This book argues that the transition by Western society to late modernity has weakened the social order, creating a quasi-anomic state that favors those conditions that place culture in a position of prominence. The preponderance of culture over social, with its affinity for profane and its immanent nature, is posited by the author to have a major impact on the fabric of social life and its implications especially on social solidarity. Gabriel A. Barhaim employs a number of ideas and concepts to illuminate the central theme of a feeble social order. Such concepts are, among others, crisis of reference, desacralization of the social order, the predominance of individual networks as a new form of social solidarity, overpowering of the public sphere, and the reduction in authority of collective representations. The persistent crisis of the social order-strongly visible in the disappearance of major ideologies on the one hand, and in the disintegration of the state and its institutions on the other hand-has been the impetus to cultural phenomena whose prevailing themes encode the fate of individuals, both symbolically and expressively. Barhaim regards the social order as the inspiring scene of action, while culture, with its diverse modes of expressions, provides guiding commentaries. In grappling with these topics in each chapter, the analysis reveals the many facets of culture and the many symbolic forms it takes. All of this provides the necessary commentaries needed to make sense of a bewildered social life, in the context of late modernity. These commentaries should be viewed mostly as a path to understanding the pressing social arrangements, interactions, practices, of contemporary life. Three out of the eight chapters are concerned with the East-Central European experience.

In the wake of apartheid, Law and Sacrifice draws on the uniquely expansive protection of fundamental rights now entrenched in the South African Constitution to outline a new theory of law. The South African Constitution not only protects the rights of people against abuses of power by the state, but also against abuses of power by private legal subjects. Drawing upon the work of contemporary thinkers such as Martin Heidegger, Hannah Arendt, George Bataille, Jacques Derrida Emmanuel Levinas and Jean-Luc Nancy, the author elicits the radical democratic potential of this 'horizontal' notion of rights. Johan van der Walt argues that apartheid must be understood as more than a racist abuse of power, and here he articulates its 'sacrificial logic'. It is in going beyond this logic, he maintains, that the truly democratic potential of the South African Constitution can be understood: in a radical formal and substantive equality that offers the legal basis for rethinking a post-apartheid future. Combining a rigorous theoretical understanding with a subtle political engagement, Law and Sacrifice is a dazzling interrogation of the limits and possibilities of democratic pluralism. It will be of interest to political and legal theorists as well as to those who are concerned with South African law and politics.

This book argues that it was primarily the encounter with totalitarianism that dissolved the ideals of American progressivism and crystallized the ideals of postwar liberalism. In politics, the ideal of governance by a strong, independent executive was rejected and a politics of contending interest groups was embraced.

Focusing on portrayals of Mussolini's Italy, Hitler's Germany, and Stalin's Russia in U.S. films, magazine and newspaper articles, books, plays, speeches, and other texts, Benjamin Alpers traces changing American understandings of dictatorship from the la

With original contributions from leading experts in the field, this cutting-edge Research Handbook combines theoretical advancement with the newest empirical research to explore the sociology of organizations. While including the traditional study of formal, corporate business organizations, the Handbook also explores more transitory, informal grassroots organizations, such as NGOs and artist communities.

The U.S. government has essentially two choices when dealing with adversarial states: isolate them or engage them. Isolate or Engage systematically examines the challenges to and opportunities for U.S. diplomatic relations with nine intensely adversarial states—China, Cuba, Iran, Libya, North Korea, U.S.S.R./Russia, Syria, Venezuela, and Vietnam: states where the situation is short of conventional war and where the U.S. maintains limited or no formal diplomatic relations with the government. In such circumstances, "public diplomacy"—the means by which the U.S. engages with citizens in other countries so they will push their own governments to adopt less hostile and more favorable views of U.S. foreign policies—becomes extremely important for shaping the context within which the adversarial government makes important decisions affecting U.S. national security interests. At a time when the norm of not talking to the enemy is a matter of public debate, the book examines the role of both traditional and public diplomacy with adversarial states and reviews the costs and benefits of U.S. diplomatic engagement with the publics of these countries. It concludes that while public diplomacy is not a panacea for easing conflict in interstate relations, it is one of many productive channels that a government can use in order to stay informed about the status of its relations with an adversarial state, and to seek to improve those relations.