bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Analytic/Synthetic Distinction
Authors: Russell Gillian
Published: March 2013

“The analytic/synthetic distinction” refers to a distinction between two kinds of truth. Synthetic truths are true both because of what they mean and because of the way the world is, whereas analytic truths are true in virtue of meaning alone. “Snow is white,” for example, is synthetic, because it is true partly because of what it means and partly because snow has a certain color. “All bachelors are unmarried,” by contrast, is often claimed to be true regardless of the way the world is; it is “true in virtue of meaning,” or analytic. The existence of analytic truths is controversial. Philosophers who have thought they exist include Immanuel Kant, Gottlob Frege, and Rudolf Carnap. The philosopher most famous for thinking that they do not is Quine. Skeptics have sometimes argued that the idea of an analytic truth is incoherent, and they sometimes express this by denying the existence of the distinction. A related view is that there is a distinction but that it is trivial, since the class of analytic sentences is empty. A third kind of skeptic about analyticity questions its usefulness. It can be tempting to think that to defend analyticity one need only specify some paradigm cases and maintain that the analytic sentences are the ones like those. The use skeptic points out that analyticity is of interest only because it is thought to entail certain other features. One can define as many conceptions of analyticity as one likes, but none of them will do the work that analyticity has traditionally been expected to do. An analogy (due to Gilbert Harman) is with debates over the existence of witches. Someone might defend the claim that witches exist by pointing to the people who are taken to be paradigm cases of witches in their linguistic community (say, the people who have already been burned at the stake), claiming that “witch” properly applies to anyone who is like that. But a skeptic can argue that while one can define “witch” any way one likes, people have been burned at the stake because witches were thought to have certain salient features, such as having magical powers. The skeptic’s main point is that there is no person with those features—the features that justify the practice. Similarly, the skeptic about analyticity may allow that one can define some notions of analyticity while maintaining that there are no truths that will be useful to philosophers in the way analytic truths were supposed to be.
Political Obligation
Authors: Dobos Ned
Published: March 2013

There are good, prudential reasons to obey the law. The prospect of punishment, not to mention loss of reputation and social exclusion, is enough for most any citizen possessed of a suitably far-sighted self-interest to discharge his or her legal duties. But is there a moral obligation to do what the law requires, just because the law requires it? If the answer is yes and the mere illegality of an act renders its performance prima facie morally wrong, political obligation obtains. Political obligation thus refers to the moral duty of citizens to obey the laws of their state. In cases where an action or forbearance that is required by law is morally obligatory on independent grounds, political obligation simply gives the citizen an additional reason for acting accordingly. But law tends to extend beyond morality, forbidding otherwise morally innocent behavior and compelling acts and omissions that people tend to think of as morally discretionary. In such cases, the sole source of one’s moral duty to comply with the law is one’s political obligation.
Philosophy of Law: Normative Foundations
Authors: Oberdiek John
Published: March 2013

This article on the philosophy of law focuses on contemporary discussions of law’s normative foundations. This branch of philosophy of law, also called normative legal theory, overlaps with topics in political philosophy and ethics, as well as with analytical general jurisprudence, and it is a lively and rich area of philosophical research. As this description suggests, normative philosophy of law covers a vast territory. A case could easily be made to include several dozen more topics under this heading, or indeed to devote separate overarching entries to many of the topics that might be subsumed under normative philosophy of law. The philosophy of criminal law, for example, comprises far more than theories of punishment. This is all to say that what follows is but a primer. The common focus of the following topics is the relationship between individuals and the state. Examining that relationship has long been a principal concern of normative philosophy of law. More specifically, normative philosophy of law in the dominant Anglophone tradition has long been devoted to exploring the state’s role in alternately protecting and constraining individual liberty through law. This article charts aspects of that alternating role, focusing on authority, the duty to obey the law, the rule of law, rights, legal moralism, and punishment.
Liberty
Authors: Carter Ian , Shnayderman Ronen
Published: March 2013

