The Egyptian Revolution 2011 has shaken the Arab world and stirred up Middle-East politics. Moreover, it caused a rush in political science and the neighboring disciplines, which had not predicted an event like this and now have troubles explaining it. While many things can be learned from the popular uprising, and from the limitations of previous scholarship, our focus will be on a moral resource, which has occasionally been noticed, but not sufficiently explored: the role of humor in keeping up the spirit of the Revolution. For 18 days, protestors persevered at Liberation Square in Central Cairo, the epicenter of resistance; at times a few dozens, at times hundreds of thousands. What they did was to fight the terror of the regime, which reached absurd peaks during those days, with humor-successfully. We offer a social-functionalist account of the uprising, which includes behavioral as well as cultural levels of analysis, and illuminates how humorous means helped to achieve deadly serious goals. By reconstructing how Egyptians laughed themselves into democracy, we outline a social psychology of resistance, which uses humor both as a sword and a shield.

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Behavioural economics, Consumer law, Economic sociology, Culture, Human condition,

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The predicament of modern capitalism, and of contemporary finance capitalism in particular, is the fine line between credit and crisis. Recent developments from the American sub‐prime mortgage crisis to the European sovereign debt crisis revived debates about the nature of money and all sorts of derivatives. Money is a social phenomenon which has always two sides: an economic and a legal one. As an economic commodity, it hinges on the market; as a legal relation, it depends on the state. The resulting tension features prominently in the works of Max Weber and Karl Polanyi. Both studied the market society of the late‐nineteenth and early‐twentieth century, including its monetary institutions. Moreover, both were also aware of the political function of their related writings. The following review allows us to establish links between law, economy, and society and thus exemplify the economic sociology of law as it is foreshadowed by the sociological classics.