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Edward Shils’ and Michael Young’s “The Meaning of the Coronation,” took up crucial aspects of Shils’ thinking about differentiating types of social bonds, which led to his distinction between primordial, civil, and sacred bonds, and to his focus on center and periphery and the charisma of central institutions. The relation of these concepts to colonialism and post-colonialism is complex, but the reign and death of Elizabeth II illustrate them clearly. Colonial subjects responded to the same bonds, devised alternatives to them, and accepted the revisions represented by the Commonwealth after decolonization. But they also sought liberation from the colonized mind, and in doing so reconfirmed the centrality of the institutions they were attempting to liberate themselves from. Her death evoked dual reactions consistent with this problematic relation.

This is a commentary on William Lynch’s Minority Report, which is a synthesis of the last 75 years of STS writings with philosophical themes from Lakatos, Feyerabend, and others. The comment questions the continued relevance of older ideas of scientific opinion which rested on the supposed autonomy of scientists in the face of the present grant system and the bureaucracy of peer review. The magnitude of the funding of science, and its apparent biases, call the whole of the inherited view of science into question.

The classics of social theory have a peculiar status: our current list is the product of past academic strategizing, and the list of favored classics has changed. Currently there is a process of replacing them with older writers who better fit current concerns, and to cancel those who hold the wrong views, or are of the oppressor class, in order to provide epistemic justice for those who don’t deserve their status and uplift those who were wrongly neglected. From an instrumental, careerist point of view, adapting to these changes makes sense. From the point of view of judgement, which differs from the capacity to produce, it does not. Exclusions narrow our range of reference and our capacity to assess in the present. We owe ourselves, and them, not only temporary, fashion driven justice but a larger capacity of judgement detached from the instrumentalization of scholarship.

Rates of crime for Blacks in the United States in the post-slavery era have always been high relative to Whites. But explaining, or minimizing, this fact faces a major problem: individual excuses for bad acts point to deficiencies, in the agent, which are perhaps forgivable, such as mental deficiency or a deprived childhood, but at the price of treating the agent as less than a full member of the moral community. Collectivizing excuses risks implying group inferiority. The history of attempts to provide an explanation of crime that mitigates blame without undermining full participation to the moral community is long and convoluted, leading to the presently widespread claim that crime is itself a product of victimization through pervasive racism. Three basic strategies – rejection of comparison, attribution to racially invariant causes and explanation by reference to uniquely Black conditions, such as subculture or extreme stigmatization – are identified and their ethical implications distinguished.

“ Science as a Vocation” describes an ideal of scholarship for a vanished world. Images of the past university still color our idea of the university. Weber dispelled illusions about the university of his own time, and pointed to its cruelty and irrationality. Veblen did something similar for the American university of his time, defended a similar ideal, and foresaw the effects of disciplinarization and the quantification of academic life. They both provide insights into the ways in which the autonomy of academic inquiry has been transformed, and the price that has been paid for the present forms of autonomy. But a consideration of these changes also reveals the reasons for the change in academic values over the last century and what has been lost.

The belief-desire model of action explanation is deeply ingrained in multiple disciplines. There is reason to think that it is a cultural artifact. But is there an alternative? In this discussion, I will consider the radical critique of this action explanation model by Rüdiger Bittner, which argues that the model appeals to dubious mental entities, and argues for a model of reasons as responses to states or events. Instead, for Bittner, agents are reason-selectors—selecting the states or events to respond to and selecting the ones the agent is disposed to respond to. By getting rid of the explanatory role of beliefs, this model runs into difficulties over errors usually attributed to false beliefs. These can be resolved by expanding the notion of dispositions to cover the case of false belief. But this suggests that the belief-reason model serves to divide the category of dispositions in an arbitrary or culturally specific way.

This comment on Frodeman and Briggle’s Socrates Tenured raises questions about the project of applying philosophy or philosophical skills to wicked problems such as terrorism. By definition, these problems cannot be solved by appeal to principles, but involve conflicting values and goals. The societal problems to which the book refers are of this kind. The argument of the book vacillates between recognizing this and asserting some sort of special disciplinary authority for philosophy in the face of these problems. Examples illustrate the dilemma.

