During the last year of the 1980s we have seen a number of economic and political changes that are likely to shape much of the agenda of the social sciences for the rest of the century. The Archives would like to invite social scientists to submit for consideration and possible publication articles relating to these developments.

The aim of the article is to define and delimit a fundamental historical change in the construction of causal models and causal explanations on topics dependent on time. The author met with the problem while working with a study on the emergence of the sociological discourse, but had no opportunity then to elaborate it.

Dans la france en paix des annéees quatre-vingts, l'objection de conscience est identifiée le plus souvent à des images du passé : à l'eépoque de l'antimilitarisme révolutionnaire et des mouvements libertaires pour lesquels la mise en question de l'armée s'intégrait à une « contestation globale de l'État », époque des guerres coloniales aussi où l'objection, qui n'était pas encore reconnue légalement, prenait la forme de l'insoumission, ou bien encore à l'époque elle aussi révolue des contestations politiques et idéologiques des années soixante-dix auxquelles les objecteurs ont été associés — moment où ils passaient fréquemment devant les tribunaux militaires et revendiquaient un statut qui ne soit pas discriminatoire. Mais ces images sont devenues lointaines, la menace de la guerre paraît l'être, elle aussi, et l'objection, de fait, semble n'avoir plus grand rapport avec les évolutions ou les enjeux du moment.

Among other things, the revolutionary period in France is notorious for two practices: the development of a civil religion and a project of linguistic standardization. The substitution of republican for religious symbols, the creation of public space for republican worship, the hostility towards intermediary bodies, all of this sought to ground a more direct relationship between the citizen and the republic. At the same time, the new order sought to consolidate its control of the church. An oath of loyalty to the republic was required from priests, as part of a plan to make priests functionaries of the state. The protest evoked, and its association with counterrevolution, however, produced equivocation on the part of regimes until the Concordat, which acknowledged the place of Catholicism in French society, without providing official recognition as the state religion, and which sought to monitor the activity of the clergy.

One of the major developments in the history of western Europe between 1100 and 1300 was the construction of large-scale political organizations. Before 1100 political life had often been intensely local, its horizons limited to the village, parish, or county. But in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries the old local communities of post-Carolingian Europe were aggregated into the kingdoms and city-states that formed such a prominent feature of European life in the high Middle Ages. This essay is concerned with one aspect of this process of political construction: the factors that determined the possible pathways that a local community could follow as it was incorporated into a larger political organization.

The question of how Western-style democracies have evolved and stabilized, and conversely why some countries have experienced a breakdown of evolving democracy —or the question of the transition to, versus breakdown of, democracy— is central to both socio-political theory and sociopolitical history. Apart from being a fascinating topic on its own, it is a fruitful meeting point between theory and history. Perhaps it is for those very reasons that there has been a surge of interest in it in recent years (see e.g. Burton and Higley 1987; Cotton 1989; Higley and Burton 1989; O'Donnell and Schmitter 1986; Stephens 1989). In this article, I apply a democratic elite or demo-elite theoretical perspective to the explanation of the historical processes of stabilization vs breakdown of democracy in prewar Europe, using illustrations from two European countries: Britain as a positive, and Germany as a negative case.