Daniel Little
The approach to social and historical research that I favor is one that pays attention to the heterogeneity and contingency of social processes. It advises that social and historical researchers should disaggregate the large patterns they start with and try to identify the multiple underlying mechanisms, causes, motivations, movements, and contingencies that came together to …
Continue reading "Ideologies, policies, and social complexity"
SSHA CALL FOR PAPERS Macrohistorical Dynamics Network 42nd Annual Meeting of the Social Science History AssociationMontréal, Québec Canada 2-5 November 2017Submission Deadline: 3 March 2017 Changing Social Connections in Time and Space" Please consider participation in Macrohistorical Dynamics (MHD) panels of the 42nd annual meeting of the Social Science History Association, November 2-5, 2017 in …
What kind of political movement does Donald Trump represent? How did we get here? And what will be needed to defeat this divisive and anti-democratic political agenda? There is a tendency to see Trump as a bolt out of the blue, an anomaly -- an extraordinary showman who somehow conned just enough voters to gain …
Earlier posts have addressed the issue of the rise of extreme-right parties and ideologies in many parts of the world, including Western Europe and the United States. A valuable multi-country research project now seeks to shed light on these phenomena based on large-scale surveys of attitudes among young people. MYPLACE (Memory, Youth, Public Legacy and …
Continue reading "Survey research on the extreme right in Europe"
The topic of the historicity of academic disciplines has come up numerous times in this forum. It is a conviction of mine that disciplines demonstrate a great deal of path dependency over time in their evolution. We can think of a discipline as being constituted at a time by some or all of these elements: …
Continue reading "Path dependency in formation of academic disciplines"
Rahman as keynote speaker at "Black Men in Unions" Institute, UM-Dearborn, 2012 Rahman with Huey Newton, Norman “Mudada” McGee, Connie Matthews Tabor, and Elbert "Big Man" Howard at Detroit Metro Airport, Nov. 16, 1970 In an earlier post I discussed the path through which an African-American intellectual, Phil Richards, came to have the intellectual profile …
Becoming an intellectual in any society is a chancy thing, and this is especially true for young people coming from backgrounds of disadvantage and discrimination. What were the influences that gave the child and young adult the curiosity and other intellectual qualities that led him or her to seek out new knowledge and new questions …
Georg Lukács in 1962 used the colorful image of a fictional "Grand Hotel Abyss" to express his disappointment in the theorists of the Frankfurt School. Here is a passage in which the idea is described in "Preface to the Theory of the Novel" (link): A considerable part of the leading German intelligentsia, including Adorno, have …
Recent posts have grappled with the interesting topic of phase transitions in physics (link, link, link). One reason for being interested in this topic is its possible relevance to the social world, where abrupt changes of state in the social plenum are rare but known occurrences. The eruption of protest in numerous countries across the …
Continue reading "Critical points in history and social media"
In an earlier post I considered the topic of phase transitions as a possible source of emergent phenomena (link). I argued there that phase transitions are indeed interesting, but don't raise a serious problem of strong emergence. Tarun Menon considers this issue in substantial detail in the chapter he co-authored with Craig Callender in The Oxford …
Continue reading "Menon and Callender on the physics of phase transitions"
Understanding Society 