Basis Of Society Research Articles

Etiek en kapitalisme

Ethics and capitalism The main purpose of this essay is to demonstrate that, on the basis of Biblical Ethics, criticism on Marxism and Communism does not simultaneously imply adherence to Capitalism, for the most vulnerable point in Classical Capitalism is its lack of ethics as a leading principle. Since the days of Adam Smith, political economy (the common wealth of society) in Capitalism is metaphysically assumed, and in this sense derived, not from reality nor any proven ethical principle, but from a concept of a private economy (the competition of private greed) as a basis for society.

Changing Values of Work and Leisure

That work is both necessary and desirable, for individuals and for society, is one of the most deeply ingrained beliefs in the value system of Western civilisation (Macarov, 1985). The concept of work is one of the most widely spread and deeply embedded elements in individual psyches, the structure of societal institutions, and the value system of industrial civilisations. It is the measuring rod of individuals, the goal of organisations, and the basis of society. It is almost as encrusted with value-orientations and transcendental meanings as is religion. Work is seen as both necessary and desirable for the individual and for society (Macarov, 1981). Political, social and economic programmes are all based upon the assumption that people need to and want to work, and that society needs all the work that everyone capable of labouring can produce. Work structures the day, the year, and the career. On an individual basis, people are judged not only by the work that they do, but also by the manner in which they work. People who do not or cannot work are viewed as somehow outside the mainstream of life (Ritti & Hyman, 1977). 'A hard worker' is an accolade, while 'he (or she) is lazy' is a damning indictment. Social welfare programmes throughout the world are linked to the realm of work through restrictions on coverage, vestedness, administration, and payments arising from past or present work situations (Macarov, 1980). Rehabilitation efforts-physical, social or emotional-use work as the principal instrument, and holding a job as evidence of success. Prisons use work as punishment, as rehabilitation, and as timefilling devices. Governments expend enormous resources of time, energy, and money in attempting to achieve full employment, and social workers in some areas spend the great bulk of their time dealing with the unemployed and problems which arise from lack of work.

Hobbes and the Right of Self-Defence

The weakness of the Hobbesian sovereign which arises out of what the individual can do in his own defence is well established. What has not been examined is the attempts Hobbes makes to counter this and that is the concern of this article. He appeals to the individual to exercise caution on three distinct grounds: on grounds of gallantry, on grounds of ‘reasonability’ and finally by reference to theology. Each appeal is examined and each is seen to fail. Such is Hobbes's insistence on Passion and Will as the basis of society that he finds it impossible to appeal to Reason and Nature to temper its exercise.

Towards a History of Lost Corners in the World

There are large areas of the world whose pre-industrial economic and social history virtually remains a blank. Even in Europe some historical periods remain almost unexplored. The most conspicuous cases, however, are found outside that continent. In Africa, for example, there is an area, almost the size of West Africa, or the size of the United States east of the Mississippi, for which not even a general historical survey of the pre-colonial period exists. This huge equatorial region-mostly covered by the tropical rain forestextends from the Atlantic Ocean to the Great Lakes, between lat.4.N. and lat.4.S. In this article it is used as a case-study to document a more general argument. 1 Lack of knowledge has been the main reason adduced to account for such big gaps in the historical record. I shall argue, however, that while conventional sources are indeed often scarce or even absent, nevertheless knowledge about the past is often more substantial than is commonly realized, and statements can be made with confidence about such blank periods or areas. It is a matter of finding the traces of the past where they are: in unconventional places. Historians have not found many conventional written, or even oral, sources in Equatorial Africa. They were discouraged, moreover, by the prevalence of an anthropological model that presented the societies of that area in static terms. According to this model, kinship groups were the basis of society. They grew, split, grew again and so on without any institutional development at all. This theory of segmentary lineage organization practically precluded any social

RESPONDING TO AN SOS - SAVE OUR SHORES

The rising sea level issue affecting U.S. coastal policy is reviewed, and the U. S. Army Corps of Engineers coastal role is summarized. Three case studies are provided to demonstrate the successful application of several structural devices available to solve different coastal problems. The coastal engineer, and other scientists, should contribute significantly to the information upon which society bases its decisions on use of the shoreline.