Mark Bevir raises the question of how genealogy, understood as a technique-based radical historicism, and the notion of the contingency of ideas, ground “critique.” His problem is to avoid the relativism of radical historicism in a way that allows for “critique” without appealing to non-radical historicist absolutisms of the kind that ground the notion of false consciousness. He does so by appealing to the notion of motivated irrationality, which he claims avoids the problem of relativism and the problems of “false consciousness.” The genealogies of Nietzsche and Foucault, however, do not ground “critique.” The relevant normative judgments, of nobility in Nietzsche, for example, are presupposed.

Dorothy Emmet, in two books, one of which was based on extensive personal contact with Robert Merton and Columbia sociology, provides the closest thing we have to an authorized philosophical defense of Merton. It features a deflationary account of functionalism which dispenses with the idea of general teleological ends. What it replaces it with is an account of “structures” that have various consequences and that are maintained because, on Emmet’s account, of the mutual reinforcement of motives produced by the structure.

The blogosphere is loathed and feared by the press, expert-opinion makers, and representatives of authority generally. Part of this is based on a social theory: that there are implicit and explicit social controls governing professional journalists and experts that make them responsible to the facts. These controls don't exist for bloggers or the people who comment on blogs. But blog commentary is good at performing a kind of sociology of knowledge that situates speakers and motives, especially in cases of complex professional and administrative decision-making, as well as providing specific factual material that qualifies claims of experts and authorities. In many contexts the commentaries are examples of Habermasian demands for justification, to which there is a response. A major topic in women's health, and on the blogs, is the effects of hysterectomy, especially accompanied by oophorectomy, the removal of (normally healthy) ovaries. Physicians make extreme claims on web pages about the lack of consequences, or their manageability through hormone therapy, which they claim is supported by research. Blog posters, and a blog opposed to hysterectomy generally, claim that there are numerous damaging effects, and deconstruct the claims of experts. Blog posters fill in the claims with personal experiences and analysis of the conduct of physicians and nurses, as well as the motives of women who deny symptoms. Physicians provide their own critique and analysis of the blogs, to which they attribute great influence. A later meta-analysis and new longitudinal research affirms the bloggers, and explains why much of the research cited by experts is wrong.

Social science has for the most part lost its ambition to be ‘science’, as shown in the recent change in the American Anthropological Association statement of purpose. The new term is expertise. The change points to something fundamental: social science methods are now largely stable; they have well-developed uses for public and policy audiences; because they are user-friendly they are unlikely to radically change, and new problems arise for them to be applied to. New concepts are developed, but they do not develop into ‘theories’ in a scientific sense. So what is expertise? It is something other than fact generation: it is the result of aggregating and assessing research in an area. Experts engage with one another, so there is a community of expertise. Yet there is also another sense of ‘scientific’: using the tools of natural science and extending them to the social. The current means of doing this for social science is through neuroscience. These methods could serve to filter and validate social science concepts.

Sociology once debated ‘the social’ and did so with a public readership. Even as late as the Second World War, sociologists commanded a wide public on questions about the nature of society, altruism and the direction of social evolution. As a result of several waves of professionalization, however, these issues have vanished from academic sociology and from the public writings of sociologists. From the 1960s onwards sociologists instead wrote for the public by supporting social movements. Discussion within sociology became constrained both by ‘professional’ expectations and political taboos. Yet the original motivating concerns of sociology and its public, such as the compatibility of socialism and Darwinism, the nature of society, and the process of social evolution, did not cease to be of public interest. With sociologists showing little interest in satisfying the demand, it was met by non-sociologists, with the result that sociology lost both its intellectual public, as distinct from affinity groups, and its claim on these topics.

