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This commentary critiques Betthäuser, Bourne and Bukodi's (2020) paper which finds that cognitive ability does not substantially mediate class of origin effects on educational and occupational outcomes. From these results, they conclude that cognitive ability is only of minor importance for social stratification, reasserting their view of the primacy of class origins for social stratification. The central issue surrounding cognitive ability in social stratification is its effects on socioeconomic attainments vis‐à‐vis socioeconomic origins, not the extent that cognitive ability mediates classorigin effects. Their analytical strategy of estimating the extent that cognitive ability mediates class origineffects is misleading because: it ignores the only moderate associations of socioeconomic origins with educational and occupational outcomes; the stronger direct effects of cognitive ability; the associations of parents' ability with their own socioeconomic attainments; and the genetic transmission of cognitive ability and other traits relevant to social stratification from parents to their children. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Parallels have been drawn between the 1930s and today, notably the existence of unstable economic conditions as well as deepening, antagonistic ideological divisions. In the 1940s, two books appeared that presented opposing diagnoses of, and remedies for, the problems that faced Western societies at that time. In Man and Society, Karl Mannheim argued that forms of political organization had not adapted to changing social, economic, and technological conditions, and that this explained the rise of communism and fascism. He insisted that, in order to avoid disorder and political extremism, liberal democracies needed to engage in greater planning of their economic and social affairs, with sociology providing the synthesis of scientific knowledge required for this. Just a few years later, Friedrich Hayek published The Road to Serfdom, in which Mannheim's work was a central target. He insisted that only the preservation of liberal freedoms and competitive markets could prevent the spread of totalitarianism. This paper outlines the arguments of each of these authors and provides an account of some of the historical background against which their disagreement arose. It also explores the relevance of their very different positions today, at a time when the neoliberal ideology that Hayek championed continues to have great influence but is under increasing attack from across the political spectrum. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The "Trojan Horse" scandal laid bare an anxiety at the heart of the British security establishment; an anxiety that brings together questions of identity, values, and security within the demand to manage radicalization. It is an anxiety that, I will argue, reveals a novel conceptualization of threat that has driven the UK's security and communities policies within the "war on terror." This conceptualization emerges within Prevent, the UK's counter-radicalization strategy. Yet, I argue, the extensive literature on Prevent has failed to adequately articulate this underlying, core logic. To date, the Prevent literature has effectively demonstrated the ways in which Muslim communities in the United Kingdom have been policed through British counter-radicalization policy. Yet, this analysis struggles to explain the expansion of Prevent into a wider range of "extremist" spaces. In this article, I contend that it is more useful to situate Prevent as a particular conception of power; a logic and an analysis of threat that demands new forms of government intervention. To do so, this article provides a genealogical reading of Prevent, locating it as a radical extension of state security ambitions to intervene early, making explicit a vision of security in which life as a process of becoming is produced as an object of management. The paper draws out the ramifications of this analysis to think through fundamental shifts in the principles and practices of contemporary security aspirations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

While much attention has been devoted to measuring levels of social mobility over time, less attention has been given to the possibility of changing pathways to social mobility. This paper examines pathways from social origins to socio‐economic destinations in midlife for two British cohorts, born in 1958 and 1970 respectively, using Structural Equation Modelling (SEM). We address the roles of cognitive attainment, private schooling and educational attainment in mediating the link between social origins and destinations. Have these mechanisms become more or less important over time, in a context of structural change in the state schooling system and educational expansion? We find that private schools displayed greater academic selectivity and an increased link to high levels of educational attainment for the younger cohort. Essentially, private schools adapted to changing circumstances, becoming more academically selective and less socially selective, and more focused on educational credentials. Childhood social origins were less strongly linked to childhood cognitive scores in the younger cohort, but cognitive scores were also more weakly linked to educational attainment for this cohort. We also find a decreased association between social origins and educational attainment for the younger cohort. While the finding that educational inequalities weakened over this time period is positive, the lack of a corresponding reduction in the overall link between social origins and destinations suggests that reducing educational inequalities was not sufficient to increase social mobility when accompanied by countervailing changes in the role of private schools. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A study of social bases of different modern mass movements suggests that each major social stratum has both democratic and extremist political expression. Extremist movements of the left, right, and centre are primarily on the working, upper and middle classes, respectively. As often noted, isolated individuals do contribute disproportionately to the backing of extremist mass movements, it is the author's contention that this fact does not contradict the class interpretation of modern politics, whether extremist or democratic. This paper attempts to show that it is an error that extremist ideologies and groups can be classified and analysed in same terms as democratic groups, i.e. right, left and centre. These three positions resemble their democratic parallels both in compositions of their social bases and in contents of their appeals. While comparisons of all three positions on the democratic and extremist continuum are of intrinsic interest, the author concentrates here on the politics of the centre, the most neglected type of political extremism, and that form of "left" extremism sometimes called "fascism," or "Peronism" as manifested in Argentina and Brazil. The author also presents data for different countries which indicate the sharp difference between social roots of classic fascism and populism, and those of right-wing movements.

