why do actors participate in the democratic process? the sociological theory of democracy offers five modes of democratic action and democratic order: economic theory of democracy: strategic action and democracy as efficient market order. normativistic theory: emotional bounded action and solidarity with the great community. communitaristic theory: action as strong valuation and democracy as moral order. deliberative theory: communicative action and democracy as order of formal procedures. constitutional theory: reflexive or creative action and active trust in negotiated democratic orders.

in applying rational choice theory to the debates about power, it has been proposed that distinguishing power from luck yields new insights. specifically, it has been suggested that, where social and institutional structures favour some and disfavour others, the former have the good luck to get what they want without trying and the latter the bad luck to be faced with collective action problems that prevent them from furthering their interests. against such proposals, it is argued that luck, thus understood, is non-explanatory and, moreover, depoliticizing. it is further argued that they exemplify a narrow conception of power that defines it as intentional, as involving positive interventions in the world, as furthering the wants of the powerful and as altering the incentive structures of others. such a conception closes off questions about the operations of power where these are more or less indirect, ongoing and often inaccessible to direct observation, and only very partially and superficially captured by the “snapshot'” accounts of structured interaction among strategic actors characteristic of rational choice theory. a broader and more dynamic view, revealing the complexities of power, allows that the powerful can hold and exert their power without intending to, without positively intervening in the world and irrespective of their actual “brute” wants; and that their power consists in being capable and responsible for affecting (negatively or positively) the subjective and/or objective interests of others.

the idea of an axial age in the mid-first millennium b.c. has a long history but was crystallized by karl jaspers in his 1949 book the meaning and goal of history. since then, voegelin, eisenstadt and many others have contributed to clarifying the four cases of axial “breakthrough”, to use jaspers's term, namely ancient israel, greece, india, and china. a number of significant background conditions — economic, social, and political — have been identified that indicate dramatic social change all across the old world, but there is no clear indication of the causal relation of these changes to the emergence of strikingly new cultural-religious formations. this article uses categories derived from the work of merlin donald to argue that in all four cases “theoretic” culture was applied to the reformulation of basic cultural premises, though “mimetic” and “narrative” traditions that had been central in older civilizations continued to be significant, but reformulated in the light of the new theoretic understandings. the four cases, however, are far from homogeneous. they show such differences between them that we can speak of “multiple axialities”, as we have come to speak of “multiple modernities”.

this paper shows that religion is a basic principle that underlies modern poverty policy. however, it has played out in very different ways in societies according to the relative predominance of catholic, lutheran, and calvinist heritages. though religion is but one explanation for why we deal with the poor as we do today, systematically accounting for denominational differences in poor relief traditions can help to answer a series of otherwise perplexing cross-national differences in poverty policy and enrich existing explanations of the welfare state.

starting from the french law of bequest enacted by the code civil and from its interpretation by tocqueville, the paper studies this law as a social device designed to solve two different issues. the first one is concerned with legitimacy and is studied through the debates within the conseil d'état, whereas the second is concerned with the social mechanisms leading to action and it is studied through the debates among economists and lawyers during the 19th century. more generally, the paper suggests that similar social devices are useful to understanding transfers of resources related to death, such as life insurance and organ donorship.

in 1927, at the age of eighteen, jean kowalyk moved to the ukrainian village of czortowiec, where she worked as a seamstress. when the germans invaded in 1941, they brought to the village forced laborers to build a work camp. jean “watched the cruelty [done to the workers] day after day […] when i saw people being molested, my religious heart whispered to me, ‘do not kill. love others as you love yourself’”. some time later, she heard a knock on her door. when she opened it, solomon berger, a jewish doctor the family knew, was “on his knees”, put his arms around her legs, and “begged for help”. jean let him in and hid him – along with several others – behind a false wall until the end of the war (1).