The mediating role of the Ombudsman in the protection of human rights

The findings of the study discussed in this article indicate that the respondents are aware of the power of the economy over social issues in all social affairs in our society. They see the networking role, professional knowledge and leadership skills of the Ombudsman as core competencies in solving problems pertaining to human rights brought about by increasing social inequality. Complex problems regarding human rights demand coordination between national and international governmental and non-governmental organisations because human rights are becoming a central dimension of international affairs today.     

‘Neo-Feudalism’ in America? Conservatism in Relation to European Feudalism

This paper reconsiders American conservatism in relation to European feudalism and medievalism. The paper argues and shows that conservatism in America has typically been an American variant or proxy of European feudalism in particular and medievalism in general. Specifically, this is argued and shown for American economic and political conservatism with respect to feudalism in economy and its despotic ramifications in politics, as reciprocally related and reinforcing elements of European medievalism. The paper also identifies other interconnected elements of European medievalism in American economic and political as well as cultural conservatism. It finds that in economic-political terms, conservatism in America, irrespective of its assumed and celebrated lack of a European feudal and medievalist past, has been and continues to be a functional equivalent of feudalism and other medievalism in Europe. The paper concludes that American conservatism, including neo-conservatism, is a sort of European neo-feudalism and neo-medievalism rather than, as it claims and widely supposed, non-feudal and non-medievalist, thus questioning received views in the literature and society.     

Spencer is dead, long live Spencer: individualism, holism, and the problem of norms

The debate between the advocates of sociological individualism and those of holism has been pervasive in the development of social theory. This debate is often situated in the false problems of sociology, since it is seen as a particular form of the perennial and irresolvable dilemma between social nominalism and realism, as well as between freedom and determinism. Nevertheless, the debate is far from over within contemporary sociology and other social science, as indicated by the resurgence of individualism in rational action theory and its repudiation by holistic social theories. The aim of this paper is to identify some modern variations on this theme as well as to discern certain common tendencies of two seemingly opposite theoretical perspectives, viz. the convergence upon a normative solution to the problem of social order. This convergence is therefore denoted normative convergence between sociological individualism and holistic sociology.     

Paradigms for analysis of social institutions: A case for sociological institutionalism

This paper makes a case for sociological institutionalism, particularly its Veblenian variant or connection. This is attempted against a background of the surge of renewed interest in analyzing institutions within modern social science, especially economics and sociology. This is indicated by the emergence of the new institutional economics as the (modified) neoclassical approach to institutions and the revival of economic sociology with its conception of the institutional embeddedness of the economy, respectively. Still, many pertinent differences between economic and sociological institutionalism are overlooked or minimized in the current literature. By exploring such differences, the paper helps span a gap in the literature in which comparative analyses of economic and sociological approaches to institutions are rare.     

Collective‐unconscious apologetics of plutocracy and oligarchy: Chicago economics' ideological preferences revealed by the sociology of knowledge

The article places and analyzes the Chicago school of economics within the framework of Mannheim's sociology of knowledge or ideas that posits and documents social determinants of ideas and ideologies. This framework reveals the Chicago school as the explicit or implicit ideology and utopia of plutocracy, oligarchy and aristocracy in the sense of apologetics of these social classes and/or systems, thus being the class form of ‘apologetic economics’. Specifically, first, Chicago economics reveals itself as the collective‐unconscious apologetics of plutocracy, oligarchy and aristocracy. Second, it appears as the ‘collective‐conscious’ apologetics in this respect. In addition, it come close to the mostly covert collective‐unconscious or conscious apologetics of theocracy and fascism. The article aims to contribute to a better understanding of the social, in particular class, factors of Chicago and related schools of economics and generally of economic ideas, theories and policies by applying Mannheim's sociology of knowledge, especially its emphasis on the collective unconscious as the source of ideology.     

Competitive envy-free division

We are concerned with a fair division problem in which the indivisible goods to be distributed among a finite number of individuals have divisible bads associated with them. The problem is formulated and analyzed in terms of the housemates problem. We present an efficient procedure that decides whether an envy-free solution exists, and if so, finds one of them; otherwise finds a solution such that each envious housemate is assigned a room whose rent is zero.     

Labor Markets’ Institutional Properties And Distributive Justice In Modern Society: A Comparative Empirical Analysis

The paper’s main argument is that the rates of distributive injustice in industrial societies are significantly influenced by labor markets’ institutional properties. Markets characterized by institutional properties that heavily favor capital at the expense of labor are expected to produce more distributive injustice - as well as more income inequality – than others. In particular, distributive injustice is expected to be inversely linked with labor’s institutional power in economy and society. The paper intends to make a contribution to institutional analyses of distributive justice and related social problems such as income inequality in modern societies.