This article examines Channel "de‐radicalization" interventions, which take place on individuals suspected of having the potential to commit terrorist crimes. Situated within critical security studies, the article explores the British Prevent programme by utilizing primary interviews with hard‐to‐reach Channel mentors and senior Prevent officials. Following the work of anticipatory risk‐governance scholarship, this research illuminates the three processes of risk‐visibilization (how an individual becomes sufficiently "seen" as harbouring risk that they are offered Channel mentorship), risk‐calculation (how practitioners negotiate supposed riskiness), and risk‐knowing (how practitioners "know" risks they observe). It demonstrates how the practice of preemptive counter‐terrorism is subsumed inherently by—even relies upon—subjectivity and human prejudice, and fundamental disagreements between practitioners. Through substantial empirical contribution on the phenomenon of Channel interventions, the discussion highlights ultimately that the algorithmic rationale of preemptive risk‐spotting normalizes the suspicion of banal and everyday behaviors, precisely because such interventions are ultimately deployed through worst‐case imaginations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The protest movement against the war in Vietnam surfaced in the Spring of 1965 with teach-ins and with the march on Washington in April of that year. As American involvement in the war in Vietnam escalated, so too did the protests. The assumption that a new wave of student radicalism inundated much of the student population in opposition to the war in Vietnam may have been good for press copy and bad for relations with university old-grads and the public, but it was a poor reflection of how things really were on the campuses in the 1960s. Two manifestations of student anti-war feelings are considered here: first, protests, and second, opinions. At least three national institutional surveys of American student protests took place during the 1960s: one for 1964-5, one for 1967-8, and one for 1968-9. All three studies showed that Vietnam war protests on American campuses were a good deal less widespread during these academic years than the talk about college student radicalism might have led to believe. Researchers reported that among the accredited four-year colleges and Universities in the U.S. in the 1967-8 academic year, the war in Vietnam was the most popular protest issue. Organized student protests were reported at 38 per cent of such institutions in that year. By comparison, the second most popular issue was living group regulations which was an issue for protests at 34 per cent of colleges and universities in 1967-8.

This article presents a qualitative research on students who report emotional distress and have moral radical attitudes. The research was inspired by sociologist R.L. Kapur's discovery of an interesting change in the prevalence of reported emotional distress among students at Edinburgh University in Edinburgh, Scotland. Examining the relationship between radicalism and emotional distress the trend appears to be accepted as evidence of a genuine increase in the prevalence of emotional upset in the respective groups. This would imply that the distress is real, with individuals recognizing its presence by judging their emotional state against certain criteria, which had remained invariable over time and place. Alternatively, the reported differences are primarily due to changes in the propensity to report emotional upset students who simply have become less reluctant to confess to feelings of inadequacy, or their perception of what constitutes emotional distress. Emotional upset students altered feeling, a state which might have originally been designated morbid preoccupation is known as emotional disturbance. Alex Robertson

The article deals with the emergence and activities of a U.S. political phenomenon, the radical right. The conservative elements in U.S. society can be divided into two groups, the moderate conservatives and the radical right. These groups may be differentiated in terms of their attitudes towards the political era of New Dealism. The radical right refuses to accept the past, is radical in the sense that it rejects the status quo. It wants to turn the clock back all the way; it refuses to accept what has happened as something inevitable, or irreversible. Most, though not all the sections of the radical right are opposed to: the labor movement, preferring to see trade unions eliminated; the income tax, the movement for the repeal of the sixteenth amendment; the welfare state and government planning, it would like a return of limited government; the radical right sees the World War II as an avoidable mistake, and prefers in retrospect a policy of Russia and Germany fighting it out alone. The radical right views foreign policy from the recognition of Russia to Potsdam as appeasement, treachery and treason. It is opposed to membership in the United Nations, and to entangling foreign commitments. It tends to be Asia-oriented, rather than Europe-oriented; it is suspicious of Great Britain as a Machiavellian power which has manipulated people into wars, and refuses to back people in time of need.