Wordsworth was appalled and outraged. A proposal had been put forth to build a railroad from Kendal to the shore of Lake Windermere in the very heart of his beloved English Lake District. He did what we would do in similar circumstances: he wrote two long letters to a newspaper. And, more memorably perhaps, he also wrote a poem in which he asked: ‘Is then no nook of English ground secure From rash assault?’

The growth within the capitalist world-economy of the industrial sector of production, the so-called ‘industrial revolution’, was accompanied by a very strong current of thought which denned this change as both a process of organic development and of progress. There were those who considered these economic developments and the concomitant changes in social organization to be some penultimate stage of world development whose final working-out was but a matter of time. These included such diverse thinkers as Saint-Simon, Comte, Hegel, Weber, Durkheim. And then there were the critics, most notably Marx, who argued, if you will, that the nineteenth-century present was only an antepenultimate stage of development, that the capitalist world was to know a cataclysmic political revolution which would then lead in the fullness of time to a final societal form, in this case the classless society.

The City is a civilizing influence. This is one of the enduring themes of western thought. The crowding, filth, and exploitation of the industrial city in nineteenth-century Europe could not dampen the enthusiasm of urbanists such as Weber, Ruskin, or Spengler; nor is there any dearth of eulogizers of today‘s sprawling megalopolis. This mode of thought has also found its way into the poor countries of the third world, where the overwhelming majority lives in isolated villages. The current message for them is to seek urbanization if they want to be prosperous. This is the essence of a now familiar proposition that cities are necessary for economic development.

The renewed interest in the phenomenon of charisma, which was first given coherent conceptual form by Max Weber, shows little sign of abating. It is probably the most easily comprehensible, possibly the most popular and certainly the most dramatic model which can be utilized in interdisciplinary studies. Moreover, the theory has the apparent attractiveness of enabling students to intensively study one leader and his movement and then draw more general conclusions about that leader's impact on the society in which he operated. In an article written in 1966, Claude Ake gave a timely warning to practitioners who made grandiose deductions from evidence about one leader and then drew firm conclusions about his total society. In particular, Ake, at one stage in his critique, pointed out the fallacy of assuming that charisma usually implies integration of a previously decentralized, regionalized or fragmented society. As Ake correctly noted, this is unenlightening, unanalytical reasoning since ‘the theory seeks to explain how solidarity may be forged [by a charismatic leader]; but it does so by means of a concept which assumes the existence of solidarity’, thus producing ‘a circular explanation of integration’.

Egyptian professional men have worked hard since 1900 to create professional organizations similar to those of Western countries. These bodies—of lawyers, doctors, engineers, journalists, and teachers—have struggled to further their own economic interests and prestige, raise professional standards, influence the country's politics, and—less consistently—to serve the public. They have molded into institutional form the growing self-consciousness of professions which were either lacking or quite different in the traditional Islamic world. The lawyers came first, forming the first predominantly Egyptian professional syndicate in 1912. After the failure of the other professions' efforts to channel the heady nationalist enthusiasm of the 1919–24 years into the establishment of other syndicates, the movement subsided, producing only occasional flurries of interest until World War II. A burst of activity then set up the medical, press, and engineering syndicates in quick succession (1940, 1941, 1946). The formation of the teachers syndicate and other less important ones under the Nasser regime in the 1950s rounded out the movement. This article will trace the growth and sequence of professionalization in these five occupations, with particular attention to the establishment of syndicates, which represented the culmination of long years of gradually emerging self-consciousness. Less important professions will be mentioned only in passing.

This paper finds its point of departure in population figures for 8 Latin American countries and 61 cities during the period 1750 to 1920 (Tables 2–9, pp. 435–43). This span is a convenient one for the study of Latin American urban development. Prior to the mid-eighteenth century, population statistics, at least those available from printed sources, become sparse and unreliable, and one begins to get totals of householders rather than head counts. Moreover, the wide swings in current estimates of regional populations for the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries make relative urbanization rates problematical even when one has good data for towns. For the time being, the functional scale for urban places proposed by Hardoy and Aranovich (1969; 1970) seems a more appropriate index for the Hapsburg and early Bourbon periods than a purely quantitative one. After 1920, when more frequent and modern national censuses facilitate data collection, a new era in Latin American urban development commences, marked by economic nationalism, broadened political participation, centralized economic planning, import substitution, the politicoeconomic ascendancy of the United States, and massive internal migrations.

Of the many contributions of Max Weber to the social sciences, his theory of charisma has received the greatest attention. It has been applied to Hitler and the Nazi Party, to Lenin and the Bolshevik Party, to presidents in democracy, and to rulers of dictatorial parties in newly formed nations. In addition, the scope of the term charisma has been widened considerably. Charisma should not be limited to supernatural powers but include any kind of human genius and creative activity. Nor need personal and institutional charisma always follow each other but can run concurrently during the reign of the charismatic leader.