Hans Morgenthau was a founder of the modern discipline of International Relations, and his Politics among Nations was for decades the dominant textbook in the field. The character of his Realism has frequently been discussed in debates on methodology and the nature of theory in International Relations. Almost all of this discussion has mischaracterized his views. The clues given in his writings, as well as his biography, point directly to Max Weber’s methodological writings. Morgenthau, it is argued, was a sophisticated user of Weber’s views who self-consciously applied them in the sphere of International Relations in such a way that Realism provided an ideal-typical model of the rational and responsible statesman. This interpretation both explains Morgenthau’s views and shows them to be a serious, complex, and compelling response to the issues which have animated the controversies over International Relations theory after Waltz’s presentation of the methodological basis for his neo-Realism.

Agassi, Sztompka, Kincaid, and Crothers argue, in various ways, that Merton should not be held responsible for his published views on theory construction, and they provide psychological or strategic explanations for his failure to resolve issues with these views. I argue that this line of defense is unnecessary. A better case for Merton would be that theories in his middle-range sense were a nontechnical alternative solution to the problem of spurious correlation. Middle-range theory was not, however, a solution to the problem of diverse approaches. Merton also did not resolve the problems with his account of functionalism, and the problems undermine the claim that he had a distinctive “structural” approach all along.

Robert Merton's essays on theories of the middle range and his essays on functional explanation and the structural approach are among the most influential in the history of sociology. But their import is a puzzle. He explicitly allied himself with some of the most extreme scientistic formalists and contributed to and endorsed the Columbia model of theory construction. But Merton never responded to criticisms by Ernest Nagel of his arguments or acknowledged the rivalry between Lazarsfeld and Herbert Simon, rarely cited the philosophical and methodological literature, and responded to critics with ambiguous concessions, leaving the Mertonian legacy profoundly ambiguous.

Sociology, as conceived by Comte, was to put an end to the anarchy of opinions characteristic of liberal democracy by replacing opinion with the truths of sociology, imposed through indoctrination. Later sociologists backed away from this, making sociology acceptable to liberal democracy by being politically neutral. The critics of this solution asked `whose side are we on?' Burawoy provides a novel justification for advocacy scholarship in sociology. Public sociology is intended to have political effects, but also to be funded by the politically neutral state. He argues that public sociology is institutionally neutral, but that committing to an organic relation with a social movement is legitimate as a matter of the sociologist's personal value choice. Although this produces side-taking sociology, by improving the case for particular standpoints it ser ves to improve democratic discussion generally, which is an appropriately neutral public aim.

In the nineteenth century, there was substantial and sophisticated interest in neuroscience on the part of social theorists, including Comte and Spencer, and later Simon Patten and Charles Ellwood. This body of thinking faced a dead end: it could do little more than identify highly general mechanisms, and could not provide accounts of such questions as `why was there no proletarian revolution?' Psychologically dubious explanations, relying on neo-Kantian views of the mind, replaced them. With the rise of neuroscience, however, some of the problems of concern to earlier thinkers, such as imitation, have revived because of the discovery of neuronal mechanisms, or through fMRI studies. The article reviews the history and discusses the implications of current work for the reconsideration of traditional social theory concepts. It is suggested that certain kinds of bridging work with neuroscience would enable us to answer many questions in social theory that empirical sociology has failed to answer.

Merton's two papers on the norms of science were written in a period of intense political activity in science, and responded to this context, using conceptual tools from classical sociology and Harvard thinking of the time. The basic reasoning was Weberian: science and politics each had a different ethos. One target was the Left view of science as a model for society. Another was the view of the American Left that complex societies required regulation, but that science should be free of control. Merton pictured science as already intensely policed, but threatened by the conflict between its special ethos and potential democratic demands, and requiring protection. This was a `liberal' argument, but Merton used the language of the Left to present it.

In this reply, I raise some questions about the account of “normativity” given by Joseph Rouse. I discuss the historical form of disputes over normativity in such thinkers as Kelsen and show that the standard issue with these accounts is over the question of whether there is anything added to the normal stream of explanation by the problem of normativity. I suggest that Rouse’s attempt to avoid the issues that arise with substantive explanatory theories of practices of the kind criticized in The Social Theory of Practices leads to a result that is uninformative, and the strategy raises the question of whether there is anything there to explain and thus whether there is any necessity to appeal to the kind of anomalous explanations the normativist offers.

