Few ideas are as central both to social scientific analysis and normative political philosophy as the concept of scarcity. For the social analyst, scarcity is at the core of many models, including most prominently what Gary Becker has called the economic approach to human behavior, for example rational choice and game theoretic approaches. Its importance in this sphere stems from the fact that it is one of the key ingredients generating calculation and strategic interaction, cooperative or conflictual. Where, conversely, a superabundance is postulated there is, as Carl Menger observed, no economizing behavior, no competition, nor any need for a property regime. And so too is the idea of scarcity one of the background conditions for the theory of justice in general—‘justice derives its origins’ from human selfishness combined with ‘the scanty provision nature has made for his wants’ —and for the problems of distributive justice in particular. Again, where there is superabundance these matters would not so much as arise. Yet scarcity is at the same time one of those concepts which, like the notion of the standard of living, seems readily accessible, transparent, indeed available almost pre-theoretically. So universal, so ready-to-hand does the notion of scarcity appear that we may be tempted to allow it to enter our theoretical lexicon unexamined.

Les formes et l'importance quantitative du célibat ont considérablement varié suivant les époques, avec de fortes spécificités nationales et régionales. Une des plus importantes variations s'inscrit dans la constitution du « marriage pattern » occidental mis en évidence par J. Hajnal (1965). L'auteur a montré, et sa thése est devenue classique, que le modèle occidental moderne (à partir de la fin du Moyen-Âge) avec mariage tardif, familles conjugales restreintes et taux de célibataires élevé, représentait une exception géographique et une nouveauté historique : à aucune autre époque ni dans aucune autre région du monde le taux de célibataires n'avait été aussi important. André Burguière (1972) a proposé une interprétation originale de cette transition démographique. La mettant en relation avec l'essor de « l'esprit du capitalisme » analysé par Max Weber, il montre comment le nouveau comportement conjugal participe à un ascétisme généralisé exalté par l'Église et lié à un esprit d'entreprise : « la préoccupation du couple n'est plus simplement de fabriquer une famille, mais de savoir la gérer, de préserver et d'améliorer son statut social, devenu sa principale finalité » (p. 1138). Dès l'origine de son développement, le célibat serait ainsi lié aux principes de la modernité.

One widespread image of Japanese internal migration is to be found in a well-known ballad Kita kuni no haru, ‘The northern country spring’, one of the biggest hits of Japanese popular music in the 1970s. The ballad is about a man reflecting on his furusato, the rural hometown from which he migrated to the city.

My attention to gossip as a notion worthy of reflection was attracted by a trivial detail: the English etymology of gossip is god-sib, godfather, or, generally, god parent, ‘denoting—says the English Oxford Dictionary—the spiritual affinity of the baptized and their sponsor’. This intriguing origin alludes to gossip as the performing of an initiation ritual, the creation of an exclusive bond; above all, it bears an uncanny association with the mafia which happens to have been the topic of my research for sometime. I suppose I could have interpreted god-sib through the obvious gender bias as deriving from godmother rather than from godfather; this tallies with the Italian comare or the French commère which can also denote a gossip. But I did not think of this possibility at first. Instead, carried away by linguistic speculation, I went to check the etymology of the main Italian word for gossip, pettegolezzo. I was not a little surprised to find that the word comes from a rather less inspiring source. It comes from peto, to fart. In some northern Italian dialects, venetian, piedmontese and emilian, a common expression, ‘contar tutti i peti’, ‘to tell every fart’, refers to the habit of reporting and speculating about trivial events.

It is difficult to discuss a phenomenon when one does not know precisely what it is. This problem is particularly vexing in the case of the Mafia. It has been argued that ‘the need for a definition [of the Mafia] is crucial; not just for any definition with some degree of contingent empirical plausibility, but for a definition with some analytical clout’. The word ‘Mafia’ itself has travelled far to distant lands, such as the former Soviet Union. For instance, according to Arkadii Vaksberg, Russian journalist and author of The Russian Mafia, the Mafia is ‘the entire soviet power-system, all its ideological, political, economical and administrative manifestations’. In an article published in a magazine for British executives dealing with Russia, the label Mafiosi is used to lump together bureaucrats, smugglers from the Caucasus, the cpsunomenklatura accused of embezzling state funds, the late British businessman Robert Maxwell and many others.

