This study develops a novel analytical approach for studying popular conceptions of the nationstate that accounts for both withinand between-country heterogeneity and avoids a priori assumptions about the national boundedness of culture. I identify widely shared attitudinal patterns among a pooled sample of over 27,000 respondents from thirty countries and only subsequently examine those respon...

The celebration of communitarianism by political philosophers (Sandel, M. 1982 Liberalism and the Limits of Justice. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press) has apparently been extended to strategic analyses of ascriptively attuned norms (Fearon, J. and D. Laitin. 1996. “Explaining Interethnic Cooperation.” American Political Science Review 90: 715–735) — an intriguing development, given game th...

This paper tests Samuel and Pearl Oliner’s theory that extensivity is a cause of prosocial behaviors, using data from the 1995 and 2005 waves of the Midlife in the United States (MIDUS) survey. Principal components analysis of a set of nineteen questions about moral obligations supports the Oliners’ contention that some individuals have a constricted moral sense, meaning that they feel stronger...

This paper discusses a recent retreat of multiculturalism in the liberal state. This retreat has occurred both at the level of theory and practice. With the help of some recent liberal critiques of multiculturalism (by B.Barry, G.Sartori, and Y.Levy), the first part maps out some shortcomings of the notion of minority integration through cultural recognition, particularly with respect to immigr...

It has been claimed that psychologist Joshua Greene's recent neuroscientific research into the physiological underpinnings of our moral intuitions has normative implications. In particular, it has been claimed that this research discredits our deontological intuitions about trolley-like cases, without discrediting our consequentialist intuitions about such cases. I disagree. As I see it, attemp...

Class explains much in the differentiation of life chances and political dynamics in South Asia. Yet in the subcontinent class has lost its centrality as a way of understanding the world and how it changes. Indian intellectuals have been a major force in the eclipsing of class through discursive strategies of constructivist idealism. Formalism in social sciences finds class relations elusive an...

This paper argues that Pierre Bourdieu was motivated by the frustration of the French Revolution. His work continually criticized the gap between the ideological promise of the Enlightenment and the actual persistence of inequality in modern France. This paper exposes the centrality of the failed revolution in Bourdieu’s oeuvre by visiting four topics he delved into: Education, gender, globaliz...