Emergence Of Industrial Society Research Articles

SECULARIZATION AND ITS DISCONTENTS

From the beginning of sociology in the mid-19th century, the dominant concern was with the emergence of industrial society. Early sociologists had a lot to say about the significance of religion to this development and vice versa. They laid down a pattern of concepts and theoretical arguments which have tended to highlight a very limited number of reasons for regarding religion as an interesting topic for sociologists. The pattern is dominated by the theme of religion’s eclipse by industrial society. In various ways, and with a bewildering variety of embellishments, social scientists have overwhelmingly framed religion as a topic of marginal and declining significance. Explanations for the downward trajectory of religion have taken many forms, but the ground-bass refers monotonously to aspects of industrialization and modernization. This leads an air of inevitability to the process which is conventionally called ‘secularization’.

Relevance of Piagetian Cross-Cultural Psychology to the Humanities and Social Sciences

Jean Piaget held views according to which there are parallels between ontogeny and the historical development of culture, sciences, and reason. His books are full of remarks and considerations about these parallels, with reference to many logical, physical, social, and moral phenomena.This article explains that Piagetian cross-cultural psychology has delivered the decisive data needed to extend the research interests of Piaget. These data provide a basis for reconstructing not only the history of sciences but also the history of religion, politics, morals, culture, philosophy, and social change and the emergence of industrial society. Thus, it is possible to develop Piagetian theory as a historical anthropology in order to provide a basis for the humanities and social sciences.

Etiche religiose. E lo spirito dei modelli di welfare state in Europa

The paper is organized in four sections. Section one presents a brief overview of how the classical sociological theories deal with the religious phenomenon in Western societies. The following section discusses the secularization theory as offered by Norris and Inglehart in Sacred and Secular (2005), where the classic functionalist theory of secularization - that religion would gradually fade in importance and cease to be significant with the emergence of industrial society - is criticized and, a new theory of secularization as a social process linked to the level of existential (un)security occurring in a country is developed. Within this framework, the role of the welfare safety net, and other effective delivery of government services, is analyzed as a means for many people to reduce their vulnerability to sudden, unpredictable risks. Section three investigates the relationship between religion and social policies. Starting from the recognition that the role of religious denominations has been neglected by the comparative studies on welfare state models, we suggest a new classification of welfare systems based on the mainstream religions existing in a country. The different welfare regimes are analyzed along the line Catholic vs. Protestant (Southern vs. Northern welfare models), and along the line Lutherans vs. Calvinist reformed churches (East/West welfare systems). The fourth section illustrates five analytic dimensions of the relationship between religion and welfare state systems. The five dimensions are the following: the principles and the moral norms (precepts) of religious doctrines; the agencies and services directly managed by religious institutions; the political parties with a religious orientation; the cultural orientation and values of the public opinion; the relations between the Church and the public institutions.

How “New” Are “New Wars”? Global Economic Change and the Study of Civil War

Attempts to comprehend, through empirical inquiry and philosophical reflection, the likely effects of deeper, seemingly unstoppable processes of socioeconomic change on patterns of violent conflict within and across societies are not new. Indeed, the relationship between the momentous transformations wrought by industrialization and the longterm prospects for war and peace was a prominent theme of political and sociological thought in nineteenth-century Europe. In a celebrated lecture, delivered at the London School of Economics in 1957, Raymond Aron observed how thinkers such as Auguste Comte and Herbert Spencer, both profoundly conscious of in a period of transition, had been prepared to make prophecies about the future of war boldness and dogmatism astound us. (1) By the time Aron himself came to reflect on the subject, the horrors of two world wars and the terrifying prospect of another even more destructive conflict ensured that long-range historical predictions were decidedly out of fashion. Instead, the Cold War came to be marked by an acute concern with the present; a concern that shaped and, in important respects, also distorted thinking about war and peace. The latter was true in particular for the study of civil or intrastate wars, wars whose local sources and regional dynamic were often overshadowed by a preoccupation with the central strategic balance and the competition for influence between East and West. The end of the Cold War, then, involved more than just a release from the balance of terror. It also had a liberating impact on the study of conflict, causing a strong feeling of living in a period of transition to again permeate much of the writings and debates about sources of war and peace in the international system. While the emergence of industrial society had preoccupied an earlier generation of thinkers, has, to many, assumed a similar role of describing the sense that we are living through a period of universal, far-reaching, and irreversible changes. Structure, Qualifications, and Argument in Brief Of special interest to this article is the more specific suggestion that processes of globalization have contributed to changes in the nature of war so profound that one is justified in talking of Wars. (2) This claim to newness rests, in part, on the assertion that changes in the nature and workings of the global economy, especially in the 1980s and 1990s, are impacting uniquely on the patterns and character of intrastate and/or region-wide conflict around the world. This article examines this assertion in greater detail. It does so, however, against the backdrop of a wider debate, one that has focused on the economic agendas of belligerents, local populations caught up in conflict, and external actors in the emergence and consolidation of contemporary wars. There are two reasons for thus widening the debate. In the first place, the salience of economic agendas in contemporary wars is considered by many to be directly and causally connected to changes in the global economic environment over the past quarter century or so. Secondly, by assessing the comparative importance of one set of factors, the article hopes to contribute to a broader discussion, which the New Wars debate has helped to stimulate, about the nature of contemporary wars. It is a basic premise of the article that this can most usefully be done by drawing upon the actual knowledge, however incomplete and fragmentary, that we now have of individual conflicts. As such, what follows is not an exercise in grand theorizing about global economic change and war. It represents a more modest, though necessary, effort to test generalizations, unspoken assumptions, and implied causal connections that are often made about contemporary forms of warfare, against our understanding of individual cases. To this end, special attention is given throughout the article to what we know (and, indeed, what we do not fully comprehend) about wars in West and Central Africa, Algeria, and the former Yugoslavia. …