Le concept de «communauté» fait partie de ces notions constamment invoquées et tenues pour évidentes mais qui ne réfèrent à aucune signification en particulier tout autant qu'elles renvoient aux multiples sens que les individus et les groupes projettent sur elles. C'est là ce qui attend sans doute les notions qui désignent à la fois une réalité définie et une valeur, un idéal jamais accomplis. La notion de démocratie fait exemplairement partie, au XIXe siècle, de cette catégorie de notions affluentes.

Following the Cold War, nationalism has rapidly established itself at the centre of the world's political stage. This has had the immediate effect of increasing the importance of nationalism as an object of sociological investigation and this effect can confidently be expected to continue and expand.

In der vorliegenden Arbeit versuche ich, auf der genauen Ebene des Textes und der dort angeführten Quellen einen kleinen Teil jener viel zu unverständlichen und daher bis heute noch niemals genau geprüften Fußnote über den »Berufs«-Begriff in der Abhandlung Max Webers: »Die protestantische Ethik und der Geist des Kapitalismus« zu entschlüsseln. Zuerst will ich zeigen, welch großen Stellenwert Webers Argumentation über den lutherischen »Berufs«-Begriff für die ganze Konstruktion der PE hat. In der ersten Hälfte der PE versucht Weber, die Quelle des »Geistes des Kapitalismus« bis zum alten Protestantismus zurückzuverfolgen. Beachtet man aber die Darlegungen der PE genau, dann wird klar, daß dabei Weber in Wirklichkeit dem Ursprung des »Geistes des Kapitalismus« doch nicht direkt, sondern auf einem Umweg, nämlich mit der Suche nach der geschichtlichen Herkunft des »Gedankens der Berufspflicht« nachgeht. Um diese Zurückführung zu ermöglichen, müssen die beiden folgenden Bedingungen erfüllt sein:

1: daß es Weber gelingt, den »Gedanken der Berufspflicht«, und zwar als etwas, das für den »Geist des Kapitalimus« von konstitutiver Bedeutung ist, in den »Geist des Kapitalismus« einzuführen,

2: und daß es ferner Weber möglich ist, den Ursprung dieses »Gedankens der Berufspflicht« bis zum »alten Protestantismus« zurückzuverfolgen.

Als Weber aus den zwei Traktaten Benjamin Franklins den Idealtypus des »Geistes des Kapitalismus« komponiert, wird der »Gedanke der Berufspflicht« in ihn noch nicht eingeführt. Nach der dortigen Definition des »Geistes des Kapitalismus« wird das »Interesse an der Vergrößerung seines Kapitals < Archiv: Vermögens >« (Archiv, 14; RS, 33) zwar »als Selbstzweck« aber nicht als Berufspflicht angesehen.

When the Lord told Moses that his people should love the stranger as themselves (Leviticus 19:34), who was the stranger?

It is a truth sometimes acknowledged in private but not publicly discussed that the only English translation of the most famous work of twentieth century historical sociology is seriously defective. The purpose of this paper is to establish the nature of the defects and to suggest some of their causes and consequences. As I shall seek to show, these involve rather more than matters of technical linguistic competence in German. Although Parsons' translation of Weber is indeed littered with a continuous stream of individual mistranslations, misprints and omissions of up to clause-length which can destroy the meaning of entire paragraphs, a mere catalogue of these would serve little purpose. Nor can one do more than mention his persistent disintegration of Weber's extraordinarily dense and over-burdened sentence structures, which have an average length of something like 8–10 lines: the desire to render Weber into readable English is evident, but so, too, is the damage which necessarily occurs to the meaning and argumentative sequence of the original. In justice to Parsons we must accept that his pioneering achievement was based primarily on an intellectual construction of Weber's meaning; linguistic and stylistic considerations were quite secondary. This order of priorities is one that, rightly, has been observed in almost all subsequent translations of Weber, and one that the present writer also adheres to. On the other hand, precisely the same cause underlies the bulk of Parsons' mistranslations of Weber, since he always believed that the latter required ‘a certain amount of construction’ to bring out his meaning fully [Camic, 22 cf. SOSA 501]. In what follows, then, I shall seek to isolate a series of systematic intellectual distortions occurring in the English-language version of the Protestant Ethic, although this series is selective rather than comprehensive.