Looking for new ways to interpret the failings of the neo-liberal economy, this article argues that financialised capitalism at the eve of the 2008 financial crisis showed striking analogies with the characteristic combination of oligopoly and informality of the Soviet economy at the eve of its collapse. State capture by oligopolists, a large "virtual economy", the inability of agencies to obtain insight into economic and financial operations, the short term orientations of managers not coinciding with enterprise viability, and a "mystification of risk" by high science are some of the analogies to be discussed. It is argued that not only the origins but also the aftermath of the crisis may show significant analogies.

This article presents an unknown aspect of Tocqueville’s thinking that positions him as a pioneer in the field of fiscal sociology. In Democracy in America, he puts forward the general trend by democratic societies to increase their public expenditure, which would later be known as Wagner’s law. His findings continue to be valid in an era of economic globalization, especially with the resilience of the Welfare State. In The Old Regime and the Revolution, the demonstration is mainly based on the financial changes in the public sector that contributed to destroying political freedom, accentuating class divisions, and delegitimizing public action while cognitive and ideological factors precipitated the movement. Tocqueville’s pioneering work is remarkable for its methodology (although this remains implicit rather than explicit) and for its results. Nevertheless it is not referred to by either the founders of financial sociology or by current researchers.

This paper examines the role of bibliometrics in exploring the question of the effect of commercialization upon the health of American science. It approaches the problem through the question: What would constitute relevant evidence documenting decline in the number of scientific articles published by American authors in the last two decades? Because even the data have been privatized recently, it begins by criticizing article counts used in other venues. It concludes by demonstrating that the problem of decline is not merely in relative shares between countries, but also an absolute decline in American-authored articles across the board. We close with some proposed causes of the decline.

The conservative role of the textbook in reproducing the dominant ideas of a disciplinary field is well known. The factors driving that content have remained almost entirely unexamined. Reviewing the universe of textbooks aimed at the American market between 1998 and 2004, we explore the persistence of the identification in American sociology textbooks of a paradigm in which structural functionalism, conflict theory, and symbolic interactionism are used to frame the theoretical core of the discipline. We examine how over time the textbook market produces both supply and demand pressures to reproduce content that is at odds with the mainstream of the profession. We draw upon in-depth interviews with recent textbook authors and their editors.

In the current context of a growing internationalization of scientific exchanges, the issue of the language of scientific publications – settled in the natural sciences since the 1980s – has now become a central issue for the Social Sciences. Our paper discusses this topical issue through a detailed analysis of the linguistic strategies adopted by two major French social science journals, Population and Revue française de sociologie (RFS), which have chosen to translate into English a selection (RFS) or all (Population) of their articles. In view of the measured effects in terms of visibility in the international scientific field – increasing visibility for the journal Population at the expense of its French edition and a marginal effect for the RFS – we raise questions about the role of national social sciences journals and recall that the specific intellectual mission of these journals lies beyond the pursuit of internationalization.

Contrary to expectations, the EU’s eastward expansion in 2004 did not sound the death knoll of nationalism in the region; rather, it signalled its reinvention and, in some respects, reinvigoration. In this paper, we examine three ways in which nationalism has been redefined in Hungary and Poland in the context of EU enlargement. First, consensus on the desirability of European unification has lessened the importance of left/right party divisions; in its place, the “nation” has provided a fulcrum for inter-party contestation. Second, EU integration has provided nationalists in the region with a backdoor for realising old nationalist ambitions of national reunification across the porous borders of the EU. Third, we examine the way radical nationalist organisations in Hungary and Poland increasingly define themselves in opposition to the EU.