THE MODERNIZATION OF SWEDISH CREDIT MARKETS, 1840–1905: EVIDENCE FROM PROBATE RECORDS

This study estimates the size of the so-called informal, or unintermediated, credit market in one Swedish city through a period of economic transformation. In the early 1840s promissory notes accounted for more than half of the total credit market, and almost four times the value of credit channeled through the banking system. Even in the 1870s, the promissory-note market was twice the size of the loan volume of the banking system. By 1905 bank-based credit had finally surpassed the informal variety; but even then, outstanding promissory notes were almost three-fifths as great as total bank credits to noncorporate borrowers. It is well known that the fundamental shift from agriculture to industry during the nineteenth century was accompanied by a transformation of the financial sector that was at least as revolutionary. For most of the past 50 years, however, research in economic history has been sharply focused on the new factory industries and their economic and social effects. The explosive development of financial markets during the 1980s and 1990s has once again directed the interest of historians to the financial sector and its role in the growth process. It can be argued that the emergence of industrial societies during the nineteenth century was actually the result of commercialization and monetization, as well as of new forms of savings, lending, and financial intermediation. These were necessary conditions for the divisions of labor and economies of scale that are at the heart of modem economic growth. Sweden's transition to a modem industrial society was a lengthy process, one punctuated by three major booms. The booms of the 1850s, the 1870s, and the two decades preceding World War I not only increased Sweden's GDP and its investment ratio, they also had a profound impact on the political system and on incentive structures. Two closely linked developments

Community, industrial society and contemporary debate1

This article revisits the debate about community, which was stimulated by the reception of the idea of industrial society into social thinking. It asks what models of community were offered as a response to the emergence of industrial society, and whether they have present‐day descendants. The suggestions will be that present‐day and ‘industrial’ models of community can be linked in ways that complement, or even challenge, the typology of models of community associated with the major political ideologies; and that there are more interesting ways to classify thinking about types of community than the alleged contrast between liberalism and communitarianism, or individualism and communitarianism, recognizes.

The Fontana Economic History of Europe. Volume 3, The Industrial Revolution, 1700–1914. Volume 4, part one, The Emergence of Industrial Societies. Edited by Carlo M. Cipolla. New York: Barnes and Noble, 1976. Pp. i, 624; i, 368. $19.50 each.

The Fontana Economic History of Europe. Volume 3, The Industrial Revolution, 1700–1914. Volume 4, part one, The Emergence of Industrial Societies. Edited by Carlo M. Cipolla. New York: Barnes and Noble, 1976. Pp. i, 624; i, 368. $19.50 each. - Volume 37 Issue 2

The Fontana Economic History of Europe, Vol. 3: The Industrial Revolution, Vol. 4 (In Two Parts): The Emergence of Industrial Societies

The Fontana Economic History of Europe, Vol. 3: The Industrial Revolution, Vol. 4 (In Two Parts): The Emergence of Industrial Societies

The Fontana Economic History of Europe. Volume 3, The Industrial Revolution; volume 4, the Emergence of Industrial Societies

The Fontana Economic History of Europe. Volume 3, The Industrial Revolution; volume 4, the Emergence of Industrial Societies

Politics, Economic Surplus and Redistribution in the American States: A Test of a Theory

A test of Lenski's theory of distributive systems is applied to cross-sectional data for the American states. In part. Lenski's theory is an attempt to explain the reversal of trends toward social inequality with the emergence of industrial society. The results of this study indicate that two of the explanatory factors specified by Lenski-rising levels of economic surplus and the appearance of mass political organizations-are mutually contingent in their impact upon redistributive policy-making in the American states. The findings also support a general version of Key's interparty competition hypothesis.

Some Religious Factors in the Emergence of Industrial Society in England

The emergence of industrial society in England was accelerated by Puritanism, but Puritanism's influence depended on a complex interaction among religious, political, and economic spheres. Seventeenth-century English society experienced massive social and cultural polarization. Both emerging camps deviated radically from English tradition while diverging from one another: the Anglican-Royalists toward a much more peasant type of society; the PuritanParliamentarians toward a much more proto-industrial type. The development of each sociocultural system was catalyzed by cumulative reactions against the other. Their development and the interaction between them was complicated by differential stress on nationhood, religion, and social class. Neither these phenomena nor the emergence of the current form of western industrial society can be explained adequately by deterministic specification; assessment of cumulatively limiting necessary conditions is needed.