George Steinmetz offers a comparative sociology of colonialism in The Devil's Handwriting: Precoloniality and the German Colonial State in Qingdao, Samoa, and Southwest Africa. More specifically, he wants to explain differences in the implementation of "native policy" within German colonial regimes around the turn of the twentieth century. He finds that there are significant differences across three …
Social explanation and causal mechanisms
To explain a social outcome or regularity, we need to provide an account of why and how it came about; and this means providing a causal analysis in terms of which the explanandum appears as a result. Having a causal theory of a realm requires having an ontology: what kinds of things exist in this …
Marx’s critique
Marx was a critic above all else. His most comfortable intellectual stance was criticism -- most of the subtitles of his works involve the word "critique". He was, of course, a critic of other thinkers --Proudhon, Smith, Bakunin, for example. And here, the key to criticism is the unearthing of indefensible intellectual presuppositions. But even …
Academic freedom from Hofstadter to Dworkin
Academic freedom is a core value in American higher education. At certain times in our history it is a value that has been severely challenged, including especially during the McCarthy period of the 1950s. But what, precisely, does it entail? One way of starting on this topic is to consider Richard Hofstadter's writings on the …
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Food and water
It seems likely enough that one of the largest global security issues in the next fifty years will be food and water. There is a brewing food crisis underway already, with prices for staple grains rising world wide, and poor countries are beginning to experience the consequences. But a crisis in fresh water seems not …
Idealist philosophy of history
In a previous post I commended W.H. Walsh's approach to the philosophy of history for Walsh's sympathetic effort to understand both traditions in the field, including what is called "speculative" philosophy of history. And Walsh is to be commended as well for his analytical ability to formulate and explicate these positions. This is in fact what we …
W. H. Walsh’s philosophy of history
English-speaking philosophers have often made a hash of the philosophy of history. Either they have had such disdain for continental philosophy that they could not get their minds around the thoughts of a Hegel or a Dilthey, or they became pre-occupied with certain minor linguistic or logical issues and therefore couldn't get to the more …
Dilthey on the human sciences
Wilhelm Dilthey (1833-1911) maintained that the human sciences were inherently distinct from the natural sciences in that the former depend on the understanding of meaningful human actions, while the latter depend on causal explanation of physical events. Human life is structured and carried out through meaningful action and symbolic expressions. Dilthey maintains that the intellectual …
More on The Spirit Level
There are quite a few interesting comments on my earlier post on The Spirit Level on Economist's View. I can't respond in detail to all of them, but here are a few additional thoughts. A few commentators seem to think I'm unsympathetic to the book, which isn't accurate. So let me be more direct in my assessment of The …
Income inequalities and social ills
According to Kate Pickett and Richard Wilkinson in The Spirit Level: Why Greater Equality Makes Societies Stronger, income inequalities in a society are a source of a variety of social problems in that society, almost without regard to the absolute level of income in the society. Their basic measure of inequality across countries and states in …
Understanding Society 