The Last Old Nation: Austrian National Consciousness since 1945

If eighteenth-century America was the first new nation, twentieth-century Austria is the last old one.'1 Common to both the preindustrial American and the postindustrial Austrian cases is a process of cognitive mobilization which resulted in the decay of an old and the development of a new national consciousness. In North America the traditional identities of those who had once thought of themselves as loyal subjects of the British Crown were replaced by their new self-perceptions as Americans. At the outset of the nineteenth century Austrian national consciousness was a mixture of supranational loyalty to the Habsburg dynasty and of subnational identification with individual provinces. The growth of a German national consciousness during the second half of the century was rapid, and German elements prevailed in Austrian national consciousness during the interwar years. In the American case a revolution in the peoples' minds preceded victory in the Revolutionary War; in the Austrian case it followed the defeat of the Axis powers in World War II. The development of an Austrian national consciousness since 1945 has had an important beneficial effect on Austrian politics. The political cohesion of the Second Austrian Republic has been striking in contrast to the political divisions of the First. In their attempts to account for this change, most observers have adopted a view from the top of society, analyzing the structure and strategy of Austria's political elites.2 This account benefits by a supplementary explanation which chooses a perspective from society's base through an analysis of the effect of mass beliefs on the traditionally explosive question of Austria's national identity. Austria's new national consciousness has become one of the brackets which maintains the cohesion between the different political camps (Lager) in Austria.

Questions Concerning the Theory of Socialist Reproduction

The theory of socialist reproduction is one of the most important divisions in the political economy of socialism, attracting particularly great attention both from scientists and from practical workers. This theory reveals the patterns in the development of socialist economics and in the building of the material base of communist society. Economic practice is guided by this theory. The planning and management of the economy are based on this theory. The advantages of the socialist economic system over the capitalist system are clearly manifested in the course of socialist reproduction. These advantages determine the rapid rates of development of material production as the basis for society's entire life and for improving the material and cultural well-being of the people. Between 1950 and 1967, the national income of the USSR increased 4.2 times; that of the USA, 1.8; that of Great Britain, 1.5; that of France, 2.2; and that of Italy, 2.5 times. During the same years, the share of the socialist nations i...

Marriage in the USSR

Marriage is the beginning and the "nucleus" of the family. The relations between the spouses customarily "set the tone" for all other relationships within the family. However, the nature of the husband-wife relationship depends above all on the motivations that determined the conclusion of the given marriage. The influence of the economic basis of society and of social existence as a whole is, to a considerable degree, implemented through these motivations and mediated by them.

Intellectual and Class Alienation: Oxford idealist diagnoses and prescriptions

Few terms have had more complex fortunes than “alienation” and “intellectuals”; few at this time are more modish and less clear. It would be instructive to devote an entire paper to tracing their histories and plotting all their variations in present usage; it would be no less enlightening to determine just why these two concepts are so often coupled. Perhaps the single most important reason is to be found in the numerous attempts to classify and explain the great modern revolutions, particularly those of France and Russia. These have been frequently characterized as qualitatively different from all those that preceded them. Inspired by, or producing in their course, total ideologies, these revolutions have produced a new style of politics. Its origins and patterns of development have received increasingly close scrutiny. Among the most consistently favored hypotheses has been that linking revolution to intellectuals. This theory need not be phrased as did Burke and Taine, who seem to have believed that the world would be spared great political convulsions, if only there were no radical intellectuals, subverting by their impractical speculations, the bases of society and politics. Tocqueville, whose views are occasionally confounded with those of Burke and Taine, did assert that thorough-going revolutions cannot occur without the existence of a general theory about the nature of the good society, a theory that cannot be realized except by changing completely, and possibly violently, the status of persons and property under the existing order (1).