The role of families in supporting people with dementia is widely acknowledged in literature and UK government policy. The role of general practice in ensuring early and effective support for people living with mental health problems including dementia is also enshrined in UK policy. As part of a larger study, a total of 122 carers were asked to rate predefined aspects of the primary care response. For some responses they were also asked to provide a reason for their rating. The purpose of this study was to examine carers' accounts of contacts with general practitioners (GPs) and general practice teams when they were first approached with concerns about their relative. Findings suggest that, on average, carers rate the service as being at least ‘good'. However, their accounts describe a wide variety of experiences and demonstrate that expressed satisfaction does not necessarily reflect a satisfactory service. Both practitioner-related and carer-related issues were cited as reasons for their ratings. Implications for practice and research are discussed.

Terry Nardin’s book on Oakeshott is an attempt to compare him to other 20th-century philosophers and to track the development of his philosophical thought. The project of comparison is made relevant by the fact that Oakeshott’s philosophy, like that of Heidegger and others, was the product of the dissolution of neo-Kantianism. Nardin stresses the idea of “modal confusion,” meaning responding to a question of one kind with an answer appropriate to another kind of inquiry, as a key to Oakeshott’s thought from Experience and Its Modes through to On Human Conduct itself, where Oakeshott changes his terminology. But why does Oakeshott change? One reason might be the critique of Oakeshott by Peter Winch, as Oakeshott appears to have reformulated his views in response to it in On Human Conduct, in the course of constructing an alternative to ‘conceptual analysis’ as practiced in contemporary Oxbridge.

The ‘Science Wars’ of the 1990s, whose central moment was the Sokal hoax, was understood to be ‘political’, but it was never quite clear what the political issue was. Two recent books, James Robert Brown’s Who Rules in Science?(2001) and Phillip Kitcher’s Science, Truth, and Democracy(2001), attempt in different ways to reflect on and extend the discussion from a ‘Left’ perspective. Brown argues Sokal’s case from a perspective of philosophical rationalism and anti-naturalism. Kitcher’s argument is that the aim of science is significant truth, and significance is a valuative notion. Explanation is relative to interests or values. But this does not mean that truth does not matter, or that the world has no influence on what we believe - the two considerations, significance and truth, interact and co-evolve. If this is true, how science is governed, and particularly what is studied, make a difference. A well-ordered science would be one in which decisions about what is studied would be both wise and democratic. Pure democracy would undermine wisdom, so a novel relation is needed, in which the preferences of voters would be tutored and a family-like dialogue would allow optimal choices to be made. Both discussions point to a genuine political dilemma over science and democracy, related to the dilemma faced by the Old Left, which hoped that science, through ‘Planning’, would seamlessly integrate itself into the social good in solidarity with the proletariat. Kitcher grasps that the forms of Liberal Democracy are not up to the task of dealing with science - and thus places himself at the opposite pole from thinkers like Habermas, who think that the Left must expand Public Reason. So the issue is ‘Who rules?’ and whether the proper role of science in society is one that effectively precludes ‘democratic control.’

The concept of worldviews gives a visual sense to the notion of a shared ideological frame, but misleadingly suppresses the visual itself. Against the standard image of worldviews, it is argued that the notion makes sense in connection with particular technologies of representation, notably newspapers, and is no longer informative about political beliefs. The example of Kristin Luker's work on abortion politics is used to show how weak the evidential base is for claims about worldviews. It is then argued that the kind of solidarity produced by ideological or `word', politics is different from the solidarities produced by the visual. Acts of political violence with strong visual representation produce sympathetic responses and are particularly effective in creating a sense of common victimhood. However, images also produce complex and conflicting responses that are less controllable. The visual impact of the World Trade Center attacks is a startling example of the differences between a politics of the eye and a politics of worldviews.