The definition of “liberty” (or “freedom”—most political and social philosophers use these terms interchangeably) is a highly contested matter. Under what conditions is a person free to do something? What kinds of obstacles would make a person unfree to leave the country or to attend church or to get a job? Is liberty simply a matter of having the opportunity to do something, or is it achieved only through effective action of certain kinds? Is liberty a property of individuals, or can it also be applied to collectivities? Under what conditions can an individual’s overall level of freedom be said to “increase”? The starting point for much of the discussion about the nature of freedom is usually the distinction, made famous by Isaiah Berlin, between “negative” and “positive” freedom. Theorists of negative freedom, who tend to be political liberals, hold freedom to be the absence of obstacles of various kinds, and they often limit their attention to obstacles that they hold to be “external” to the agent, or, more commonly, to obstacles that are created by other human agents. Theorists of positive freedom, on the other hand, see constraints on freedom where negative theorists deny their existence—for example, in the presence of internal factors that damage the agent’s capacity to be autonomous. For them, freedom is a matter of being in control of one’s life and determining one’s own fate. Only when such agential limitations are overcome, they hold, can an agent achieve self-mastery or self-realization. Also important for theorists of liberty is the relation between the freedom of one person and the power of another. Is the power of agent A over agent B only contingently related to the unfreedom of agent B? Or should freedom itself be defined as the absence of subjection to the power of others? The latter response is given by republican theorists of freedom, who claim to have traced a third way between negative and positive conceptions of liberty. A number of liberal theorists of freedom, who instead see freedom and power as contingently related, have resisted this republican claim and have continued to uphold the negative conception. Understanding the nature of liberty, and of its relation to coercive or dominating power, is also important for debates about distributive justice: Is liberty best guaranteed, or most fairly distributed, where the state limits its activities to the enforcement of private property rights and freedom of contract? Or is there a sense in which a government’s redistribution of wealth from the rich to the poor enhances the freedom of the poor? Must egalitarians appeal to a positive notion of freedom in support of such enforced redistribution, or might the libertarians be mistaken in seeing egalitarianism and negative liberty as incompatible ideals? Yet another important area of enquiry concerns the measurement of freedom—whether of an individual or of a group. How, if at all, can the various single freedoms of individuals be aggregated, so as to produce overall comparisons of freedom, to the effect that one individual or group is “freer” than another?
Science and Religion
Authors: Pitts J. Brian
Published: March 2013

The science–religion interaction spans so many fields, years, sources, etc., that a comprehensive view is no small task. This survey will be especially oriented to the discussion that has grown primarily out of the intellectual tradition of Western Christendom, but which aspires to universality. The Western Christian discussion, of course, profited in the late medieval era from Arabic transmission of Greek texts, whether pagan or Christian, as well as more distinctively Islamic and Jewish contributions. The Western Christian tradition, however, ultimately took some dramatic turns in response to the 16th-century Protestant Reformation and its aftermath. The history of science lately has produced many informed and balanced treatments. One important theme is the rejection of “Whiggish” history, which portrays the past with a bias to ratify the present. Instead, one must aim to enter sympathetically into the mindsets of the historical actors. Can one then return to the present in a more critical way? One major task of philosophy is to assess the types and bases of knowledge claims in other disciplines. Thus, the philosophy of science and the philosophy of religion, broadly construed to include certain traditional parts of theology (prolegomena, apologetics), are relevant, as is much of medieval philosophy. Besides sciences and theologies (including church history), one thus also needs an adequate command of the history of science, the philosophy of science, the sociology of science, and relevant parts of general intellectual history. Such, at least, were some of the aspirations involved in this article’s compilation. The question of whether science(s) has, or needs, a logic is important. Certainly, deductive logic is inadequate. Bayesianism, making systematic use of the probability calculus, might be adequate. A key issue is Hume’s problem of induction. Many philosophers agree that it cannot be solved, and some—generally those who are still working on a solution—think that the lack of a solution would render science no more justifiable than fortune telling (or Bible reading, for that matter) as a source of beliefs. This article is organized more or less chronologically in terms of the issues discussed, forming a selective slice of the intellectual history of the West since the medieval period, while encouraging critical reflection using methodological insights available in the early 21st century. It is hoped that this organization facilitates both a non-Whiggish history and a useful critical understanding for contemporary application.
Laws of Nature
Authors: Lange Marc
Published: March 2013

