No sociologist was more concerned with morality and the interrelation between morality and society than Émile Durkheim; and at least sociological approaches to understand morality can be expected to clarify whether and to what extent they are willing to follow Durkheim's account.

The constitutions of the last two centuries are monuments to an eminently modern enterprise: the reconstruction of the political order by rational human effort. Constitution-making is a deliberate attempt at institution-building at the fundamental level of laying down the normative and legal foundations of the political order. Framing a constitution always purports to be an act of foundation; an act intended to break with the past, and with the existing cultural and institutional traditions, in which principled discussions take the place of everyday horse-trading in politics.

The focus of this paper is adoption, specifically adoption as an issue of local justice. Local justice, as conceived by Jon Elster, is a way of thinking about how scarce goods and burdens are allocated by local, low-level institutions; and encompasses such issues as military service, college admission, organs for transplantation, donation of sperm, child custody, and adoption. There are three principle elements to local justice: scarce goods, institutions that allocate them, and the individuals who step forward as allocative candidates. Over time, the individual will bring his or her needs before a succession of institutional providers, while the institutions will find before them a succession of individuals who need, want, or merit the scarce good being allocated. In many instances, such as the allocation of organs for transplantation, allocation may be a matter of life or death; while in other instances, the consequences of not receiving the good may not be life threatening, but nonetheless affect an individual's future life plans (e.g. admittance into Harvard). Thus allocative decisions can be evaluated according to their importance along two different axes. The first contains decisions which are ‘important’ because they involve life and death outcomes, such as the allocation of kidneys, while other decisions are ‘important’ not because they carry with them life-and-death outcomes, but because they influence the lives of a vast number of individuals. Selection choices for college admission are among this latter type of important decision.

The upheavals in the Eastern European countries have demonstrated to the social sciences in a painful manner that they do not dispose of any adequate theory suited to grasp the dynamics and scope of the processes taking place there. Western sociology has won its categories from analysing Western societies and, in a premature manner, come to a generalised concept of society as such. Absorbed by the problems of advanced capitalism, it was not prepared for the collapse of the Easterns systems. Exploring socialist societies has, until recently, pre-eminently been a topic of specialised disciplines, such as Eastern European Studies, Soviet Studies, the Theory of International Relations, Comparative Economics and Development Studies. Its theory-building has remained too closely tied to pre-defined questions, to official documents, uncertain and precarious data or to ideological givens, to be able to assess realistically the developmental dynamics of Eastern societies. The exchange of information between Eastern and Western scholars has been highly selective, hence seldom resulting in mutual fertilisation.

Almost a decade after the wave of transformations from authoritarian to democratic regimes started in Latin America, Eastern European countries, one after another, entered the path leading towards democracy. The end of 1989 and the first part of 1990 saw unheard of numbers of free elections in ten Latin American and all East European countries (with the exception of Poland, where freedom of the first election was limited). Moreover, all the newly elected rulers won office on a promise to liberalise their economies. However, many commentators and scholars fear the impact on populations of painful structural reform policies and predict that new democracies in both regions either will not stay democratic for long or will not carry out a full package of economic reforms. They predict that half-hearted efforts at stabilisation will be followed by overwhelming political resistance which will provoke a reversal of economic policies. Each failure will reduce the credibility of successive reform attempts, the ultimate consequence being not merely economic disarray but an almost total loss of faith in democratic political institutions.