This paper presents an analytical framework for the study of constitutional design from the point of view of the structure of interaction and mechanisms of institutional selection that affect the behavior and choices of the actors involved in a constitution-making process. This framework is used to explain the various limitations introduced to the powers of the President in the Argentine constitution of 1994. I argue that two levels of causation determined this reform. At the macro level, the limitation of presidential powers was the outcome of a distribution of political resources and a configuration of preferences among the actors that made possible the resolution of conflicts by means of compromise. At the micro level, the new set of institutions derived from the limited influence of the incumbent executive over constitutional design, the pluralism of the constituent assembly that approved the constitution, and the prevalence of bargaining as a mechanism of collective decision-making. Both levels of action facilitated a consensual constitution-making process from which emerged a powersharing structure that has the potential to lower the stakes of political competition for presidential office and create new rules of mutual trust between government and opposition.

Afro-American cults are characterised these days by a movement towards re-Africanisation, which seeks its legitimacy in mythical Africa. But this idea of Africa is the object of a continuous reinterpretation. Ethnologists which studied these cults, in particular the Afro-Brazilian ones, played a central role in the invention of a tradition which seems to have become the main pivot in these religious phenomena today. Membership in these cults by most of the researchers makes the mechanisms for the construction of a dominant model of tradition even more complex.

Social inequality has long been subject to theoretical dispute with moral and political overtones. The most recent debate was over the argument of American sociologists Kingsley Davis and Wilbert Moore that unequal rewards were ‘functionally’ necessary to maintain a complex division of labour. Their theory has gained new credibility as a market model of occupational selection assuming competition among self-interested individuals. Its abstractness and limited scope need recognition, but it remains a valuable starting point for the consideration of inequality.

By looking at the history of the Polish lustration — the policy of checking the past of candidates for important positions — this article argues that although the lustration law has been finally passed at the end of 1998, Poland's dealing with the past is still full of unresolved and deeply ambivalent problems due to the nature of its postcommunist transition and the nature of the newly constructed political institutions. These conditions were shaped by the relative strength of the Polish anti-communist opposition, which credibility within the society permitted it to accept a compromise with the old regime. The undetermined character of many of Poland's political institutions have accelerated the use of the issue of retrospective justice in the partisan politics, which in turn has limited the opportunity for consensual policy, and therefore has reduced societal trust of the political parties, while at the same time increased the demand for the purification of the political system.

The controversy between Pasteur and Pouchet on spontaneous generation (1859–1864) has received great interest in the sociology of scientific knowledge. This paper shows that some statements were shifted by Pennetier's biased version (1907). The study of the correspondence between Pouchet and the members of the Academie des Sciences reveals that Pouchet was on intimate terms with many members of this institution, and also that the two commissions appointed in 1862 and 1864 did not collude with any Pastorian lobby. The discovery of Pouchet's forgery leads to a quite different estimate of this controversy. Pouchet's defeat can be explained by his repeated retreats in front of the commissions, his dogmatic faith in heterogeny, lobbying by the press, and an immoderate need for glory. Beyond the lack of replies to the rationale against heterogeny, such a transgression of the norms of scientific ethos seems to have been a source of irritation among the Academicians.

Retroactive justice against perpetrators in post-totalitarian, as distinct of post-authoritarian, democracies is constrained by the absence of human resources for the rule of law and the weakness of civil society. The limited application of lustration and other sanctions in postcommunist countries is understood in the context of politics of transition, political actors, motivations, constraints and beliefs. With special attention to the Czech Republic, the ineffectiveness of lustration is exemplified by the damage inflicted on post-communist societies by the nomenklatura and the former secret police.

The notion ‘elementary’ was used from different perspectives as a modality of anthropological explanation by two authors: Durkheim in relation to religion, and Lévi-Strauss in relation to kinship. They developed a methodology for studying the most simple, the most essential, and the most general properties of social phenomena within a regional context. In this context, the movement towards the ‘complex’ is used only to analyse the additions, the evolutions, or the combinations of pure forms or structures. The less systematic approach taken by Mauss in his article on the gift highlights the complexity of the entire social fact.

