After the transition from an authoritarian to a democratic regime, one commonly observes trials of the agents of the former regime and efforts to compensate its victims. In our century, waves of transitional justice have occured in German-occupied countries after 1941, in South- Eastern Europe in the 1970s, in Latin-American countries in the 1980s, and in post-Communist countries after 1989. The article proposes a framework for the behavioral study of these phenomena. The dependent variables are political decisions to pursue retroactive justice after the transition. Independent variables include the constraints of the actors, their motivations and beliefs, as well as the mechanisms by which individual policy preferences are aggregated into binding collective decisions.

As a religious sect that anchored its salvation pledge in an exclusive promise of spiritual empowerment, the early Christian movement called its converts to virtuoso standards of religiosity. Following their baptismal regeneration, believers were obligated to remain ‘sealed’ in purity thereafter, in expectation of pending eschatological deliverance. Signs of moral slippage would thus constitute a negation of those sectarian claims, threatening thereby the continued viability of the movement. Operating in an environment of persecution, and shaken by the protracted non-event of cosmic redemption, growing numbers of believers found the exacting purity requirements impossible to uphold. An optimal organizational resolution of that crisis would require the restoration of wavering saints to spiritual status, to be achieved through remedial adjustments in penitential practice. Drawing upon Weber's model of the sect-church dynamic, this study offers a sociological hermeneutic of The Shepherd ofHermas.

Democracy, even if it is a system of self-government, rests on institutional commitments. An institutional commitment is a manipulation through rules of one's set of alternatives. I analyze the nature of institutional commitments in general and the role they play in a democracy. After drawing a distinction between committing to a rule and being committed by what a role establishes, three conclusions emerge: a) that representation is a functional commitment, b) that constitutions are commitments to rules, and c) that judicial review is not a commitment, but makes credible the commitments embodied in representation and constitutions.

This article presents a model of the triangular relationship between minority, majority, and the minority's reference state which is a feature of many ethnic relations. The presence of a reference state can overcome a potential commitment problem between minority and majority if it is perceived to be both militarily strong and moderately irredentist. Empirical material from Croatia, Transylvania, Estonia and Crimea suggests the plausibility of the model. Russia's role as a reference state is particularly interesting.

This paper develops an analysis of the ways in which the issues of ‘unemployment’, ‘social order’ and ‘crime’ appeared to be dealt with, within the dominant culture of English society in the mid-1990s.

Revisnng the famous debate between Perry Anderson, Tom Nairn and Edward Thompson in the 1960s, the paper argues for an understanding of the specificity of the English ‘social formation’ and, in particular, the sensibilities of the dominant middle class of that country. Inspired in part by field work in the English suburb in which the authors currently reside, the paper applies this approach to the analysis of the deep anxieties that are routinely exhibited in such areas in the mid-1990s over crime—anxieties which are then separately examined along six discrete dimensions: a) the safety of self, b) the safety of home and employment position, c) personal status and the symbolic world, d) the loss of virtue, e) the fears for England, and f) the crisis of the inheritance. The paper concludes by arguing for an interpretation of the widespread fear of crime as a complex social metaphor, with a specific social/national provenance, invisible to the mass of contemporary empirical social scientists in England whose work is parasitical upon such fears.

Migration, the role of the stranger and travelling are all creativity-enhancing although for different reasons. The migrant model verifies Koestler's hypothesis that new ideas often arise out of combinations of separate frames of thinking. Simmel's theory of the stranger emphasizes the increased objectivity of limited commitments. Rudwick's recently suggested model of liminal experience might help us explain why the seemingly purposeless activity of travelling might also stimulate creativity.