Social Research articles from December 2001

Social Research archives from December 2001

Editor's introduction.(Central and Eastern Europe)(Brief Article)(Editorial)
December 22, 2001... This is the eighth issue in the Social Research series on Central and Eastern Europe. The series was launched soon after the momentous events of fall 1989. In its periodic returns to the region over the last decade, the journal has examined...

The Montesinos virus.(democracy, dictatorship, Peru, Serbia, Poland)
December 22, 2001... This essay was written in the early fall of 2000, and since then immense political changes have occurred in Peru and Yugoslavia. In November 2000, Peruvian President Alberto Fujimori fled to Japan and, since the summer of 2001, Vladimiro...

The lost treasure of Solidarity: embarrassment and amnesia.(Poland)
December 22, 2001... TWENTY-ONE years after its birth as an independent, self-governing trade union, Solidarity is still difficult to categorize, since it does not resemble any other known form of association. Perhaps Michael Walzer's observation best grasps the...

A self-governing/society twenty years after: democracy and the third sector in Poland *.(Statistical Data Included)
December 22, 2001... TWENTY-one years ago, strikes in the Polish shipyards broke into the world's headlines and Poland appeared to be a country where totalitarian communism--to which the democratic West had already adjusted itself as both traditional foe and...

Civil society, pluralism, and the future of East and Central Europe.
December 22, 2001... CIVIL society is one of the most frequently used concepts in interpretations of the decline in and sudden breakdown of the former Soviet bloc (Di Palma, 1991). Lately, mainstream Western political science discourse has adopted the concept, and...

1989 and the creativity of the political.(collapse of Soviet bloc)
December 22, 2001... WHEN we think about the meanings of 1989, we usually think about big issues: the fall of an empire, the victory of capitalism, the end of an ideology--if not ideology in general; the end of history, an international effervescence of democracy,...

Decent society and/or civil society?
December 22, 2001... FIRST a word about my title: William James, trying to explain the meaning of the term "or," allegedly said that it expresses a feeling of the hesitation one has at a crossroads, deciding which way to go (see Margalit, 1996: 290). I feel obliged...

A tentative answer to the question: has civil society cultural memory?
December 22, 2001... WHEN speaking about cultural memory, I do not have in mind traces of the past stored in a kind of collective consciousness ready for recall, nor do I propose a collective unconscious buried under the ruins of forgetting and retrievable only...

Civil society and religion: retrospective reflections on Catholicism and prospective reflections on Islam.
December 22, 2001... ONE of the most surprising and unexpected aspects of the global resurgence of civil society has been the role that religion has played in this emergence. It was surprising and unexpected at least for most social scientists and for all those who...

The post-postsociety: The Decline, Fall, and End of Practically Everything.
December 22, 2001... SOME of you may remember a funny children's historical book entitled The Decline and Fall of Practically Everybody. I believe that the popularity of the concept of civil society is due to the sense of crisis, decline, and change that governs...