In order to make sense of the endless complexities of social life, social scientists conceptualize the empirical world in terms of interlocking systems and subsystems of roles and behavior, holding some of these spheres constant so that others can be studied and understood. This is a necessary and desirable aspect of social scientific enterprise. It may well be, however, that too many aspects of human interaction are held constant by the conventional ‘micro’ and ‘macro’ distinctions that dominate the study of developing nations. Although we have a growing body of data about the attitudes, values, and behaviors of the individuals who comprise the mass publics of such nations, we have relatively little systematic information about how this micro-level analysis feeds into and affects the processes and actors that are visible at the national level of political life. Most countrycentered macro-studies, in turn, make few, if any, systematic references to variables extending beyond national boundaries into the international environment. Such criticism seems to call for a more extensive analysis across systems—analysis which not only takes into account the attributes of individuals and of national institutions, but which also links these units to one another and to a variety of other sub- and supra-national structures and processes as well.

Poverty in Southeast Asia has been analyzed in numerous ways (squatters, high population densities, dietary deficiencies, war, disease, etc.) though there has been no single systematic work which attempts to delineate all socio-economic and political forces which create the evolution of rural poverty. Although rural poverty in Southeast Asia is widespread and in most ways represents poverty in its most acute form, I am purposely not dealing with poverty per se. My aim is to discuss how regional, economic and population factors such as types of cultivation and labor requirements influence the variety and intensity of rural poverty in the rural Philippines. In particular the hypothesis under investigation is that where a landscape is economically committed to a single cropping activity (such as an export crop) which is highly labor intensive, the worse aspects of rural poverty commonly emerge. Furthermore, where a regional landscape is characterized by a diversity of agricultural patterns—some labor intensive crops, some capital intensive crops—the scale and character of rural poverty is of a different order or at least of a different magnitude.

Even a casual survey of recent history reveals that a society's devotion to democratic or egalitarian principles hardly rules out blatant racial oppression. Indeed, the two positions have often been deemed compatible. The democratic ideology professed by Europeans (or those of European descent settled elsewhere) has been drawn from the egalitarian thought of the Enlightenment. As Louis Hartz has indicated, Enlightenment thought on this matter can be interpreted either inclusively or exclusively—equality can be granted to all men, or only to certain categories of men. The seeming paradox of egalitarian rhetoric combined with obvious inequities is often resolved through defining members of some groups as outsiders—not a part of the ‘Herrenvolk’ or the ‘people’—or even as subhuman.

A charismatic leader is like a beautiful woman. Taken as a whole and looked on from afar we can all agree as to the extraordinary nature of the creature. Yet once we begin a detailed analysis of each part we find we have difficulty pointing to exactly those elements that produce the effect. Clinical descriptions may incline us to lust or disgust, but they may fail to inform us as to the ephemeral nature of the phenomenon. For that we often engage, as here, in metaphor.

During the past twenty years the major thrust of Indian historiography has expanded from its earlier concerns with imperial politics and sought to uncover the full range of actors within Indian political life and to identify the arenas in which they were active: local, regional, and national. One group of scholars has called particular attention to the diversity of elite groups, their interactions, and often their struggles for power. Their studies usually call explicitly for a broader understanding of ‘political’ activity outside the official levels of administration.

The city of Lima resembles other Latin American capitals in having drawn very heavily in recent decades on rural migration, but is peculiar in the extraordinarily large number, running perhaps into the thousands, of associations formed by migrants on the basis of common regional origin. These associations have been the subject of investigation by the American anthropologists Mangin and Doughty, and also by a number of Peruvian scholars. These studies are based on the familiar theory of a rural-urban continuum with close integration at the rural pole and a syndrome of anomie at the urban pole. They postulate that the regional associations create solidarity among rural migrants in the city and enable them to foster modernization in the regions from which they came. In this article it will be argued that these postulates cannot survive the test of empirical criticism.

The expansion of Europe in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries had brought Europeans, primarily English, Dutch, Spanish, Portuguese, and French, into contact with the lands, peoples and civilizations of Africa, Asia and the Americas. In Asia the effects of the European discoveries had been less far-reaching than had been the case in Africa and the Americas where barter had soon given way to slavery, peaceful proselitization to forced conversion, trade and commerce to extortion and monopolies, and coexistence to armed domination by the European intruders. Whereas in New France, Brazil, and the British colonies agricultural and commerical considerations had predominated, in counterdistinction to Spanish America where the initial emphasis had been militaristic, nevertheless the results of European settlement had been remarkably similar throughout the Americas.

The need for comparative studies of Jewish communities has occasionally been argued, but apart from largely typological comparisons of Jewish polities, there have been few, if any, attempts at a sociological comparative study of Jewish communities. Nearly all the sociological studies of Judaism have restricted their analysis to the Jewish community in the United States, and it is possible that their findings possess little generality beyond that society.

Because of the importance of the family and household in all societies and at all historical periods, it is essential to be able to make comparisons between varieties of domestic groups. If we wish to comment on the extent to which the household is affected by social change and especially by the process of modernization, industrialization, social mobilization, or whatever that vague but ubiquitous phenomenon is called, it must be clear what would consitute such change. This means knowing how domestic group structure differs from country to country as well as from period to period.