This thesis traces the intellectual trajectory of Lorenz Stein (1815-1890), a German legal scholar and political thinker who, despite being a significant theorist during his lifetime, is an obscure figure today, especially in Anglophone scholarship. It focuses on Stein's writings on socialism and argues that they provide crucial insights into the changing nature of socialist thought in the mid-nineteenth century. It contributes to the project of departing from a Marxist interpretation of the history of socialism that has long been predominant, and uses Stein's intellectual biography to illustrate how contingent political, cultural and personal factors have shaped both the creation and reception of socialist ideas.

The exploration of this thesis on public finance proceeds on two axes. First, it aims at developing an ontological perspective to public finance. Accordingly, public finance is defined to be the concrete political relation between the state and society. The thesis that presents a political and historical evaluation of public finance from a critical sociological and political economy approach associates the components of this definition such as public, the political etc. with the relevant debates in social and political theory. In line with this, the traditional harmony-perspective of neoclassical public finance theories, which is ignorant of the political, is criticized, calling it as &lsquo / police finance&rsquo / instead of &lsquo / public finance&rsquo / . Secondly, the thesis explores the history of fiscal thought between the 15th-19th centuries with special reference to the Ottoman Empire. All in all, with these topics this thesis aims at making a contribution to the field of &ldquo / fiscal sociology&rdquo / from a critical sociological and political economy approach.

Ce travail porte sur le développement de l’hygiène publique dans le royaume de Grèce entre 1833, année de l’accession au trône du prince Othon de Bavière, et 1845, lorsqu’un système complet des lazarets et d’offices de santé trace les frontières politiques et épidémiologiques du royaume. Après avoir traité les structures de prévention sanitaire érigées tantôt à l’intérieur du pays (vaccinateurs, médecins publics, médecins municipaux) tantôt sur ses frontières, nous étudions les mesures pour lutter contre les maladies contagieuses (surtout la peste et la variole) et contre les miasmes. Nous nous efforçons d’analyser également les maladies qui déterminent la mortalité à l’époque ainsi que les théories médicales qui expliquent les mesures appliquées, en essayant de dépasser certains aspects de la distinction classique d’Erwin Ackerknecht entre contagionnisme et infectionnisme. Enfin, nous abordons la formation du corps médical officiel, processus qui a entraîné des changements dans la pratique médicale. Cet intérêt pour l’hygiène publique impose l’étude de la construction de l’Etat et de sa ‘base biologique’. L’hygiène publique définit les menaces contre lesquelles elle s’érige en même temps qu’elle construit et met en sécurité la collectivité. Dans l’Etat de police du caméraliste Othon I, ces développements sont l’affaire de la bureaucratie, de l’administration, de la force publique et de la science de la police sanitaire. Son but était la construction et la mise en ordre de l’espace public, de l’espace d’action de l’Etat, qui est tout autant naturel que social. Cet établissement d’un ordre favorise la centralisation sanitaire en même temps qu’il prétend discipliner (processus de civilisation) les éléments naturels et les forces sociales pour qu’ils puissent être coordonnés sans résistances ; autrement dit, l’action d’imposer un ordre pacifie. La police sanitaire contrôle ces processus, en reconfigurant les liens que les hommes tissent entre eux, avec la géographie, avec la nature et avec leurs maladies. / This study is about the organization of public hygiene in the kingdom of Greece between 1833, when prince Otto of Bavaria ascends to the throne, and 1845, when the political and epidemiological frontiers of the kingdom are traced by a complete system of lazarettos and sanitary offices. We will firstly analyze the structures of sanitary prevention in the interior of the country (vaccinators, public health doctors, municipal doctors) as well as at its frontiers, and then we will focus on the measures against contagious diseases (such as the plague and smallpox) and against miasmas. We are also interested in examining the main diseases that determine the mortality of the period under scrutiny and the medical theories that explain the applicable sanitary measures. At the same time, we will review some of the aspects of the classical distinction of Erwin Ackerknecht between contagionism and miasmatic theory. Finally, we will study the difficult formation of an official group of medical professionals. The interest in public hygiene imposes the study of the biological construction of the state and, subsequently, of the state itself. Public hygiene defines the threats which it tries to prevent, and it creates and secures the collectivity. In the Police State of the cameralist king Otto, these developments are controlled by the bureaucracy, the administration, the public force and the science of medical police. Its purpose is to construct and order the public space, the space of state action, which is natural as well as social. This action of ordering imposes the centralization of health and at the same time it normalizes the natural elements and the social forces so that they can coordinate without resistance; in other words, the action of ordering pacifies. Medical police controls these processes by reconfiguring the ties that bind individuals with each other and with the geography, the nature and their diseases.

This dissertation attempts to explain why cross-national variation exists in government approaches to dealing with illegal drugs. As other scholars have shown, several domestic and international political factors do account for some of this variance. However less is known of the effect that bureaucratic dominance and political institutions may have on drug policy. This research argues that bureaucrats define problems in ways that make their services the best possible solution to policymakers. Mediating the ability of bureaucrats to influence drug policy outcomes are political institutions. Certain institutional structures foster a competitive policymaking environment while others foster a more cooperative policymaking environment. In the former of these, law enforcement approaches to the drug problem are often retained as the status quo because competition between policy actors prevents consideration of alternatives. In the latter environment however, prevention, treatment, and harm reduction approaches to the drug problem are developed because cooperation between policymakers allows other actors. namely public health bureaucrats.to influence drug policy decision making. To test this argument, I constructed an original dataset that includes over 4,000 observations of drug policy in 101 democracies. Institutional data on intergovernmental relations, regime type, political bargaining, electoral design, and cameralism were regressed on 6 different drug policy indices: law enforcement, deterrence-based prevention, abstinence-based treatment, educationbased prevention, substitution-based treatment, and harm reduction. While controlling for government resource capacity, severity of the drug problem, international pressure, and political ideology, I found that institutions explain a portion of the variance in drug policy outcomes. Providing in-depth information about these phenomena is a large amount of field data I collected while interviewing 155 politicians, bureaucrats, interest group leaders, and service providers. Respondents from all four of the case countries examined in this research.including United States, Canada, Austria, and Netherlands.report that bureaucrats play a major role in the formation of drug policy. Which bureaucrats have the most influence on policymakers is largely a function of domestic political conditions, international political factors, and political institutions.