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A core idea in all of Edward Westermarck's studies is the strong connection between nature and culture. As attempts to survive environmental threats, moral ideas contain similarities in a very wide range of historical situations. Westermarck connected nature and culture in the three major fields of his scholarship: in his studies of the human marriage and family, in his Moroccan field-work dealing with rituals and moral beliefs, and in his studies of the origin of moral ideas and emotions. There have been remarkable vicissitudes in his scholarly fame. In the early 20th century he was a leading international sociologist. His large treatises on the history of human marriage and the origin of the moral ideas were translated to many languages and his ideas were intensively discussed. Already in the 1920s Westermarck's scholarship based on evolutionism and Darwinism tended to become neglected, and during the subsequent decades it was largely ignored by both sociologists and anthropologists. During the two last decades of the 20th century, however, tendencies towards a renaissance of the ideas of Edward Westermarck are clearly observable. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article focuses on the future of the social sciences in the 21st century. The development of social science will depend on societal inventions, which we don't know before they are made. Social science is focused on what actually happens in the world and society, but because societal and social changes are based on social inventions and new social forms, it is a dubious activity to try to predict its content. Immanuel Wallerstein began his opening address in the XIVth World Congress of Sociology by stating that sociology primarily is a culture and not a body of ready-made concepts and proven statements. The same goes for most of the social sciences. The author also tends to agree very much with the general tone of a recent article by Margaret Archer published in March 1999 issue of the journal "International Sociology." She emphasized how social scientists always have to account for circumstances that are not of their own choosing, and that there always are social changes which are neither the fault nor the accomplishment of the social sciences. Yet, social science has to change when the world changes. This is also a background to the fact that the social sciences are often in a crisis, or put even more strongly, it is a natural predicament of social science to be in a crisis.

Scenarios and projections into the future are strongly influenced by our conceptions of the past Misconceptions about historical development are never entirely harmless. Industrialization is often conceived of as an irreversible process while traditional peasant society is pictured as stable and monolithic. Yet recent research clearly shows that processes of industrialization existed in the countryside long before large scale production began to concentrate in urban areas It also indicates that in many rural regions there was a massive proletarianization prior to the great movements to urban areas in the 19th century. These misconceptions tend to blur and hamper our thinking about the future. First, if industrialization is thought of as an irreversible process, alternatives to present development become difficult to carry our in practice In fact, many alternatives are known already bur there is no political will to implement them Secondly, misconceptions tend to lead to an over-romanticized conception of rural life. There are already some signs of a rural revival such as population movements from town to country Some forms of migration may end disastrously if the migrating individuals arc without any form of organizational and collective resources. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article presents a commentary on papers about the sociology of religion. The question of the influence of the sociology of religion on general sociology and on the general intellectual debate is easier to pose than to answer. There is a growing awareness that there are well-developed sociologies other than those which dominate Western social science. Reading Emile Poulat's paper about the founding of the Conférence Internationale de Sociologie des Religions, one is struck by the fact that the sociology of religion is presented as a world of its own. It is as if the sociology of religion does not need any external or outside justifications for its existence and development. Meanwhile, James Beckford points out that there have been various studies describing and revealing some important social tendencies. There has been proliferation of studies of religious movements, charismatic renewals and fundamentalist uprisings with visible and dramatic effects on social life and societal frameworks. Industrial society had a fairly stable structure and an institutional build-up based on rules that are centrally enforced by state authorities and shared norms. The information society displays a much greater variety of codes, world views and cosmologies.

Political sociology is much more difficult to delineate than it was thirty to forty years ago. In the 1950's there existed a vacuum, an almost empty borderland between political science and sociology. Studies focusing on both social structure and politics, on the simultaneous occurrence of structural and political change, and on large-scale historical processes behind the rise of nations and states were rare. The founding of the Committee on Political Sociology in 1959 was an administrative act of revolutionary consequence in sociology and political science. Political sociology was neither a branch of sociology nor of political science, but a genuine border field created to undertake field studies and gauge the impact of structure and culture on politics on the one hand, and the effects of politics upon society and its social institutions on the other. Political sociology is focused on dominant social and political cleavages and on master change in society. Transformations influencing social structure, politics, economy, and culture are the prime objects of political sociology. Today European and also Scandinavian societies are in the aftermath of and in the midst of two revolutionary changes.