Dozoku: An Example of Evolution and Transition in Japanese Village Society

“ …from the moment when a tribal community settles down finally upon a definite space of land, the land begins to be the basis of society in place of the Kinship. The change is extremely gradual, and in some particulars it has not even now been fully accomplished, but it has been going on through the whole course of history. The constitution of the Family through actual blood-relationship is of course an observable fact, but, for all groups of men larger than the Family, the Land on which they live tends to become the bond of union between them, at the expense of Kinship, ever more and more vaguely conceived.”

Islam and Society-Formation in Morocco Past and Present

B ECAUSE Islam defined all the institutions of a social system, it has been claimed that those who embraced it became sufficiently integrated to form the basis of society.' Taking national boundaries into consideration, the logical extension of the argument would be to assume the existence of asmanysocieties as there were Islamic countries. Presentday modifications and secularization of Islam to meet the requirements of modern life are, theoretically, processes in countries which were already Islamic so-

Communalism and Communism in Malaya

THE nation-building programmes of those Asian countries which have recently freed themselves from colonial control are challenged today by two main disruptive forces, communalism and communism. The claims of dissatisfied racial, religious or linguistic minorities still seriously impede the political unification of countries like India, Ceylon, Burma and Indonesia. In all of these countries the disunity caused by conflicts between communal or national groups offers favourable opportunities for the spread of communism, since communal grievances are rarely free from social and economic implications. With its specious claims to resolve the national problem by the destruction of the class basis of society, communism, as in Eastern Europe, hopes to find a useful hunting ground in those Asian countries that are afflicted by internal group conflicts. It is significant that the communists in India, Burma and Ceylon have been quick to support separatist and minority movements. But the one country in South Asia today in which the interaction between communalism and communism is proving most disastrous is Malaya. It is the formidable combination of these two challenges to unity within a single small dependent territory that gives the Malayan problem its truly baffling complexity. Communalism is the inescapable legacy of European colonial rule, a symptom both of decaying empires and of the birth pangs of new states. For a comparatively brief period in the histories of Asia and Africa, European colonial administrations acted as a temporary cement, holding fast in racial mosaics the medlies of tribes and nationalities brought together to serve the needs of tropical colonisation. But cultures comparable to those of the homogeneous societies of the West could not arise in the Asian and African colonies simply as a result of fifty to a hundred years of subjection to a common colonial government. Though Western technology, economic organisation, administration, law and language undoubtedly set unifying forces in motion,

Relation of Social Change to the Economic Bases of Society

Relation of Social Change to the Economic Bases of Society

The Cultural Functions of Social Stratification: I: Regarding the Genetic Bases of Society

The Cultural Functions of Social Stratification: I: Regarding the Genetic Bases of Society

