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The paper offers a distinctive reading of Popper’s work, suggesting that his Logic of Scientific Discovery (LScD) might be re-interpreted in the light of his Open Society. Indeed, Popper can be interpreted as criticising certain aspects of his first book, and as a result improving upon them, in his second. It suggests translating what Popper says about ‘conventions’ into his later vocabulary of ‘social institutions’. Looking back, I believe that Popper never intended the language of conventions and decisions to be read individualistically. I remain unsure whether Popper was himself quite as clear about this as he could have been. My reading makes Popper a pioneer in the sociology of science. Scientific institutions are arenas of political power; but Popper did not discuss the structure and inter-relations of the social institutions of science, or offer a politics of science in the context of his methodology. What is missing from the skeletal sociology of LScD is the politics. We could put it in Popperian terms this way: scientific institutions are both open and closed. They are closed, firmly, to the inexpert, to the nonmembers; supposedly they are open to the qualified, provided the prerogatives of seniority and leadership are acknowledged. Despite these shortcomings, Popper’s critical and rational approach and his insistence on openness and intellectual honesty are still important today. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Contradictions lie at the heart of revolutionary groups operating in underground conditions: how can the trust and secrecy of the circle be combined with spreading the message to far-flung masses? Can the ideals for the future society be manifested in the way the revolutionaries are themselves organized? This paper examines the disputes on these questions that raged among Russian radicals before 1917, which are important because of their subsequent global influence. It analyzes the dynamical changes in the forms taken by certain major revolutionary circles, and argues that the differentiated social forms, which morphed via crucial decisions from their origin in egalitarian multi-voiced circles, stemmed from the internal debate that was essential to the circle and was to a great extent an outcome of the philosophical and revolutionary ideas espoused. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Using Dumont’s analysis of value, this paper discusses the interplay between equality and hierarchy in Ambrym Island, Vanuatu. From this vantage point Melanesian egalitarianism appears to be a dynamic and hybrid form that reproduces itself through tensions between different forms of potential inequality. The discussion is situated within a thoroughly globalized society, where money and Christianity have played a fundamental role for over a century, and where ceremonial displays and exchanges of food are still absolutely central to village life. Those food ceremonies create important material spectacles of sociality, where the exhibition, destruction and distribution of food are part of an ongoing process of submitting potentially hierarchical structures to an ethos of egalitarianism. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]