In this discussion, the author asks the question if Oakeshott's famous depiction of a practice might be understood in relation to contemporary cognitive science, in particular connectionism (the contemporary cognitive science approach concerned with the problem of skills and skilled knowing) and in terms of the now conventional view of “normativity” in Anglo-American philosophy. The author suggests that Oakeshott meant to contrast practices to an alternative “Kantian” model of a shared tacit mental frame or set of rules. If cognitive science, in its connectionist forms, allows us to give a naturalistic though nonreductive sense to his words, Oakeshott, like other philosophers who have employed the concept of tradition, expanded his discussion into a broader reconsideration of the nature of theorizing, a metaphilosophy. And this extension can be understood in relation to such recent thinkers as McDowell and, in particular, to the problem of the acquisition of the normative.

Charisma is a concept with a peculiar history. It arose from theological obscurity through social science, from which it passed into popular culture. As a social science concept, its significance derives in large part from the fact that it captures a particular type of leadership. But it fits poorly with other concepts in social science, and is problematic as an explanatory concept. Even Weber himself was torn in his use of the concept between the individual type-concept and a broader use of it to characterize the sacral character of culture and institutions. Which use is fundamental? Neither use seems to be able to be extended to account for the other, and in practice the term serves as a heterogenous residual category. Shils’ argument that the charisma of central institutions was fundamental was an attempt to make sense of the examples of institutional charisma that fell into this residual category, such as the jury, and assimilated charisma to the idea of the holy. But this conflicts with Weber’s idea of the originary or creative character of individual charisma, which by definition cannot derive from preexisting sacral qualities. Weber’s account of individual charisma focuses on success, and this suggests the idea that the power of the charismatic leader arises from the ability to confound and surpass expectations - to be extraordinary. This allows us to reconsider ‘originary’ charisma, and assimilate it both to rational choice and to Steiner’s account of taboo. A leader who produces a change in our risk perceptions by proving our previous perceptions wrong by the success of the leader’s actions is providing a novel rational choice for us: a new option together with new estimates of the risk in a course of action. Weber explained the situation of primitive or magical morality in terms of magical charisma producing taboos that were then rationalized, leading to permanent norms - which relies on the notion of charisma without explaining it. But Steiner goes further, by suggesting that taboo represents the intellectual organization of danger through the act of interdiction. The power to interdict is not based on some other power, but rather the power to organize danger through interdiction is originary. Is there originary charisma today? Or is the commonplace use of the term ‘charisma’ a transformation of the concept into something else? In popular culture, the term refers to role-models who break new ground, and if we consider the ‘dangers’ that they appear to their audiences to overcome, the phenomenon is not so different. Charisma seems to collapse into personal style, but in a world in which the old interdicts have lost their power, style itself becomes a matter of experimental success in the face of social danger.

A mounting empirical literature clearly indicates that the core programs of the welfare state are unsustainable in their present form. The proximate cause of this growing fiscal instability is a demographic imbalance between younger contributors and older beneficiaries. The authors argue, however, that the ultimate cause is the institutional structure of the welfare state itself. Specifically, if its fiscal institutions are modeled as a common-pool resource, the tools and analysis emerging from the growing literature on common pools can be used. Such an analysis suggests that the apparent nonsustainability of current welfare state programs is rooted in the failure to resolve two distinct problems in institutional design. The first problem concerns how to limit the scope of opportunism among rational self-interested individuals. The second problem concerns how to limit the adverse effects of the knowledge problem among boundedly rational individual actors.

3. See Jacobs et al. v. The Seminole County Canvassing Board and Gore v. Harris. 4. This principle was instrumental in the judicial reasoning for many of the secondary cases filed by Florida citizens during the election recount process. Even in Jacobs et al v. The Seminole County Canvassing Board, where the County Supervisor of Elections admitted allowing Republican party officials to add voter identification numbers to thousands of ballots, the judge ruled that this action should not outweigh the right of those voters to have their votes counted. The judge's ruling reads: 'If the court finds "substantial compliance with the absentee voting laws", the ballots cast are not void or illegal'. 5. Boardman v. Esteva, 323 So.2d 259; 1975 Fla. 6. Ibid. 7. This sense of arbitrariness was enhanced by the failure of two key justices O'Connor and Kennedy to offer any reasoned explanation for their choice to abide by the 12 December deadline, given their apparent unwillingness to sign on to the tortured logic of the Scalia concurrence. 8. For a scholarly treatment of the interpretive flexibility associated with following rules in practice, see H.M. Collins, 'The TEA Set: Tacit Knowledge and Scientific Networks', Science Studies, Vol. 4, No. 2 (April 1974), 165-86, and Collins, Artificial Experts: Social Knowledge and Intelligent Machines (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1989).