Inner Laws of Sociology. A New Sociology by Luigi Sturzo

BOOK REVIKWS Inner Laws of Sociology. A New Sociology. By LuiGI STURZO. New York: P. J. Kenedy & Sons, 1944. Pp. xxxvi +314. In this review we shall confine ourselves to the consideration of several main topics that seem particularly relevant for readers of a theological and philosophical magazine. To cover the book in any wider detail would be of interest primarily to those directly engaged in the study of sociology. We urge those concerned to read the book fully and carefully, for it has a profundity of observation and wealth of material notably lacking in the books usually written on sociology. We shall, accordingly, divide this review into three parts. The first will concern a very broad outline of the book as a whole, commenting only on certain parts which require special consideration; this will serve also to sketch the extent of Don Sturzo's system of sociology. The second part will take up a crucial question, namely, the relation of society and the individual. The third part will consider, though inadequately, sociology as a science and its relation to other knowledge. I. The first pages of the Introduction set out the scope and method of Don Sturzo as a sociologist. Taking sociology as the " study of social life in its complexity and in its synthesizing factors," Don Sturzo assigns two possible methods to it: the experimental, an "analytic study of social facts, to bring out their constant elements and from these to derive their nature and laws "; and the historical, which is " studying the social syntheses and their factors in their concreteness and in the dialectic of human process." He chooses the hitter method while not ignoring the advantages to be gained in the former. He rejects the school of positivist sociologists who have attempted to create a social biology with emphasis upon an organistic or mechanical conception of society. He likewise rejects those who have a " metaphysical " conception of society wherein society is variously conceived as principle, will, idea, or spirit. For Don Sturzo, " the basis of society is simply the human individual taken in his concreteness and complexity as an original and irresolvable principle." Society is not an entity or an organism outside and above the individual, nor is the individual a reality outside and above society. Either taken in itself, as distinct and opposed to the other, is a logical abstraction. 520 BOOK REVIEWS 521 Hence society is the " sum total of individuals." In an attempt to avoid the conclusion that society would " thus be reduced to a mere movement of individual actions and reactions," Don Sturzo maintains that he gives " to the associate instinct its full value as an ever-developing exigency and social impulse, and by this very fact we resolve the individual into society." This, however, is not an evident conclusion of the author's analysis of the relation of society and the individual in the main body of the book. This initial view of sociology and its use of the historical method is the basic presupposition of Don Sturzo as a sociologist. His. understanding of historicism is contained in the following definition: " Historicism is the systematic conception of history as human process, realized by immanent forces, unified in rationality, yet moving from a transcendental and absolute principle towards a transcendental and absolute end." This concerns, rather, the philosophy of history, which is not the same thing as history conceived as philosophy. The latter position is taken by Don Sturzo: " ... history, thus conceived, presents itself with all the characteristics of philosophy. . . . Basically, philosophy and history might be said to be convertible, since both in different ways have as object the rationality that finds realization in human events according to the general laws governing reality." The full explanation sought in history requires philosophical knowledge, but this means that a historian, to the extent necessary , should also be a philosopher; he is not equipped to give such knowledge in virtue of his ability as a historian (though in fact many historians write as though history were the universal science). To insist upon the distinction between philosophy and history being kept clear is not by way of opposing them but rather of relating them in such a...

The Economic Regions of Germany

F ROM the dynamic point of view an economic region is an area of interrelated activities and kindred interest and organization. It is an entity of human space-relationships, which are effected through the medium of the route pattern and the urban centers. Such a region, therefore, embraces the complex and closely woven fabric of intercourse by means of which are effected the transfer of goods and persons and the distribution of services, news, and ideas, the very bases of society. The revolution in transport and the great changes in the structure of society have largely outmoded the old regional organizations. In various countries much attention has been given of late to the problem of recasting the political framework and bringing it more into harmony with existing economic and social conditions.' In France, for example, economic regionalism2 had an early and energetic start, and at one stage there was a possibility that new regions would displace the departments as administrative units. In Britain various plans for regional reorganization have been put forward.3 In the United States the problem has been approached more thoroughly by the social scientists, who have found that the areal examination of social and economic phenomena is indispensable for the analysis of urban-rural interrelationships and the nature of social changes and maladjustments.4 The problem has also received a great deal of attention in Germany in the postwar years; for here there exists on the one hand a political framework that, with its numerous territorial inliers and outliers, is a chaotic legacy from the past and on the other hand a vast economic and social structure, not much more than half a century old, that has called into being new major units of life and orientation.5 Abortive attempts were made to recast the divisions in accordance with the Weimar Constitution in I9I9. And in the postwar years numerous public authorities and scholars published the results of elaborate investigations8 of various aspects of the general problem and

The Physical Basis of Society.

The Physical Basis of Society.

Book Review: The Physical Basis of Society

Book Review: The Physical Basis of Society

The Physical Basis of Society . By Carl Kelsey, Professor of Sociology in the University of Pennsylvania. New York. D. Appleton & Co. 1916. Pp. xvi + 406.

<i>The Physical Basis of Society</i> . By Carl Kelsey, Professor of Sociology in the University of Pennsylvania. New York. D. Appleton &amp; Co. 1916. Pp. xvi + 406.

The Physical Basis of Society . By Carl Kelsey, Professor of Sociology in the University of Pennsylvania. New York. D. Appleton &amp; Co. 1916. Pp. xvi + 406.

<i>The Physical Basis of Society</i> . By Carl Kelsey, Professor of Sociology in the University of Pennsylvania. New York. D. Appleton &amp; Co. 1916. Pp. xvi + 406.