The article focuses on Swedish sociology. A number of general surveys of Swedish sociology have been published. Despite differences in formulation, opinions concerning the principal trends in Swedish sociology show a broad measure of agreement. Historically, a quite natural starting point is that the Nordic countries were outside the mainstream of Europe when industrialism came into its own, while the great classics of sociology were written in the countries at the center of this process, where the dominant trends of industrial society first emerged in full outline. One might say that circumstances in the Nordic countries were not as favorable for potential social thinkers to found an intellectual tradition of their own. The late 1960s was a time of radical reexamination of sociology in many countries, including Sweden, where the reaction against traditional sociology provoked debates around two central issues: soft data and value judgments, to use sociologist Ander Gullberg's phrases. Although the debates bore features peculiar to Sweden and referred to specifically Swedish issues, they may nonetheless be regarded as offshoots of the sharply increased international interest in hermeneutics and in Marxist-inspired critical sociology.

The article focuses on Scandinavian sociology. Sociology in the Scandinavian countries that is Denmark, Finland, Norway, and Sweden does not have its roots in national traditions of speculative theorizing about the nature of man and society. The absence of a long intellectual history of significant social philosophy and macrosociological speculation is a conspicuous feature of the four countries. This characteristic of both Scandinavian sociology and the Scandinavian societies can to some extent be explained sociologically. To state that Scandinavian sociology does not rest on national traditions of social speculation is not to say that sociology in these four countries is without national roots. It is, however, striking that the forerunners of present-day sociology belonged to a strongly empirical tradition. In all four Scandinavian countries there is a long and honorable record of studies in government, statistics, social welfare, and ethnography dealing with sociological problems. When sociology in its present form was established at the Scandinavian universities after World War II, it developed in an academic milieu with a strongly positivistic orientation.

This article provides information on the journal Acta Sociologica and its role in the formative years of Scandinavian sociology. Since its foundation in 1955, Acta Sociologica has been open for papers from different orientations and schools. Important paradigmatic changes have been clearly reflected in its pages. In Acta Sociologica's first five volumes, the theoretical papers strongly emphasized the importance of social factors in perceptions and behavior. The description of Acta Sociologica's relation to the studies of the welfare state is revealing in the way it has functioned during the years. A very basic characteristics of Acta has been a kind of pluralism. It was never an organ for just one kind of theoretical and ideological orientation. Positivism, Marxism, structuralism, post-modernism have all been reflected in its pages, but Acta was never a protagonist of just one kind of learning. One of the consequences of such pluralism is that there never has been anything truly dramatic associated with the contents of and in Acta Sociologica. For Scandinavian sociology and sociologists, Acta Sociologica has some special functions. Like all scientists, Scandinavian sociologists should of course aspire to be the best in the world. Acta Sociologica has been one of the important mechanisms for Scandinavian inter-comparisons.

The comparative study of nations and countries has been built on the notion that causal inferences in the field should approximate the design of natural science experiments. It seems fair to say, however, that there is not a single social science comparative study which has succeeded in any strict manner in complying with the rules of scientific experiments and the canons of John Stuart Mill. The attempts to base comparative sociology on a quantitative tradition with roots in the rules for scientific experiments have nevertheless been fruitful in the sense that they have helped to raise and formulate many core problems of comparative research. Yet, the time is ripe for realizing that most comparative studies would greatly profit from a combined quantitative and qualitative approach. It is generally assumed that the qualitative study is best at the explorative stage of a project and that it ought to be followed by a more strict quantitative study. In the light of experience from many comparative studies it is reasonable to argue that it is the other way around and that quantitative analysis usually is at its best at the explorative stage whereas a qualitativeoriented analysis provides the final insight and understanding. The need for a reversal of the order of the two kinds of approach is not a purely methodological issue. The call for quantitative, comparative research proliferated at a time when internationalization and the integration of single countries into bigger units appeared to be not only politically salient but also humane goals. Today the preservation of the nationally and ethnically unique in the midst of homogenizing and uniformizing international tendencies has at least in small countries become not only politically but also humanely important. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]