While the progressive European politicians are on the lookout for a new model of ‘third way’ capitalism with a human face, after the (temporary?) defeat of the Swedish, Dutch welfare state reform occupies a prominent place in many commentaries.Although it attracted only international attention in the mid- 1990s, the ‘Dutch miracle’ has its basis in policy changes in the early 1980s. For a full explanation of the Dutch experience we must go back at least fifteen years, and study the combination of problem loads, power shifts, institutions, politics and ideas, in three ‘tightly coupled’ policy domains of the Dutch welfare state: industrial relations, social security, and labour market policy. The return to wage moderation took place in the early followed by a series of reforms in the systems of social security in the late 1980s and early 1990s. From the mid-1990s, finally, the adoption of an active labour market policy stance, in order to enhance overall efficiency and create a new domestic balance between wages and social benefits, gained political currency. In this article we present a stylised narrative of these policy changes—what happened, how it happened and what it meant. We demonstrate that these three policy shifts, although embedded in different corporate actors, were interrelated; they created the conditions and the demand for one another, and neither of these policies could have been successful on its own.

A scrupulous analysis of the French translation of The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism reveals an acculumation of errors which seriously alter Weber's analysis in its nodal articulations (articulation of relations of causality and affinity, intrication of ideas and interests, schemes of mediation between beliefs and behaviour). The same problem arises in relation to its central conceptual mechanism (concepts of profession-vocation, of life style, of confirmation) and in relation to its theological lexicon. The analysis concludes with the urgent necessity for a new translation.

Recent interptetive work suggests ways of historically situating French post-structuralism as a mingling of Nietzschean philosophy with elements of Durkheimian sociology. This article aims to demonstrate the presence of Nietzschean themes in the life-work of the Durkheimian Robert Hertz and to recognize him as a key figure in the history of this intellectual confluence. An examination of published and private sources reveals Hertz as a prototype of the Nietzschean/Durkheimian intellectuel pathitique of the inter-war period in France.

Tocqueville's two major works, Democracy in America and The Old regime and the revolution, have fared very differently in English translation. The Lawrence translation of Democracy in America is essentially accurate, except for a handful of mistakes. The classical translation by Gilbert of The Old Regime was excessively free and rhetorical, but did not betray lack of understanding of French language or history. A new translation published by University of Chicago Press suffers from the opposite flaws. While trying to follow the original very closely, the translator got many things wrong because of a demonstrable lack of proficiency in French.

This article critically examines recent claims that Weber's political thought has close associations with classical republicanism. One salient indication of Weber's distance from this tradition is his theory of Ceasarism, and his view that modern polities are most robust when they assume a version of it consistent with civil liberties. By employing the resources of Begriffsgcschichte, I examine the extent of Weber's departure from the ‘ancient sense of politics’ and the originality of his own political theory.

The social organisation of the Na of China is exceptional in that marriage occupies a marginal place and the concept of kinship appears to be absent. This poses fundamental questions for the anthropology of kinship. For Cai Hua this puts into question the universality of marriage, Radcliffe-Brown's definition of the elementary family, and Lévi-Strauss’ theory of alliance. The article is based on the theoretical presupposition which interprets the residual presence of marriage solely as the result of cultural borrowing and provides as a principle the original absence of the institution in this society.

With the astonishing resurgence of nationalism in various parts of Europe subsequent of the end of the Cold War, attention has once again been focused on the normative issues posed by the politics of nationalism. This article wresdes with some of these normative issues by reviewing a profund theoretical dialogue conducted between two British neo-Marxists, Tom Nairn and Eric Hobsbawm, going back to the 1970s. The article also gives some attention to Ernest Gellner's sociology of nationalism, which heavily influences Nairn's sociological understanding of nationalism (though Gellner in no way shares Nairn's enthusiasm for neo-nationalist movements). The article concludes, in response to Gellner, that no amount of sociology can relieve us of the obligation to engage at the normative level with the challenges posed by nationalism.