Arthur Koestler is most celebrated for his historical novel about the Moscow show trials, Darkness at Noon. And the book is indeed a deeply revealing look at the heart of totalitarianism in the twentieth century -- the more so if you do a side-by-side reading of the trial of the fictional Rubashov and the transcripts …
Micro cultures?
Is there such a thing as a "micro"-culture -- a culture that is somewhat distinctive of a particular community in a specific time and place, and different from the culture of similar communities in other places? The sorts of communities I'm thinking of might include sports teams, university faculties, union locals, church congregations, street gangs, …
Paired comparisons
Sidney Tarrow is a gifted and prolific student of comparative politics. (Listen to my interview with Professor Tarrow.) He has spent much of his career trying to understand social movements, contentious politics, and the causes of differences in political behavior across national settings. And one of his special contributions is his ability to think clearly …
Is network analysis inconsistent with agent-centered explanation?
Quite a few researchers who study dynamic social processes are making use of some of the tools of network analysis. And it is sometimes maintained that this approach is inconsistent with an agent-centered approach to social processes. Some of these researchers take the view that "it's not what is in the heads of various actors, …
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The flea market analogy
Is the flea market a helpful analogy for understanding the social world ("The Dis-unity of Science")? Does it serve to provide a different mental model in terms of which to consider the nature of social phenomena? What it has going for it is heterogeneity and contingency, and an obvious share of agent-dependency. The people who …
The "dis"-unity of social science
One of the central goals of Vienna Circle philosophy of science was the idea of the unity of science. The idea included at least two separable parts: methodological unity and unity of content under a single system of laws. On the methodological side there was the idea that the logic of explanation and confirmation should …
Politics and science
In the idealized version of science, the enterprise of scientific knowledge discovery follows its own logic without extraneous non-cognitive or non-rational influences. But this is unrealistic. Science is a social activity, conditioned by institutions, governments, and other social forces. So it is worth considering how politics influences the course of science and how these influences …
What was E P Thompson up to?
Let's think about E P Thompson. His 1963 book, Making of the English Working Class, transformed the way that historians on the left conceptualized "social class." But what, precisely, was it about? Whereas other Marxist historians focused particularly on the large structures of capitalism, Thompson's eye was turned to the specific and often surprising details …
Social science and social problems
Several of the interviews that I’ve conducted in recent weeks have agreed on an important point: that the social sciences ought to be directed towards addressing important social problems, and that the research agenda for social science ought to be influenced or shaped by the constituencies in society who are most affected by these social …
Agent-based modeling as social explanation
Logical positivism favored a theory of scientific explanation that focused on subsumption under general laws. We explain an outcome by identifying one or more general laws, a set of boundary conditions, and a derivation of the outcome from these statements. A second and competing theory of scientific explanation can be called "causal realism." On this …
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Understanding Society 