The discovery of the laws of nature has long been considered a principal aim of science. Of course, many laws that science discovers are not commonly designated “laws.” Alongside Boyle’s law, the law of universal gravitation, and the law of supply and demand, there are Archimedes’ principle, Maxwell’s equations, and the formulas of stoichiometry. Philosophy does not aim to account for the use of the term “law” or to discover the natural laws. Rather, philosophy strives to understand what it is that scientists discover when they discover laws. Philosophers have generally distinguished laws from “accidents” (that is, from contingent facts that are not matters of law) on several grounds. First, laws stand in especially intimate relations to subjunctive conditionals and counterfactual conditionals. Second, laws can explain why various facts hold. Third, laws help to give causes their powers to produce their effects. Fourth, laws restrict what is possible in nature; laws are universal and cannot be violated. (They possess “natural necessity.”) Fifth, laws specify the properties characteristic of various natural kinds. Sixth, when scientists confirm that some general hypothesis makes accurate predictions regarding each of the unexamined cases there might be, lying in a vast range, scientists are often basing their inductive reasoning on the presupposition that this hypothesis may be a law. Thus, laws are central to a wide range of core topics in metaphysics and epistemology. A philosophical account of natural law must refine these various respects in which laws are supposed to differ from accidents. It must then specify what laws are such that they are capable of playing their distinctive scientific roles. A wide variety of rival accounts of law has been proposed. Some philosophers defend “non-Humean” accounts, according to which laws are constituted by irreducible necessities, subjunctive facts, essences, or causal powers—or laws are themselves fundamental rather than reducible to other sorts of facts. Other philosophers defend “Humean” accounts, according to which the laws are reducible entirely to some non-modal features of the universe’s actual past, present, and future history, together perhaps with some features of scientists, their theories, or their practices. Yet other philosophers deny that the category of “laws of nature” is helpful for understanding science or reality. Some philosophers investigate the extent to which laws arise in the biological and social sciences. Although the nature of natural law was of great interest to early modern philosophers, this article is confined to works of analytic philosophy after 1945.
Rationality
Authors: Rysiew Patrick
Published: March 2013

“Rationality” is among our central and most widely used evaluative notions. That humans are “rational animals” is a presumption built into the very name of our species, Homo sapiens; and the thought that humans are rational, perhaps distinctively so, appears to be part of the popular fabric of thought about ourselves. “Rational” and its complement “irrational” are standardly used, both in ordinary speech and across a variety of academic disciplines and subdisciplines, to describe persons, beliefs, actions, plans, policies, desires, decisions, institutions, and a host of other things. It is widely agreed that lying behind this richness of use is a general division between “theoretical” or “epistemic” rationality and “practical” rationality. But that distinction goes only so far in regimenting the concept and the issues with which it is bound up. Because it is a term that is used in so many ways, and with regard to such a wide range of topics and subjects, it does not admit of any neat analysis. Some have despaired of its being a useful general theoretical notion at all. Given its centrality, however, it is better to map the notion in its various principal employments than to try to get by without it. This entry lays out those employments and describes some of the main issues arising in connection with the notion of rationality.
Impossible Worlds
Authors: Kiourti Ira
Published: March 2013

Impossible worlds constitute an increasingly popular yet controversial topic in logic and metaphysics. The term “impossible worlds” parallels the term “possible worlds” and commonly refers to setups, situations, or totalities (“worlds”) that are inconsistent, incomplete, non-classical, or non-normal in possible-world semantics and metaphysics. These may verify a proposition and its negation, be silent as to the truth value of a proposition, or somehow fail to conform to the (classical) laws of logic. Some authors object to the term “impossible world,” preferring to talk of nonstandard worlds or partial situations instead. While the term “impossible world” is sometimes used to refer to a world that is inaccessible from another relative to some specified accessibility relation, impossible worlds are often conceived of as absolutely impossible in a broadly logical, conceptual, or metaphysical sense. As in the case of possible worlds, modern talk of impossible worlds originates with semantic interpretations of modal and non-classical logics, yet the potential applicability of these worlds to logical, metaphysical, and semantic philosophical puzzles has allowed them to permeate the wider philosophical arena. Arguments for impossible worlds often parallel those for possible worlds (see From Possible Worlds to Impossible Worlds) and focus largely on the proposed applications for such worlds (see Applications). As with possible worlds, there are various metaphysical conceptions of impossible worlds (see the Metaphysics of Impossible Worlds), and objections to such worlds are often theory specific (see Objections to Applications and Objections to Impossible Worlds). This article focuses on modern work on impossible worlds and its critics.
The Netherlands (Dutch Revolt/ Dutch Republic)
Authors: van Nierop Henk
Published: March 2013

