image: cover of Max Weber, The History of Commercial Partnerships in the Middle Ages I've never really understood why the exposition of one of Max Weber's most important methodological ideas, his theory of ideal types, occurs in the context of an essay that is primarily about the role of values in the social sciences. This is …
Feyerabend as artisanal scientist
I've generally found Paul Feyerabend's position on science to be a bit too extreme. Here is one provocative statement in the analytical index of Against Method: Thus science is much closer to myth than a scientific philosophy is prepared to admit. It is one of the any forms of thought that have been developed by man, and not …
Marx on Russia
In 1881 Marx wrote a letter to Vera Zasulich, an important Russian follower, that addresses the question of theory and prediction when it comes to thinking about the future course of history. In particular, he denies that his theories have determinate predictive implications for the development of capitalism or socialism in Russia. Here is a link to the …
Trust networks
Chuck Tilly had a fascination with the mechanisms of social interaction at all levels. His 2005 book, Trust and Rule, picks up on one particular feature of social organization that is often instrumental in political and social episodes, including especially in the everyday workings of predation and defense. This is the idea of a trust network: …
Teaching philosophy
What is it that we expect students to learn when we teach philosophy? Is philosophy an arcane and charmingly useless vestige of a nineteenth-century university education? Or does it have something crucial to add to the liberal education of the twenty-first century -- whether in the arts and sciences or in pre-professional schools? Philosophers would …
Norbert Elias on the individual
Norbert Elias opens his 1987 book The Society of Individuals with these words: The relation of the plurality of people to the single person we call the "individual", and of the single person to the plurality, is by no means clear at present. But we often fail to realize that it is not clear, and still less why. We have the …
Public health estimates in Marx’s Capital
Long stretches of Marx's Capital take the form of an effort at developing and defending an economic model of capitalism, based on the theories of value and surplus value. But there are also recurring efforts at providing a descriptive sociology of capitalism: the forms of day-to-day life that British economic relations imposed upon the working class. …
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Contentious politics in China
By official count, the incidence of popular protest in China has increased ten-fold in the past fifteen years. Kevin O'Brien and Rachel Stern report that the Chinese state reported 8,700 "collective incidents" in 1993, and this number had grown to 87,000 by 2005 (12). And the issues that have evoked protest have expanded as well: …
Skinner’s spatial imagination
images: presentations of Skinner's data by Center for Geographic Analysis, Harvard University, AAS 2010 G. William Skinner was a remarkably generous scholar who inspired and assisted several generations of China specialists. (Here is a link to a remembrance of Bill.) He was prolific and fertile, and there is much to learn from rereading his work. …
Zomia — James Scott on highland peoples
James Scott opens his most recent book with quotations from frustrated pre-modern administrators and missionaries whose territories included the peoples of inaccessible highland regions -- Guizhou, highland Burma, and Appalachia. Scott finds that the geographical circumstances of highland peoples mark them apart from the political organizations of the valleys; states could control agriculture, surplus, and …
Understanding Society 