Moral Purity and Persecution in History. By Barrington Moore, Jr. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2000. 158p. $19.95.

2001 ◽  
Vol 95 (2) ◽  
pp. 504-505
Author(s):  
Adam B. Seligman

From time out of mind, people have killed, maimed, and oppressed one another in two sorts of conflicts: over material interests (real estate, slave labor, agricultural surplus, war booty, and so on) and over what Max Weber would have termed "ideal interests" (conflicts over ultimate meanings, salvation, principles of justice, definitions of social order). Barrington Moore's classical and landmark study, Social Origins of Democracy and Dictatorship: Lord and Peasant in the Making of the Modern World (1966), explored the first mode of conflict in the making of modern nation-states. All social scientists are forever in his debt for that effort. It ranks as one of the most important contributions to the fields of comparative and historical sociology.

2015 ◽  
Vol 14 (4) ◽  
pp. 478-507
Author(s):  
Fumiya Onaka

This paper reconsiders Max Weber’s method of comparison focusing on the changes between 1904 and 1920. The method employed in this study involves the comparison of two texts of his main works: the old and new manuscripts of Wirtschaft und Gesellschaft, and the old and new versions of Die Protestantische Ethik und der “Geist” des Kapitalismus. The results reveal that the “comparison” of Max Weber gradually moved from “thick comparisons” based on descriptions of causal attribution in psychological or legal sense and elective affinity in Goethe’s sense to “broad comparisons” related to causal explanation through interpretive understanding and that only the latter has been adopted by various works in comparative and historical sociology.


2009 ◽  
pp. 83-99
Author(s):  
A. Libman

Economic policy in the modern world can be treated as an outcome of interaction of multiple territorial centers of public authority: nation-states, subnational and supranational jurisdictions. In the last decades economics has increased its attention to the factors which influence the distribution of power among jurisdictions. The paper surveys two main research areas in this literature: economics of conflicts and theory of endogenous decentralization. It discusses the basic models of both approaches and their modifications applied in the literature as well as factors of conflict formation and bargaining over devolution.


1988 ◽  
Vol 27 (4II) ◽  
pp. 501-507 ◽  
Author(s):  
Soofia Mumtaz

This paper discusses some issues currently preoccupying social scientists with respect to the process of development and its implications for Third World countries. These issues have become highly significant considering the momentum and nature of the development process being launched in the so-called "underdeveloped" world, within the context of modern nation-states. Therefore, in this paper, we seek to identify: (a) What is meant by development; (b) How the encounter between this process and traditional social structures (with their own functional logic, based on earlier forms of production and social existence) takes place; (c) What the implications of this encounter are; and (d) What lessons we can learn in this regard from history and anthropology. Development as a planned and organized process, the prime issue concerning both local and Western experts in Third World countries, is a recent phenomenon in comparison to the exposure of Third World countries to the Western Industrial system. The former gained momentum subsequent to the decolonization of the bulk of the Third World in the last half of this century, whereas the latter dates to at least the beginning of this century, if not earlier, when the repercussions of colonization, and later the two World Wars, became manifest in these countries.


2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Amy Nusbaum ◽  
Toby SantaMaria

The scientific enterprise reflects society at large, and as such it actively disadvantages minority groups. From an ethical perspective, this system is unacceptable as it actively undermines principles of justice and social good, as well as the research principles of openness and public responsibility. Further, minority social scientists lead to better overall scientific products, meaning a diverse scientific body can also be considered an instrumental good. Thus, centering minority voices in science is an ethical imperative. This paper outlines what can be done to actively center these scientists, including changing the way metrics are used to assess the performance of individual scientists and altering the reward structure within academic science to promote heterogenous research groups.


Religions ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 12 (3) ◽  
pp. 188
Author(s):  
Rafał Śpiewak ◽  
Wiktor Widera

The essence of the Catholic Church implemented in the modern world is of crucial importance for the understanding its mission towards the state, especially when developing appropriate civil attitudes. One sources of cognition is the historical reflection made on an analytical basis of Catholic media content. This article presents the discourse analysis of Gość Niedzielny (i.e., Sunday Guest), which was one of the most important Catholic publications in Poland, during the reconstruction of the Polish statehood. The pro-state mission of the Catholic Church was an expression of responsibility for common good, was nonpartisan and was connected with the promotion of values that condition the social order. It was believed that the condition of the state is determined by the moral form of its citizens and their level of involvement in social life. Christian values were though to secure and protect also the good of non-Catholic citizens. Here, the research and discourse analysis allows us to define the conclusions regarding contemporary relations between Church and the state in Poland. The key thoughts included in the publications of Sunday Guest, have contemporary application and their message is extremely up-to-date.


1997 ◽  
Vol 33 ◽  
pp. 475-486 ◽  
Author(s):  
Oliver Logan

‘Civilization’ was a major keyword in the Italian Catholic discourse of the nineteenth century and the first half of the twentieth. Indeed Catholic Christian civilization was seen as synonymous with true civilization itself insofar as the post-classical era was concerned. The concept of ‘Christian civilization’ was closely allied to that of cristianità, as distinct from cristianesimo (Christianity). The terms cristianità and chrétienté, like English ‘Christendom’, had originally had primarily geographical connotations, but in post-Revolutionary Catholic thought they acquired connotations of a Christian order of society under the leadership of the Church, the evils of the modern world being presented as consequences of its breakdown. The allied discourse on ‘Christian civilization’ itself in the Italian Catholic world, as in the French one, was in large measure reactionary in character, associated with Counter-Revolutionary ideology and with opposition to liberalism. It asserted that a return of society to the Church was a precondition of social order. Thus the myth of a lost universal order offered a paradigm for the future.


Author(s):  
E. G. Ponomareva

The processes of globalization have determined significant changes in the prerogatives of nation states. In the twenty-first century the state no longer acts as a sole subject having a monopoly of integrating the interests of large social communities and representing them on the world stage. An ever increasing role in the global political process is played by transnational and supranational participants. However, despite the uncertainty and ambiguity of the ways of the development of the modern world, it can be argued that in the foreseeable future it is the states that will maintain the role of the main actors in world politics and bear the responsibility for global security and development. All this naturally makes urgent the issues related to the search for optimal models of nation state development. The article analyzes approaches to understanding patterns, problems and prospects of the development of this institution existing in modern political science. These include the concept of "dimensionality" based on the parameters of scale (the size of the territory) of the states and their functions in the international systems, as well as the "political order". In the latter case the paper analyzes four models: the nation-state, statenation, consociation, quasi-state. The author's position consists in the substantiation of the close dependence of the success of a model of the state on its inner nature, i.e. statehood. On the basis of the elaborated approach the author understands statehood as "the result of historical, economic, political and foreign policy activity of a particular society in order to create a relatively rigid political framework that provides spatial, institutional and functional unity, that is, the condition of the society’s own state, national political system." Thus statehood acts as a qualitative feature of the state.


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