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By using forms of conservatism as criteria, this paper advances a novel conceptualization and typology of comparative-historical social systems. The paper attempts to do justice to the crucial complexities involved in the relations between a free-market economy, a democratic polity and a free society overall on the one hand and varieties of conservatism on the other. Such attempts are all the more indispensable in light of various simplifications and conflations committed by the conventional wisdom, especially in the USA, in this realm. One of these simplifications is the spurious (American) equation of economic conservatism or the laissez-faire economy with a free society. Another is the broader but also dubious equivalence of the admixture of economic conservatism and formal political democracy, with a free social system. It is the purpose of this article to redress these popular misconceptions. Special emphasis is placed on a peculiar social system denoted authoritarian conservatism or conservative authoritarianism in light of its increasing salience in the USA since the 1980–1990s sequel of its permanent ‘Conservative Revolution’. Given that few endeavors exist to establish a coherent taxonomy of comparative-historical social systems on the basis of these criteria, this paper contributes to filling in a gap in the literature. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper makes a case for sociological institutionalism, particularly its Veblenian variant or connection. This is attempted against a background of the surge of renewed interest in analyzing institutions within modern social science, especially economics and sociology. This is indicated by the emergence of the new institutional economics as the (modified) neoclassical approach to institutions and the revival of economic sociology with its conception of the institutional embeddedness of the economy, respectively. Still, many pertinent differences between economic and sociological institutionalism are overlooked or minimized in the current literature. By exploring such differences, the paper helps span a gap in the literature in which comparative analyses of economic and sociological approaches to institutions are rare. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The sociological intervention into the everlasting quarrel between poetry and philosophy that this paper attempts might be considered as illegitimate from the point of view of certain sciences, who may have the feeling that their disciplinary boundaries have been violated. Furthermore, because this intervention is interested in the social circumstances of the emergence of the quarrel and is not based on an analysis of its current status, it may well be accused of falling outside the field of sociological competence altogether. Sociology aspired for recognition as a "modern science" that came into existence as a response to the need for self-understanding and an appropriate cognitive approach on the part of modernity. However, with its actual rejection of the distinction between high scientific and low popular language, its actual state of fragmentation or as a postmodernist might put it, its drive for liberation from the claustrophobic embrace of fixed systems of belief, its often manifested `bad' taste for eclectic theoretical mixtures and approaches and its abandonment of the divine pretension for truth-attainment implicit in the function characteristic of science as a social system.

From the perspective of social system theory, religion is a label by which it is possible to study the relation between the individual expressions of the sacred, on one hand, and the organized system of meanings to be referred to the sacred, on the other, developing a relatively free chain of communication. Therefore, coherently to this approach, the author suggests to assume the notion of religion as communication: a system of belief challenges the complexity of the world, trying to reduce that, transforming the external differentiation into a internal one. This theoretical approach supports three research strategies: (a) overcoming the disputing question secularization/de-secularization, focusing on the dynamics of the relation between a system of belief and the social change occurring in a social context; (b) going beyond the polarization between tradition and modernity, confuting the assumption that modernity means necessarily the decline of religion; (c) reconsidering religion in the light of the social theory. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Normative and more generally axiological feelings are one of the most important social phenomena and one of the least mastered scientifically. They can be satisfactorily explained if we start from an intuition contained in Max Weber's notion of 'axiological rationality'. This notion can be interpreted as indicating that cognitive rationality can be applied, not only to descriptive, but to prescriptive questions; not only to representational, but to axiological questions. Although the cognitive theory of axiological feelings presented in this article has never been explicitly proposed before, it has been implicitly used by several classical and modern sociologists. Several examples show that it can provide a convincing explanation of empirical data. The cognitive theory of axiological feelings shows that these feelings can be context-bound and yet be rational. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]