By the middle of the 16th century the Netherlands consisted of some twenty principalities and lordships, loosely connected under the rule of Emperor Charles V. The heir of the dukes of Burgundy, Charles ruled these lands as his own patrimony. They roughly covered the area of the present-day Netherlands, Belgium, and Luxembourg, as well as a strip of northern France. During the rule of Philip II, king of Spain (r. 1555–1598), Charles’s son and successor, a revolt broke out. From c. 1580 onward Philip succeeded in bringing the southern provinces of the Netherlands (roughly modern-day Belgium) back to obedience, while the northern provinces (roughly the area covered by today’s Netherlands) retained their independence. The northern provinces came to be known as the “United Netherlands” or the “Dutch Republic,” the southern ones as the “Spanish Netherlands.” What had begun as a rebellion turned into regular warfare between the Dutch Republic, on the one side, and Spain and the Spanish Netherlands, on the other. The so-called Twelve Year Truce interrupted the fighting between 1609 and 1621. It was not until 1648 that the belligerents finally concluded peace. After 1585 (the capture of Antwerp by the Spanish army), the Dutch Republic and the Spanish Netherlands gradually drifted apart as they became two separate states, and, even more slowly, they developed their own national cultures and identities. The consequence for historiography is that the history of the Netherlands until the end of the 16th century is best studied as a whole, while the histories of the Dutch Republic and the Spanish Netherlands during the 17th century are usually studied separately.
Cardinals
Authors: Fletcher Stella
Published: March 2013

Deriving from the Latin cardo (hinge), cardinals were originally priests permanently attached to particular churches. Roman cardinals were beneficiaries of the 11th- and 12th-century reforms that sought to diminish secular influence over the church by centralizing power in the person of the pope. They emerged from that process with enhanced individual and corporate powers. The 1059 codification of rules governing papal elections made them the principal electors of popes. This was refined by the Third Lateran Council (1179), which decreed that cardinals were the sole electors of popes, that their votes were of equal value with no distinction between those of cardinal-bishops, cardinal-priests, and cardinal-deacons, and that a two-thirds majority was required to secure an election. Between conclaves, popes and cardinals met together in regular consistories from c. 1130. Cardinals began to hold administrative offices within the Roman curia and to act as legates a latere, sent “from the side” of the pope to exercise his power in specific regions of Christendom. Their authority was further enhanced when they became protectors of newly reformed and centralized religious orders. Cardinals’ red hats were exclusively the gift of the popes who, from the 15th century onward, used them as diplomatic tools in their relations with the secular powers. Between 1350 and 1650 nearly one thousand individuals were made cardinals, even if approximately one tenth of that total have since been identified as “pseudo-cardinals,” the creations of antipopes. In this bibliography, Reference Works precede General Overviews, which deal with groups of cardinals. Collections of Papers include studies of individual cardinals and are therefore particularly useful for comparative purposes. Thereafter, attention focuses on the composition, privileges, and responsibilities of the Sacred College, with subsections devoted to particular features of their life in Rome (and Avignon): Cardinals in Conclaves for their role in papal elections, Cardinal Protectors for some of their functions between conclaves, and Cardinals’ Houses and Households for other aspects of their ecclesiastical and cultural patronage. The vast majority of scholarship relating to cardinals has been biographical in nature, which is why the remainder of the present work divides the subject chronologically, into Cardinals Created before 1471, Cardinals Created between 1471 and 1503, Cardinals Created between 1503 and 1534, Cardinals Created between 1534 and 1549, and Cardinals Created after 1549. In each there is a selection of primary sources and secondary literature, identified as “Sources” and “Studies,” respectively.
Hinduism and Buddhism
Authors: Bailey Greg
Published: March 2013

Buddhism and Hinduism were never discrete religio-cultural systems, even if they are often taken as such. Most people and scholars tend to use the names as catch phrases for the two religions—one reflecting the overwhelming importance of the Buddha, the other taking up a Persian word—to encompass a set of cultural religious ideas and practices extending back to the second millennium bce. Buddhism and Hinduism have always overlapped in ideas and practice, and they have always interacted. And though Brahmanism (the name given to Hinduism’s precursor) existed earlier than Buddhism, the rise of Buddhism and Jainism as intellectual systems, and their success as recipients of patronage, forced the Brahmanical intellectuals to consolidate their religious practices and teachings and reify their existing systems. Brahmanism as a name indicates the strong input into the intellectual culture from the Brāhmaṇa class, whose emergence as a powerful and successful social group espousing a distinct view of culture associated with the Sanskrit language, the performance of the śrauta ritual, and a particular metaphysics of the person, is manifested most fully in the Mahābhārata (200 bce–200 ce). Subsequently, Buddhism and Hinduism, in their multiplicity of forms, arose on South Asian soil and coexisted in various forms of peacefulness and antagonism for many centuries, until Buddhism entered a state of decline in numerical terms around 600–700 ce, only to continue to thrive in countries such as Nepal, Sri Lanka, and many other parts of Asia.
Securitization
Authors: van Munster Rens
Published: March 2013

