Explanation of the growth of Christianity in the third century Roman Empire has long been controversial. However, recent game-theoretic research shows how a strategy of unconditional altruism such as Christianity formally enjoined can, under certain conditions, resist invasion by defectors, free-riders and cheats. It is accordingly plausible to suggest that in the particular environment of the third century Empire this uniquely distinguishing feature of Christianity accounts for much of its otherwise surprising degree of success.

Montesquieu popularized the notion of Oriental Despotism as the type of government pertaining to a lawless society based on the equality of subjects in fear and powerlessness. It typified Europe's Other in the age of absolutism. This essay does not examine the idea of total despotic power directly but rather the assumption of the absence of law and its guarantee of a sphere of civil autonomy and agency which will anachronistically be called “civil society”. While substantiating the emergence of a public sphere around coffeehouses, the growth of guilds on the basis of customary law and the development of educational and philanthropic endowments on the basis of the law of waqf, we also take the opportunity to compare the civic and educational institutions of the Ottoman and Safavid empires in the 17th and early 18th centuries.

“ Qu'est-ce que le fouriéisme? Je ne sais pas ”Charles Fourier, Lettre à l'éditeur de La Gazette de France (décembre 1835)

Sociology can be introduced to students not as a story of “great men” but as a practice shaped by the social relations that made it possible. (R.W. Connell, “Why Is Classical Theory Classical?”)

The irreversible adoption of English as Europe's lingua franca raises at least four serious issues of linguistic justice: unequal language-based economic rents, unequal share in the burden of language learning, unequal capacity to influence, and unequal respect for the associated identities. In each case, the nature of the problem is spelt out and solutions are proposed, on the background of an analysis of the micro-mechanisms that underlie the dynamics of secondary language learning and multilingual interaction.