In recent years, the ability of holistic social theories to account for the rights, duties, and even reality of the individual, has been more and more often called into question. At the same time, interest in individualism in a variety of forms has been gaining ground, both as an object of study and as a methodology. This important collection brings together essays by eminent social scientists from several countries. They discuss the question of individualism from historical, methodological, hermeneutical, political, and sociological points of view and attempt to reconcile methodological...
In recent years, the ability of holistic social theories to account for the rights, duties, and even reality of the individual, has been more and more...
Too often we think of the modern political state as a universal institution, the inevitable product of History rather than a specific creation of a very particular history. Bertrand Badie and Pierre Birnbaum here persuasively argue that the origin of the state is a social fact, arising out of the peculiar sociohistorical context of Western Europe. Drawing on historical materials and bringing sociological insights to bear on a field long abandoned to jurists and political scientists, the authors lay the foundations for a strikingly original theory of the birth and subsequent diffusion of the...
Too often we think of the modern political state as a universal institution, the inevitable product of History rather than a specific creation of a ve...
It has become something of an orthodoxy of contemporary sociology that modern democratic industrial societies are essentially alike, and that they are confronted by uniform challenges, whether industrial, social, or political. In this important collection of studies, Professor Birnbaum asserts, however, that the very existence of differentiated states within the western world must, by definition, challenge such a hypothesis. Linking historical and sociological investigation, Birnbaum argues that it is only through divergent state-formation that regional and national state variations can be...
It has become something of an orthodoxy of contemporary sociology that modern democratic industrial societies are essentially alike, and that they are...
In 1898, the Dreyfus Affair plunged French society into a yearlong frenzy. In Paris and provincial villages throughout the country, angry crowds paraded through the streets, threatening to attack Jews and destroy Jewish-owned businesses. Anger about the imagined power of Jewish capital, as well as fears of treason and racial degeneration, made anti-Semitism a convenient banner behind which social and political factions could fall in line. Anti-Semitic feelings that had been simmering in France for decades came boiling to the surface.
Here Pierre Birnbaum guides readers on a tour of...
In 1898, the Dreyfus Affair plunged French society into a yearlong frenzy. In Paris and provincial villages throughout the country, angry crowds pa...
In the late seventeenth century, France prided itself for its rationality and scientific achievements. Yet it was then that Raphael Levy, a French Jew, was convicted, tortured, and executed for an act he did not commit, a fiction deriving from medieval anti-Jewish myth: the ritual murder of a Christian boy to obtain blood for satanic rituals. When Levy was accused of the ritual murder, it was the first accusation of blood libel for a century. Levy's trial, however, became a forum for anti-Jewish accusations, and although the Holy Roman Emperor and a representative of King Louis XIV both tried...
In the late seventeenth century, France prided itself for its rationality and scientific achievements. Yet it was then that Raphael Levy, a French Jew...
A new appreciation of the extraordinary life and legacy of Leon Blum, the first Jewish prime minister of France
Leon Blum (1872-1950), France's prime minister three times, socialist activist, and courageous opponent of the pro-Nazi Vichy regime, profoundly altered French society. It is Blum who is responsible for France's forty-hour week and its paid holidays, which were among the many reforms he championed as a deputy and as prime minister, while acting as a proudly visible Jew, a Zionist, and eventually a survivor of Buchenwald.
This biography fully...
A new appreciation of the extraordinary life and legacy of Leon Blum, the first Jewish prime minister of France
Throughout the nineteenth century, legal barriers to Jewish citizenship were lifted in Europe, enabling organized Jewish communities and individuals to alter radically their relationships with the institutions of the Christian West. In this volume, one of the first to offer a comparative overview of the entry of Jews into state and society, eight leading historians analyze the course of emancipation in Holland, Germany, France, England, the United States, and Italy as well as in Turkey and Russia. The goal is to produce a systematic study of the highly diverse paths to emancipation and to...
Throughout the nineteenth century, legal barriers to Jewish citizenship were lifted in Europe, enabling organized Jewish communities and individual...