The concept of securitization is generally associated with the Copenhagen school of security studies, which is generally taken to include Ole Wæver, Barry Buzan, and a range of other, more loosely associated, researchers. Originally devised by Ole Wæver, the concept of securitization provided a fresh take on the increasingly tiresome debate between those who claimed that threats are objective (i.e., what really constitutes a threat to international security) on the one hand, and those that maintained that security is subjective (what is perceived to be a threat) on the other. In an attempt to sidestep or bypass this debate, the Copenhagen school suggests that security should instead be seen as a speech act, where the central issue is not if threats are real or not, but the ways in which a certain issue (troop movements, migration, or environmental degradation) can be socially constructed as a threat. The idea of speech acts has a long tradition in philosophy and refers to the idea that by saying something, something is done. So, just as the naming of a ship is a speech act that brings something into effect, the uttering of “security” can be viewed as an act by which all kind of issues (military, political, economic, and environmental) can become staged as a threat. However, not all talk about security qualifies as securitization in the sense understood by Ole Wæver and his Copenhagen colleagues. A securitizing speech act needs to follow a specific rhetorical structure, derived from war and its historical connotations of survival, urgency, threat, and defense. This leads the Copenhagen school to define securitization as a speech act that has to fulfill three rhetorical criteria. It is a discursive process by means of which an actor (1) claims that a referent object is existentially threatened, (2) demands the right to take extraordinary countermeasures to deal with that the threat, and (3) convinces an audience that rule-breaking behavior to counter the threat is justified. In short, by labeling something as “security,” an issue is dramatized as an issue of supreme priority. One can therefore think of securitization as the process through which nonpoliticized (issues are not talked about) or politicized (issues are publicly debated) issues are elevated to security issues that need to be dealt with with urgency, and that legitimate the bypassing of public debate and democratic procedures. The Copenhagen school originally studies the dynamics of security across five different, nonexclusive sectors—military, political, societal, economic, and environmental—although later analyses of securitization have sought to expand the number of sectors. Because securitization enables emergency measures outside democratic control, the Copenhagen school generally opts for desecuritization, rather than securitization, as the preferable mode of problem solving.
State Theory in International Relations
Authors: Freire Lucas G. , Koivisto Marjo
Published: March 2013

The state is one of the most used terms in international relations (IR) theory, and yet IR scholars influenced by both sociology and political philosophy have complained that the state and the states-system have been inadequately theorized in the field. What does the discipline mean when referring to the state? Why should state theorizing be part of IR at all? Need all state theorizing in IR be “state-centric”? There are two kinds of thinking about the state and the states-system in IR. One strand examines the history of thought about the purpose of the state and the states-system as political communities. Another explains the causes of events and transformations in the state and the states-system. These two approaches to studying the state largely translate to (1) political theory about the state and the states-system, and (2) social scientific theories of the state and the states-system in IR. Recently, both traditions have been significantly revisited in IR, and new productive synergies are emerging.
Democratic Peace Theory
Authors: Reiter Dan
Published: March 2013

Democratic peace is the proposition that democracies are more peaceful in their foreign relations. This idea dates back centuries, at least to Immanuel Kant and other 18th-century Enlightenment thinkers. In recent decades it has constituted a major research agenda, competing with and arguably supplanting other research agendas such as neo-realism. The democratic peace proposition has many possible empirical and theoretical forms. On the empirical side, some propose that democracies are more peaceful in their relations with all other states in the system (“monadic” democratic peace); some propose that democracies are more peaceful only in their relations with other democracies (“dyadic” democratic peace); others argue that the more democracies there are in a region or the international system, the more peaceful the region or international system will be (“systemic” democratic peace); and still others doubt the existence of any significant relationship between democracy and peace. Notably, most although not all empirical research on the democratic peace has employed quantitative methods of analysis. On the theoretical side, there are many different accounts of the relationship between democracy and peace, with most focusing on domestic political institutions, domestic political norms, and constructed identities. The democratic peace proposition is connected to many other propositions linking domestic politics and international relations, including that democracies are more likely to cooperate with each other, that democracies are more likely to win the wars they fight, that escalating military casualties degrade public support for war, that leaders initiate conflict to secure their domestic hold on power (the diversionary hypothesis), that democracies fight shorter wars, that different kinds of democracies experience different kinds of conflict behavior, that different kinds of authoritarian systems experience different kinds of conflict behavior, and others. The democratic peace also overlaps with related ideas such as the liberal peace and the commercial peace.
Food
Authors: DeSoucey Michaela
Published: March 2013

