Many people in the West see Jaruzelski's Poland as a particularly oppressive totalitarian regime; from this perspective the main problem of contemporary Poland is, obviously, the lack of freedom and the constant violation of human rights by the Polish Communist rulers. This is the view which the radical opposition in Poland's emigre press wants us to adopt. In fact, however, only the younger generation in Poland can express such views in good faith; the older generation which has experienced Stalinism and knows what totalitarianism is like cannot really maintain that Jaruzelski's government is worse in this respect than previous Communist governments in Poland.

It is only recently that social scientists have rediscovered the importance of setting their research in historical perspective. Twenty years ago, Alvin Gouldner remarked that ‘Many modern social scientists scarcely manage to conceive of their work as having nineteenth century roots, and most of us live in an intellectual world whose historical boundaries usually stop at the Enlightenment’ (I). Today such an attitude has ceased to be the rule. Historical grounding is needed, not only for social theory in general, but also for key concepts that appear with increasing frequency in contemporary sociological work. Anomie is one of them.

Max Weber's Problemattk still retains its power: why did only Christian Europe amongst the world civilisations autonomously create an economic dynamism, broadly capitalist in character? This essay gives an answer to this question, but it is one, for the most part, not in the spirit of the great German sociologist. There is, of course, a major academic industry devoted to the interpretation of Weber's work, but it still remains safe to say that Weber's own explanation for the fortuitous rise of the West had to do with ideological options concerning rational economic behaviour which gained particular salience in the fifteenth century despite having been present in embryo for a much longer period.

Au moment de leur accession à l'indépendance et au statut d'État légal, les pays africains se sont tous inspirés du modèle occidental d'État-nation unitaire et centralisateur, dans un contexte de profondes divisions sociales donnant libre cours aux particularismes sociaux de toutes sortes, particularismes ethniques, régionaux, religieux, linguistiques, culturels, économiques, démographiques, etc. Posant des obstacles à l'unification nationale, ces profondes divisions du corps social ont fait apparaître des tensions, des conflits, des affrontements et des luttes d'intérêts particularistes qui ont eu, et continuent d'avoir des répercussions sur les conditions d'organisation du nouvel État, sur les modes d'exercice du pouvoir et sur le processus général de développement de la société dans son ensemble.

This paper places in a broader perspective a recent dramatic attempt by privately organized wealth and power to dominate the most fundamental institution of modern capitalist society—the market. This perspective derives from my initial, first-hand work with familiesof old wealth in Galveston, Texas, a once thriving port on the Gulf of Mexico, and later with certain families in Houston, which eventually overshadowed Galveston as the regional metropolis. Because of the similarity in historic conditions nation-wide by which certain fortunes, accumulated in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, became dynastic organizations, I came to view my Galveston subjects on a broader canvas. Over the past century, the generally uniform and rationalized ways of preserving dynastic wealth have had a basic shaping function for such family-fortune organizations, making them an appropriate subject matter for comparative study.

On peut lire, en tête du Prospectus annoncant, en 1829, la première livraison des Annales d'hygiène publique et de médecine légale, que « la medecine n'a pas seulement pour objet d'étudier et de guérir les maladies, elle a des rapports intimes avec l'organisation sociale; quelquefois elle aide le législateur dans la confection des lois, souvent elle éclaire le magistrat dans leur application, et toujours elle veille, avec l'administration, au maintien de la santé publique. Ainsi appliquée aux besoins de la société cette partie de nos connaissances constitue l'hygiène publique et la médecine légale ». Au premier abord, rien de bien remarquable; s'agit-il de la collaboration des médecins et des magistrats? Depuis quelque vingt ans, le Code pénal et surtout la pratique des tribunaux l'ont sanctionnée; quant au statut d'une hygiène auxiliaire de l'administration, s'appliquant, comme le souligne plus loin le Prospectus, à « prêter ses lumières à la science du gouvernement è, le projet en est très clairement ébauché depuis les Encyclopédistes. Alors, l'État partenaire naturel de l'hygiéniste? Mais cette pensée, inaugurée par Turgot, puis affirmée avec force par la Constituante, demeurera la préoccupation la plus constante des artisans du programme sanitaire, et ce jusque vers 1920, quand l'idée de prévention voudra, à l'inverse, libérer la médecine sociale du carcan trop étroitement administratif scellé pour elle dans la loi de 1902; encore convient-il d'observer que ce souhait de voir s'assouplir la relation de la médecine sociale avec la puissance politique intervient peu ou prou au moment où l'hygiéniste pénètre — discrètement — l'appareil de l'État.

The problem facing most of the Third World today is no longer how to launch development, but rather how to sustain it. Consider the colossal disappointments, after 150 years of independence, of Brazil, Mexico, Uruguay, Colombia, Venezuela, Costa Rica, Nicaragua, El Salvador, and Peru — and the debacle of Argentina. Recall the historic leadership which set Egypt, Thailand, and Turkey on their drives to modernization fully a century ago: now, nearly stagnant. Contrast the economic promise inherited from the colonial period and the determination and unbounded elan inspired by independence with today's languor in India, Kenya, and Malaysia, the listlessness of Zimbabwe, Indonesia, The Philippines, and North Africa: indeed, the failures of Ghana and Nigeria. The issue is no longer how to assure political stability — but even with stability, how to foster steady development whose gains will accrue and whose momentum can be sustained.

Who now reads Max Müller ? Almost nobody, I suspect. If the readers of this article know Müller's name at all, they likely encountered it in some review of the various (and now discredited) theories of myth and religion that were popular in the nineteenth century, and such reviews hardly encourage anyone to seek out Müller's original work. Typically, these reviews present only a very brief and very general summary of Müller's ‘solar mythology’, and then go on to disparage Müller's work, often in a fairly extreme language. Thus, Munz (1973: 75) calls Müller ‘the most flamboyant of all nineteenth century philologists’, Puhvel (cited in Larson, 1974: 4) calls Müller's theory of myth a ’Victorian gingerbread’, and Thompson (1946:371) even suggests that ‘any modern reader who examines it [Müller's theory] begins todoubt his own sanity’.