source: The Paretian System (link) The most vivid part of any undergraduate student's study of economics is probably the diagrams. Economists since Walras, Pareto, and Marshall have found it useful to express their theories and hypotheses making use of two-axis diagrams, allowing for very economical formulation of fundamental relationships. Supply-demand curves, production functions, and a …
India’s Naxalites
India is the world's largest democracy. It also is home to one of the more persistent and deadly Maoist insurgencies in the world, the Naxalite movement in eastern India (Communist Party of India (Maoist) (CPI/M)). The Naxalites were a splinter group that separated from India's Communist Party in the 1960s, and their hallmarks have been …
Granularity
If we think back over the history of sociology and political science since 1800, one thing that is striking is the trend away from the most macro-level frameworks of thought in the direction of more situated and proximate social and political arrangements. There was a tendency among the founders -- Montesquieu, Spenser, Comte, for example …
Weber in America
Lawrence Scaff offered a fascinating preview of his forthcoming book, Max Weber in America, at a sociology seminar in Ann Arbor this week. Scaff has written extensively on Weber in the past, and this current research is particularly intriguing and stimulating. The book offers a careful reconstruction of Weber's visit to the United States in 1904, …
Re-reading Chalmers Johnson
Chalmers Johnson, one of the key contributors to Asian studies since the early 1960s, died on November 20, 2010. (Here are several notices -- link, link, link.) Johnson has been an important contributor to Asian studies since the appearance of his first book in 1962, Peasant Nationalism and Communist Power: The Emergence of Revolutionary China, 1937-1945, based on his …
Marx on a global wage
What is the longterm tendency in the wage for relatively unskilled labor? In the United States we've been thinking about this problem in the past three decades in the context of "outsourcing" and the flight of manufacturing jobs to low-wage countries. Moderate- and high-wage industrial jobs have left the country in large numbers. In the …
Urban and metropolitan problem solving
The issues that almost all large American metropolitan regions and cities are facing are important and messy. Here is a short list: racial segregation, concentration of poverty, poor health and nutrition, poor schools, crime and violence, and disaffection of young people. These problems are important because they hold back the personal lives of millions of …
Hobbes in context
We often think of Hobbes as being an originator in English philosophy, a strikingly innovative thinker who burst on the scene with the first formulation of a social contract theory of government. And we sometimes think of his justification of absolute sovereignty as a fairly direct reaction to the disorders Britain experienced during its Civil …
Consolidated quantitative history
It is fascinating to browse through the sessions on the program at the Social Science History Association this month (link). SSHA is distinguished by its deep embrace of disciplinary and methodological diversity, and there are panels deriving from qualitative, comparative, and theoretical perspectives. But particularly interesting for me this year are the more quantitative subjects …
New modes of historical presentation
Victor Lieberman's Strange Parallels: Volume 1, Integration on the Mainland: Southeast Asia in Global Context, c.800-1830 and Strange Parallels: Volume 2, Mainland Mirrors: Europe, Japan, China, South Asia, and the Islands: Southeast Asia in Global Context, c.800-1830 represent about 1000 pages of careful, dense historical prose extending over two volumes. As previously discussed (link, link), the book reviews …
Understanding Society 