of money provides the most promising basis on which to develop an analytically rigorous treatment of money which can embrace the variety of forms which circulate today.

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.

in applying rational choice theory to the debates about power, it has been proposed that distinguishing power from luck yields new insights. specifically, it has been suggested that, where social and institutional structures favour some and disfavour others, the former have the good luck to get what they want without trying and the latter the bad luck to be faced with collective action problems that prevent them from furthering their interests. against such proposals, it is argued that luck, thus understood, is non-explanatory and, moreover, depoliticizing. it is further argued that they exemplify a narrow conception of power that defines it as intentional, as involving positive interventions in the world, as furthering the wants of the powerful and as altering the incentive structures of others. such a conception closes off questions about the operations of power where these are more or less indirect, ongoing and often inaccessible to direct observation, and only very partially and superficially captured by the “snapshot'” accounts of structured interaction among strategic actors characteristic of rational choice theory. a broader and more dynamic view, revealing the complexities of power, allows that the powerful can hold and exert their power without intending to, without positively intervening in the world and irrespective of their actual “brute” wants; and that their power consists in being capable and responsible for affecting (negatively or positively) the subjective and/or objective interests of others.

Most authors view trust as a psychological disposition that motivates an agent to cooperative behavior in circumstances where the consequences of the agent’s action are uncertain and especially when this uncertainty depends on the reaction of other agents. This article criticizes this general approach and argues that trust is best seen as the action rather than as whatever it is that motivates it. Trust is defined as an act through which an agent gives to another agent power over him or herself.

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.

This article discusses the thesis according to which a necessary link exists between a culture of trust and the emergence of a democratic regime. After analyzing the ordinary uses of the word trust, it differentiates three conceptions of “civic trust”: culturalist, rational-instrumental and moral. Then, by comparing the features of both a democratic and a totalitarian regime, it refutes the idea of a constitutive relation between trust and democracy. It then concludes that one cannot claim that a population lacks the ability to establish a democracy because it possesses certain cultural traits.

the idea of an axial age in the mid-first millennium b.c. has a long history but was crystallized by karl jaspers in his 1949 book the meaning and goal of history. since then, voegelin, eisenstadt and many others have contributed to clarifying the four cases of axial “breakthrough”, to use jaspers's term, namely ancient israel, greece, india, and china. a number of significant background conditions — economic, social, and political — have been identified that indicate dramatic social change all across the old world, but there is no clear indication of the causal relation of these changes to the emergence of strikingly new cultural-religious formations. this article uses categories derived from the work of merlin donald to argue that in all four cases “theoretic” culture was applied to the reformulation of basic cultural premises, though “mimetic” and “narrative” traditions that had been central in older civilizations continued to be significant, but reformulated in the light of the new theoretic understandings. the four cases, however, are far from homogeneous. they show such differences between them that we can speak of “multiple axialities”, as we have come to speak of “multiple modernities”.

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 paper shows that religion is a basic principle that underlies modern poverty policy. however, it has played out in very different ways in societies according to the relative predominance of catholic, lutheran, and calvinist heritages. though religion is but one explanation for why we deal with the poor as we do today, systematically accounting for denominational differences in poor relief traditions can help to answer a series of otherwise perplexing cross-national differences in poverty policy and enrich existing explanations of the welfare state.

Bourdieu was the founder of a structuralist paradigm which is now often applied by some sociologists and strongly criticised by others. We are interested here in the intermediate attempts made by Lahire and Corcuff. Without omitting to notice some dead ends, they understood the interest of the “singular” habitus concept. After following their approach, we propose a “fictional” definition of this habitus in order to make this paradigm operational in areas where its heuristic capacity is low (like the new social movements).

starting from the french law of bequest enacted by the code civil and from its interpretation by tocqueville, the paper studies this law as a social device designed to solve two different issues. the first one is concerned with legitimacy and is studied through the debates within the conseil d'état, whereas the second is concerned with the social mechanisms leading to action and it is studied through the debates among economists and lawyers during the 19th century. more generally, the paper suggests that similar social devices are useful to understanding transfers of resources related to death, such as life insurance and organ donorship.

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.

Modernization, contrary to the common assumption of most writings in the field, does not follow a uniform path. The diversity of the historical experiences in the Third World countries imposes a severe revision of the theory. The case of India is taken as a good example. It helps the author to declare that there are two theorical lines which must be at the same time divided and connected. The first is functionalist, the second sequentiel, including contradictions and break thoughts. A last section is devoted to the necessity of reflexivity.

in 1927, at the age of eighteen, jean kowalyk moved to the ukrainian village of czortowiec, where she worked as a seamstress. when the germans invaded in 1941, they brought to the village forced laborers to build a work camp. jean “watched the cruelty [done to the workers] day after day […] when i saw people being molested, my religious heart whispered to me, ‘do not kill. love others as you love yourself’”. some time later, she heard a knock on her door. when she opened it, solomon berger, a jewish doctor the family knew, was “on his knees”, put his arms around her legs, and “begged for help”. jean let him in and hid him – along with several others – behind a false wall until the end of the war (1).