Food studies as a distinct field within sociology has seen extensive interest and growth. Previously, studies of food production and consumption typically fell under the purview of research on health, agrarian studies, development sociology, agricultural economy, or social anthropology. Rural and natural resource sociologists especially have long emphasized the management and impacts of food production systems in their work. In classical tomes food was typically mentioned as an example of social classification or of social problems rather than a distinct object of study. Since the 1980s sociologists’ attention to how food strengthens social ties; marks social and cultural differences; and is integrated into social organizational forms, ranging from households to empires, has grown. Early-21st-century interest in food by both researchers and the larger public follows heightened awareness of the global character of markets and politics, concerns with health and safety, and the ways cooking and dining out have become fodder for media spectacle. Today sociologists of food display considerable diversity in their theoretical approaches, research methods, and empirical foci. Sociologists draw upon both classic and contemporary sociological theorists to study food’s production, distribution, and consumption as well as how food and eating are integrated into social institutions, systems, and networks. Topically, sociologists contribute to research on inequality and stratification, culture, family, markets, politics and power, identity, status, social movements, migration, labor and work, health, the environment, and globalization. Sociological work on food in the late 20th and early 21st centuries is characterized by two overlapping threads: food systems (derived in part from scholarship on agricultural production and applied extension as well as environmental, developmental, and rural sociology) and food politics, identity, and culture (which reveals social anthropological and cultural-historical undertones). Both are nested in the emerging interdisciplinary research field of food studies, which has gained greater institutional footholds at universities in Europe and Australia than in the United States and Canada (but this may be changing). Sociologists working across the two threads examine issues of food and inequality, trade, labor, power, capital, culture, and technological innovation. This article maps out social science research and theorizing on what we eat, how we produce and procure food, who benefits, with whom we eat, what we think about food, and how food fits with contemporary social life.
Consumption
Authors: Woodward Ian
Published: March 2013

A rudimentary definition of consumption emphasizes the purchase and use of goods or services, noting that the point of expenditure on such items and the instant of their usage constitute the act of consumption. This understanding of consumption reflects a utilitarian, economic approach to consumption that should be seen as a starting point, since the range of theoretical and empirical innovations within the field of consumption studies—which exists within sociology, as well as having disciplinary expressions within anthropology, history, geography, business, and marketing studies—has established an understanding of consumption as a complex, widespread process. “The Sociology of Consumption” by Colin Campbell in Daniel Miller, ed., Acknowledging Consumption: A Review of New Studies (London: Routledge, 1995) adds a number of other stages to this basic definition of consumption. Campbell states that consumption involves not just purchasing or using a good or service but also selecting it, maintaining it, possibly repairing it, and ultimately, disposing of it in some way. Within each of these stages there are a number of complex subprocesses that consumption studies scholars have increasingly paid attention to. For example, the selection of goods is sometimes undertaken largely subconsciously or automatically but also based upon various social norms, cultural learning, emotional factors, prejudices, facets of identity, taste, or style. Likewise, disposing of a good may mean literally throwing it away, or it may mean reselling it, donating it, or passing it on to others. Campbell’s definition usefully shows how consumption is a process over time that fuses practical, emotional, material, and economic factors, rather than merely the moment when a person pays for something over the counter. In many ways, this broader understanding of consumption points to a range of innovations within the field that have occurred in the last few decades, which in turn direct us to broader changes in patterns of sociological inquiry. Questions of labor, industry, production units, social, legal, and economic institutions, technology, and social class were the core stuff of social inquiry through much of the 20th century. In mainstream sociology, consumption was for most of the discipline’s history simply not a relevant analytic category, which explains why for much of sociology’s history consumption was understood through theories of capitalist production. However, in the last few decades researchers have increasingly situated practices of consumption and a consumerist ethic as central for understanding broader social and cultural change, impacting on the way sociologists have conceptualized such diverse areas of social change as cultural and economic inequality, urban and spatial development, identity and selfhood, gender relations and performativity, media, and advertising.
Social Closure
Authors: Mackert Juergen
Published: March 2013

