Teilhard's Take

If the 20th Century was the century of physics, the 21st Century is the century of cybernetics, biology and ecology. Technological advance has both crossed new frontiers and discovered old limits. Nobel laureate Ilya Prigogine broke new ground with his understanding that nature, including its human component, seeks to establish order out of chaos by “self‐organizing,” not only according to pre‐determined laws, but through random creative choices as well that are responsible for the endless novelty and potentiality of being. The technologically‐armed purposive role of humans in the Anthropocentric Age thus takes on a new significance: “What we do today depends on our image of the future rather than the future depending on what we do today” as Prigogine puts it. “The equations of the future are written in our actions as well as in nature. Time becomes construction.” Nowhere is this truer than in the new science of genomics, which touches the soul, and in the effort to preserve the ecological balance that has enabled humanity to flourish within the narrow band of earth's livable climate. In this section we bring together leading thinkers, scientists and technologists of our age to address these issues of mankind's fate.     

This Is Not America's Final Crisis

Globalization has indeed flattened the earth, paving the way for new beginnings and the resurgence of old cultures alike by levelling the playing field for all comers. While this new era of post‐globalization certainly heralds de‐Westernization by century's end, is it more likely to mean a revival of the old ways of the East or the new hybrid ways of the first global civilization? Some of Asia's most provocative voices, as well as the world's most renowned cellist and cross‐pollinating musician, offer their views.     

INFORMAL CONTROL AND ILLICIT DRUG TRADE*

Antidrug legislation and enforcement are meant to reduce the trade in illegal drugs by increasing their price. Yet the unintended consequence is an increase in informal control—including retaliation, negotiation, avoidance, and toleration—among drug users and dealers. Little existing theory or research has explored the connections between informal control and drug trading. This article uses the rational choice and opportunity perspectives to explore the question: How and why does the frequency and seriousness of popular justice—as a whole or for each form—affect the price and rate of drug sales? The proposed theory is grounded on and illustrated with qualitative data obtained from drug dealers. This article concludes by discussing the scholarly and policy implications.     

RPR officials: a report on an inquiry into the Neo-Gaullist Party elite

Abstract. Based upon a questionnaire survey of delegates to the RPR National Congress held in Grenoble in November 1984, this paper summarizes a three-dimensional analysis of RPR officials (demographic and sociological identification; political mobilization, party functions and activism; ideological trends and political attitudes) which seeks to appraise how the evolution of the Gaullist movement correlates with changes in French politics between 1976 and 1986.     

The International Community Must Intervene—in Japan

Months after the devastating earthquake and tsunami in Japan, the real truth hidden by incompetence and dissembling by Japanese authorities has emerged: Three of the four nuclear power plants at Fukushima suffered a meltdown. Japan's leading anti‐nuclear crusader and two French public figures worried about the impact on the future of nuclear technology respond.     

The Logic of Time in Law and Legal Expert Systems*

Abstract. Research on an expert system regarding unemployment insurance law has pointed to the difficulties of explicitly representing temporal relations. The question has been addressed in the artificial intelligence literature with respect to planning systems and linguistic analysis. The approaches adopted do not appear to be directly transposable to legal discourse. The problem seems so far to have escaped notice amongst researchers attempting to develop legal expert systems. The paper explores in a preliminary way how lawyers use temporal concepts. It is submitted that “legal time” only partly overlaps with real time. A sketch of a formalization of temporal relations in law, following J. F. Allen's approach, is presented.     

Modes of Political Representation: Toward a New Typology

The mandate‐independence controversy still features prominently in studies of political representation even though the problems with its theoretical foundation and empirical operationalization have long been recognized. This article proposes an alternative typology of modes of representation. By combining type of control (ex ante or ex post) with direction of the interactions (bottom‐up or top‐down), our study captures the most important aspects of the relationship between voters and representatives. We demonstrate how the typology can be used in a survey instrument by comparing the attitudes toward representation of Dutch members of Parliament with the attitudes held by voters, and by relating the views of the members to their behavior.