On Friendship, Equality and Introductions: Comparing English and German Regimes of Manners and Emotions

This paper explores friendship by analysing some of the characteristic differences in manners between the Germans and the English, from the end of the nineteenth century until the 1970s. During that time rules for introductions were a major if not the most prominent topic in English manners books, whereas these rules attracted hardly any attention in the German ones. In an opposite way, the same goes for friendship: the topic was almost absent in English manners books while it was a central theme in German ones, together with topics such as duzen – addressing each other with the informal you: Du. Establishing a 'friendship' as well as 'being properly introduced' are both ritual transitions from a rather distant and hierarchical relationship in the direction of greater 'equality' and intimacy. These different forms are explained by placing them in the context of their national class structures and by connecting them to differences in the processes of social emancipation and national integration.Historical and International Comparison of Germany and England: Friendship, Equality, Introductions, Privacy, Good Society, Social Mobility, Informalization, and Regimes of Manners and Emotions

On the Protocol Composition Logic PCL

A recent development in formal security protocol analysis is the Protocol Composition Logic (PCL). We identify a number of problems with this logic as well as with extensions of the logic, as defined in [DDMP05,HSD+05,He05,Dat05,Der06,DDMR07]. The identified problems imply strong restrictions on the scope of PCL, and imply that some currently claimed PCL proofs cannot be proven within the logic, or make use of unsound axioms. Where possible, we propose solutions for these problems

EXTERNAL BORROWING – A SOLUTION IN OVERCOMING THE CURRENT ECONOMIC CRISIS?

The government decisions to call, in recent years, more and more reimbursable financing gave birth to fierce reactions among politicians and economy specialists. The present article aims to analyze how the external borrowing may be a solution to overcome the difficult situation where we are.government, financing, external borrowing, economic crisis

How scholars turned their attention to the populist radical right

In this extract from his new book, The Populist Radical Right: A Reader, Cas Mudde looks at the boom in academic studies of populist radical right parties. He identifies three waves of scholarship since 1945 – the most recent of which has come to trump the study of all other party families put together, despite their relative lack of electoral success

The European Parliament elections show the increasingly fragmented nature of European party systems

Most coverage of the European Parliament elections has noted the rise of several far-right and Eurosceptic parties across Europe. Cas Mudde argues, however, that a more important trend was toward increasingly fragmented party systems. Presenting a series of numbers from the elections, he illustrates that ‘big parties’ are experiencing declining vote shares, with a greater number of smaller parties now competing for power in many EU countries

Complete Characterization of Security Protocols by Pattern Refinement

Recently, the notion of complete characterizations of security protocols was introduced by Guttman and Thayer. We provide an alternative definition of this concept, and extend an existing protocol verification tool (Scyther) to compute our notion of complete characterization. We present both notions of complete characterization, discuss their relative merits, and provide preliminary empirical results using an extended version of the Scyther tool

Discussing Civilisation and Informalisation: Criteriology

Norbert Elias’s theory of civilising processes has been received only marginally in the USA, one of the obstacles being the absence of figurational or process studies of American society. In the first decade of this century this situation was changed by the publication of Stephen Mennell’s The American Civilizing Process (2007) and Cas Wouters’ Sex and Manners (2004) and Informalization (2007). By 2012, Randall Collins had reviewed the first and the third books in two essays (2009, 2011). His claims and criticism of civilising and informalisation theory are discussed in this paper by placing them in the context of the reception history of Elias’s work since the 1960s, when a first round of discussion centred on criteria to be used for determining the direction of civilising processes. A second round was in the 1990s, and in this paper we contribute to a new round by presenting a summary of earlier critical discussions in an attempt to establish a more solid and subtler body of criteria for studying civilising processes. We use this in critically discussing Collins’s contributions, linking them to symbolic interactionism, American National Ideology, and blind spots in American sociology.Norbert Elias’s theory of civilising processes has been received only marginally in the USA, one of the obstacles being the absence of figurational or process studies of American society. In the first decade of this century this situation was changed by the publication of Stephen Mennell’s The American Civilizing Process (2007) and Cas Wouters’ Sex and Manners (2004) and Informalization (2007). By 2012, Randall Collins had reviewed the first and the third books in two essays (2009, 2011). His claims and criticism of civilising and informalisation theory are discussed in this paper by placing them in the context of the reception history of Elias’s work since the 1960s, when a first round of discussion centred on criteria to be used for determining the direction of civilising processes. A second round was in the 1990s, and in this paper we contribute to a new round by presenting a summary of earlier critical discussions in an attempt to establish a more solid and subtler body of criteria for studying civilising processes. We use this in critically discussing Collins’s contributions, linking them to symbolic interactionism, American National Ideology, and blind spots in American sociology