“Social closure” is one of the most basic terms and concepts in sociology. Basically, closure refers to processes of drawing boundaries, constructing identities, and building communities in order to monopolize scarce resources for one’s own group, thereby excluding others from using them. Society is not a homogenous entity but is instead internally structured and subdivided by processes of social closure. Some social formations, such as groups, organizations, or institutions, may be open to everybody, provided they are capable of participation, while access to most others is limited due to certain criteria that either allow people to become members or exclude them from membership. Therefore, social closure is a ubiquitous, everyday phenomenon that can be observed in almost every sphere and place in the social world. Members of societies experience closure from the very beginning of their social life. To be excluded from certain groups starts at school, where presumably homogenous classes begin to subdivide into distinct peer groups or sports teams. Here, exclusion may be rather arbitrary, but the experience of having a door slammed in one’s face proceeds in cases, where inclusion depends on formal rules or preconditions. Access to private schools follows explicit rules and depends on financial capacities; access to university depends on a certificate or diploma, eventually from certain schools only; membership in a highly prestigious club depends on economic and social capital and the respective social networks; and finally, in the case of migration, people will have to be eligible for citizenship and pass the thorny path of naturalization. However, it is not just the enormous plurality of forms that makes social closure crucial for sociology. Rather, the process of closure of social relations—of groups, organizations, institutions, and even national societies—is the fundamental process of both “communal” (Vergemeinschaftung) and “associative” relationships (Vergesellschaftung), and neither would be possible without social closure. In this broad and fundamental sense, social closure is not restricted to processes in national societies. It even allows for understanding crucial processes of the way the social world is organized at the regional or global level.
Social Policy
Authors: Yerkes Mara
Published: March 2013

Social policy exists as an academic discipline but also refers to the practice of policymaking and administration (including service delivery). As an academic discipline, social policy is distinct in its empirical focus on welfare provision but overlaps with other social science fields such as sociology, political science, and public administration. From a narrow standpoint, social policy refers to policies and practices created to address the needs of individuals, i.e., to provide welfare. From a broader standpoint, social policy can be used to motivate individual behavior; is inherently related to the creation of social inequalities across class, gender, race, and sexualities; and is closely tied to capital. Social policy encompasses a wide range of policies, including activation, care, education, families, health care, pensions/aging, poverty/social assistance, and unemployment. Social policy practice refers to the administration of social policies and service delivery. Welfare provision is not limited to government—markets, employers, nongovernmental organizations, churches, and informal networks all play a role in welfare provision, although this varies across countries. The focus, however, particularly in social policy research, is often on government policies and the provision of services. In particular, social policy is often discussed in relation to the welfare state because social policies represent the public or collective management of social risks, an essential function of welfare states. In recent years, social policy research has become increasingly comparative, with a focus on cross-national analyses of systems, policies, and service provision. I would like to thank Hannelore van Hoffen, my research assistant, for all her efforts in helping to compile a list of social policy references to be considered for this article.
Housework
Authors: Treas Judith , Tatlock Anne
Published: March 2013

Housework contributes to the broad project of social reproduction. Household labor perpetuates the social structures associated with family, gender, inequality and the labor force. Provisioning families and keeping up the household all fall under the general rubric of non-market labor, that is, the unpaid work that includes not only housework, but also caring for family members. Because this takes place outside public view and falls largely to women, the value of housework to families and society has often been overlooked or discounted. Until the middle of the 20th century, household labor received little scholarly attention outside the applied field of home economics. As female employment rates increased, however, men’s and women’s lives converged in the realm of paid work, raising questions about why change came more slowly to private households. Although men do more work around the house than their fathers did a generation ago, women still do the lion’s share, and some chores remain stubbornly stereotyped as “women’s work.” Indeed, the allocation of housework is a telling indicator of gender inequality in individual households and societies. Housework also reflects on class inequality, because high-income women can hire poor women to do the job. Domestic arrangements are the outcome of both micro-level family circumstances and macro-level cultural and structural forces. Gender attitudes, partners’ time constraints, their relative resources in bargaining over the chores, and the presence of children illustrate the micro-level influences on the volume and distribution of housework. Cross-national differences in domestic practices demonstrate that the characteristics of social institutions and social policies shape intimate domestic arrangements. How the housework is managed matters for marital relationships, personal well-being, individual careers and population processes. The demand for household labor has created a transnational labor force of domestic workers with implications for global inequality.
Folk Music
Authors: Goertzen Chris
Published: March 2013

