Dog in the Night: The Limits of European Nationalism, 1789–1895

Abstract. The article questions the widely held view that nationalism was a significant feature of modem civilisation and particularly of nineteenth-century Europe. Two groups of events are chosen for examination: reputedly classic instances of nationalism (the French Revolution, German responses to Napoleon, the Italian and German revolutions of 1848, Italian and German unification and the Eastern crisis of 1875-8), and important international events which in an age of nationalism should reflect it (the Crimean War, Bismarck's alliances and the Franco-Russian alliance). Defined as the effort of nation/peoples to defend/extend their power, nationalism is evaluated specifically for its breadth of support and its influence on decision-makers which prove to be limited. This conclusion has implications not only for these events but also brings into question the established system of historical periodisation which presumes the distinctiveness of the nineteenth century and modem civilisation precisely because of their distinguishing features such as nationalism.     

Bureaucratic Domination of Hunter-Gatherer Societies: A Study of the San in Botswana

Social science analysis of hunter-gatherer societies has highlighted their economic and cultural subordination to neighbouring peoples. This article shows that, at least in the case of the San in Botswana, state bureaucratic domination is becoming the determining factor in social change. The authors provide evidence of bureaucratic domination with respect to settlement of the San, the establishment of headmanship, extension of social services and environmental legislation. In this new environment, hunter-gatherer self-determination requires the creation of effective political organizations to counter the bureaucratic state. Some San groups in Botswana are already reacting to the expanding presence of the state by dramatically increasing their involvement in various aspects of Botswana's electoral politics. While the outcome of the San political challenge to the state is still in doubt, the authors conclude that San settlement is a precondition for political change in spite of the serious cultural sacrifice involved.     

From Traditional Management to the New Management in British Local Government

The article outlines the assumptions on which traditional management in British local authorities was based. It argues the those assumptions were grounded in the conditions of the postwar period, but outlines developing critiques. In recent years societal changes and economic and financial pressures have challenged the basis of traditional management and reinforced the critiques. The legislative program of the Conservative Government on local government is presented as one response to the need to build a new management, with its own strengths and weaknesses.     

REVIEW

A Place for Strangers: Towards a History of Australian Aboriginal Being. By Tony Swain. Melbourne: Cambridge University Press. 1993. Pp. 303. Price $A29.95 paperback.     

Australian discourses of democracy

Democracy is to a significant extent what political actors and ordinary people make of it. The inquiry reported here determines how the individuals who are the constituents of any actual or potential Australian political order conceptualise democracy and their own place in it. Political discourse analysis and Q methodology are deployed to reveal the discourses of democracy present in Australia. The four discourses uncovered are termed resigned acceptance, inclusive republicanism, right‐minded democracy, and anxious egalitarianism. Their results illuminate Australian political culture, the attractiveness and feasibility of different kinds of institutional innovation, and the real‐world prospects for various kinds of democratic theory.     

Political sociology and political reality: The concept of democratic consensus

The investigation of consensus was a leading theme in the political sociology of democracy from the early 1950s until the late 1960s. Consensus has since become something of a suspect category of social inquiry. The consensus literature (V. O. Key, R. Dahl, H. Eckstein, S. M. Upset, G. A. Almond) has been charged by the ‘post‐behaviouralists’ as conservative politics disguised as impartial social science. This paper investigates the possibility of restoring consensus as a research category through an examination of its original use by John Stuart Mill. The link between Mill and contemporary political sociology is Edward Shils, who is here identified as one of the guiding spirits of the consensus literature. The paper compares consensus as treated in Mill's explicitly political science with Shils’ implicitly political science. The ‘post‐behaviouralists’ sought the recovery of the political as the leading theme of social inquiry. This is exactly as Mill originally intended. The consensus literature, however, took its bearing from Shils’ restatement of Mill, in which the political categories are submerged according to the demands of a novel and apolitical science of politics. The recovery of democratic consensus as a research category would greatly benefit from the substitution of Mill's original project in place of Shils's much weaker, if more influential, restatement of it.