Durkheim's The Rules of Sociological Method has never enjoyed the same reputation as his major books, in part because the book is uncongenial to standard interpretations of Durkheim. In particular, its attacks on teleology do not fit his reputation as a functionalist The papers in this special issue address the work historically. Both Porter and Stedman Jones deal with aspects of the context in which Durkheim worked and transformed. Schmaus and Nemedi deal with problems of interpreting Durkheim's development, and Platt discusses the reception of The Rules. The papers shed light on such important questions as the meaning of Durkheim's slogan “society is made of representations.” Durkheim, it appears, was not only what would now be called a constructionist, he went on to ask whether the fact that constructions are real in their consequences did not imply the reality causal reality of constructions and, therefore, a specific kind of “social realism.” The problem The Rules poses, of what is the fundamental stuff of society, is “classic” in significance, and Durkheim's answer is classically radical

Aims Recent UK legislation allows dental therapists or jointly-qualified dental hygienist-therapists to work in the general dental service. This study aimed to investigate the extent of dentists' knowledge of the clinical remit of jointly qualified hygienist-therapists, their willingness to consider employing such a professional, and factors associated with these two measures. Materials and methods A postal questionnaire was sent to 616 NHS-registered dentists in South-East Scotland. Analysis and classification of responses to open-ended questions used standard non-parametric statistical tests and quantitative techniques. Results Following two mailings, a 50% (n = 310) response rate was obtained. A total of 65% of dentists worked in a practice employing a dental hygienist, while only 2% employed a dental therapist. Hygienists tended to work in larger practices. Dentists' knowledge of the clinical remit of the dually-qualified hygienist-therapist was found to be limited, reflecting a restricted and inaccurate view of the professional remit of a hygienist-therapist. The majority (64%) said they would consider employing a hygienist-therapist in their practice, rising to 72% amongst dentists already working with a hygienist. Reasons given by dentists who were negative about this prospect were sought. Those who worked with a hygienist tended to refer to lack of physical space, whilst those who did not tended to cite reservations on clinical skills, competence and responsibilities, or on the costs involved. Conclusions This study identified considerable ignorance and negativity among dentists about the nature and clinical remit of this group of professionals. Dually-qualified hygienist-therapists will be in a position to treat much of the routine disease that exists within the population, and dentists may benefit from education in relation to the substantial contribution these individuals could potentially make to patient care.

These essays critically reassess the widely accepted view that statistical methods of analysis can, and do, yield causal understanding of social phenomena. They emphasize the historical, philosophical and conceptual perspectives that underlie and inform current methodological controversies.

Part 1 Critical theory and political practice: domination or emancipation? the debate over the heritage of critical theory, Helmut Dubiel disorder is possible - an essay on systems, laws, and disobedience, Gunter Frankenberg autonomy, modernity, and community - communitarianism and critical social theory in dialogue, Seyla Benhabib. Part 2 The sociology of political culture: bindings, shackles, brakes - on self-limitation, Claus Offe politics and culture - on the sociocultural analysis of political participation, Klaus Eder politics and the reconstruction of the concept of civil society, Jean cohen and Andrew Arato. Part 3 Historical-philosophical reflections on culture: culture and Bourgeois society - the unity fo reason in a divided society, Hauke Brunkhorst culture and media, Hans-George Gadamer anamnestic reason - a theologian's remarks on the crisis in the "Geisteswissenschaften", Johann Baptist Metz. Part 4 Moral development in childhood and society: moral development and social struggle - Hegel's early social-philosophical doctrines, Axel Honneth knowing and wanting - on moral development in early childhood, Gertrud Nunner-Winkler. Part 5 Foundations of critical social theory: world interpretation and mutual understanding, Johann P. Arnason power, politics, autonomy, Cornelius Castoriadis.