Labelling and Legitimization: Justifying Political Violence in the Basque Country

This article focuses on the role of labelling in the discourse employed by the Left-Wing Nationalist movement in the Basque Country to legitimize the use of violence for political ends. The approach in this article goes beyond classic labelling theory. I demonstrate that radical Nationalists do not passively undergo their being labelled as deviants (fanatics, terrorists) by society, but develop counter-labels instead to define their opponents and re-label themselves.     

Emile Durkheims Moralpolitik des Individualismus

Emile Durkheim was neither a political scientist nor a political sociologist. His oeuvre though exhibits a political dimension which is not easy to grasp. This article makes the attempt to reconstruct his project of a moral politics of individualism. How is it possible to institutionalize successfully what Durkheim calls moral individualism? Durkheim’s project rests upon two pillars: the scientific and scholarly pillar which aims at the establishment of sociology as a scientific discipline at universities. The political pillar which sets out to analyze the socio-structural, institutional, cultural conditions, forms and effects of individualism and the successful socialization of its values which allows to take seriously the rhetoric of the freedom and dignity of human beings in modernity. Durkheim’s project is confronted with the traditional images of politics and the social order to delineate the differentia specifica of his moral politics of individualism.     

Die drei Welten der sozialen Ungleichheit: Belohnungen,Prestige und Citizenship

Talcott Parsons’s contribution to an analysis of social inequality seems to have had a strange destiny: it was either neglected as if Parsons had not contributed to the problem at all; or it was rejected as an allegedly useless kind of functional analysis of social stratification of modern societies. However, I argue, there is no single theory of functional stratification. Rather, there are at least three versions that have to be seen as separate approaches: First, the theory of rewards as it was developed by Parsons and, more important, by Kingsley Davis and Wilbert E. Moore; second, the theory of moral respect, that Parsons presented in two different versions; third, the theory of a balance of equality and inequality in modern societies that Parsons developed following T.H. Marshall’s theory of citizenship. The article presents a historic and systematic analysis of these three strands of Parsons’s contribution to the debate on social inequality. While the theory of functional stratification failed as a whole, I show that Parsons nevertheless anticipated crucial aspects of recent sociological debates, like the importance of the vagueness and fluidity of social stratification, or the crucial significance of education being the most important resource for a realization of individual life chances in modern societies.     

Developments in educational legislation in Germany The program of the school – a new word in German school legislation

This article describes a conflict within the development of German schools towards more autonomy: by law the schools have to develop their own school program to describe the aims and goals of the school. But schools lack the knowledge to do so, and financial support can only be given in very rare cases. So this key element for the development of autonomous schools may not fulfil its purpose.     

Economic analysis of international environmental agreements: lessons learnt 2000–2020

International Environmental Agreements: Politics, Law and Economics - On the occasion of the 20th anniversary of International Environmental Agreements: Politics, Law & Economics, we...     

Einkommensreich – verm?gensarm? Die Zusammensetzung von Verm?gen und die Bedeutung einzelner Verm?genskomponenten im europ?ischen Vergleich

Recently, a growing number of researchers claim that income is only one dimension of social inequality. Neglecting wealth as a more profound measure of an entity??s financial situation can lead to a misleading or even wrong understanding of social inequalities. This article examines the relationship between income and wealth among elderly people in 13 European countries and tries to answer the following two research questions: Are the income-rich also the asset-rich? And what is the composition of wealth within different income groups? The analyses show that higher wealth often goes along with higher income, whereas a high income does not necessarily correlate with high wealth. Instead, in relation to the amount of wealth they possess, the asset-rich do not dispose of a high income. This may be an indicator that income is not the most important mechanism for the accumulation of wealth in the upper part of the wealth distribution. In general the wealth portfolio of asset-rich households is much broader and therefore less ??crises-prone?? than of the asset-poor. Homeownership is the central component in the wealth portfolio of households. For the lowest income quartiles it is often the only meaningful asset. Summing up, the previous income-based definition of poverty and wealth proves to be inadequate. Analyzing wealth in addition to income, it may turn out that the often proclaimed problem of old-age poverty has been either under- or overestimated.