Folk music, a widely used but controversial term, means oral-tradition music by and for peasants/the working class in regional cultures where there is also a sophisticated art music that is cultivated by professionals and supported by a socioeconomic upper crust. In recent centuries, these same environments have come to nurture a third broad category of music, popular music, that is made by professionals for the masses and sold as sheet music and, more recently, audiograms of various kinds. The three categories overlap significantly. When members of an upper class discuss folk music, the conversation tends to take place in the shadow of ideology, that is, a presumption or explicit assertion of associated virtues: group identity, nationalism, nostalgia, and working-class or peasant sturdiness, rectitude, and creativity. Indeed, folk music has often been an important ingredient in asserting that a geographical area occupied by the people cultivating that music ought to become a country in the political sense, or that a country home to a given music is especially virtuous, or that people of a given nationality or ethnicity are somehow better than those of other nationalities or ethnicities. Thus, folk music may support healthy pride in group identity, but such opinions may tilt in the direction of decidedly unhealthy assertions of superiority. Insalubrious political uses of repertoires of folk music in Nazi Germany and in the Soviet Union soiled the term folk music in academic circles, and, by the 1960s, folk music was renamed “traditional music” in some settings. Another key ingredient leading academics to shy away from the term was that intensive study of bodies of what had long been called folk music revealed considerable differentiation among repertoires, so that it became common to refer by name to specific genres of music in oral tradition rather than to simply classify them as folk music. However, at about this same time, the term folk music reached broader use among the general public in the West, referring not only to venerable repertoires in oral tradition, but also to new personal, confessional, and political songs performed in coffee houses and having some commercial success. Today, academics remain more comfortable employing the umbrella rubrics “popular music” and “art music” than “folk music” in publications and in professional environments. Nevertheless, the term has demonstrated considerable staying power even among those same academics when teaching nonspecialized or introductory classes and when talking with colleagues not conversant with the academic field of folklore as well as in general conversation. In short, however controversial folk music has become, it remains useful as a concept.
Use of Force in International Law
Authors: Corten Olivier
Published: March 2013

Use of force is a politically sensitive and legally undetermined topic. It is therefore not surprising that it constitutes a highly controversial issue. During the Cold War, various critical debates about the legality of military interventions (Korea, Vietnam, Nicaragua, Palestine, Afghanistan) were prevalent. These controversies did not disappear in the 1990s (Yugoslavia) nor in the 2000s and 2010s (Afghanistan, Iraq, Israel/Lebanon, Russia/Georgia, Libya, Syria, Ukraine, among others). A general assessment of the numerous books and articles dedicated to this issue reveals a deep ambivalence. On the one hand, no one really contests that the use of force is strictly forbidden in contemporary international law. This prohibition is recognized as a core rule of the law of nations, and even a rule of imperative international law (jus cogens). Indeed, it seems difficult to conceive any kind of legal order without at least affirming that its subjects cannot attack one another. The prohibition of the use of force is also logically linked to the notion of external sovereignty, aiming both at protecting the identity and the personality of every state and at preserving individuals “from the scourge of war” (preamble of the UN Charter). On the other hand, there are, to say the least, a great variety of interpretations of the rule. Are collective security and self-defense the only exceptions in allowing states to use force? Is the Security Council the only authority able to authorize states to use force? Under what conditions are states able to invoke self-defense? Those questions seem difficult to address, as the conventional sources are rather limited: Article 2(4) and Chapters VII and VIII of the UN Charter are far from providing explicit answers to all the questions raised. Thus, the answers can be found mainly in customary international law, with all the difficulties surrounding the task of establishing that law.
Military Intervention in International Law
Authors: Tsagourias Nicholas
Published: March 2013

Intervention refers to interference in the affairs of a state. Such interference can take many different forms: political or military, direct or indirect. International law is mainly concerned with dictatorial or coercive interference in a state’s affairs, which is in principle prohibited. The scope of the prohibition is, however, affected by the political, legal, or normative changes taking place in the international society at different stages of its development. For this reason, the legality of certain interventions (such as interventions for the protection of human rights, democracy, or self-determination) has given rise to interesting debates. The legal literature on intervention reflects these developments, but it should be noted that intervention is not exclusively a legal concept. Intervention is also a political concept, and international relations scholarship has a long history of dealing with this phenomenon. This article focuses on military intervention only and approaches it in general, as well as in specific, terms. After a general overview, textbooks as well as the sources of law relating to intervention will be presented. Because intervention can take place in a number of different forms, they are covered as follows: By the United Nations in the Domestic Jurisdiction of States, By Invitation, In Civil Wars, Humanitarian Intervention, Pro-Democratic Intervention, and Self-Determination. Because intervention is a multifaceted concept, the resources included here approach the topic from a broad spectrum base, recognizing the various influences involved in the decision on whether to intervene.