image: scenes from Mumbai, April 2016 Inequalities of wealth and income throughout the world have generated a great deal of attention in the past several years, in both the media and the scholarly world. Thomas Piketty's Capital in the Twenty-First Century gave this set of debates a huge impetus when it appeared in 2013. Branko …
The Kerner Commission report
The Kerner Commission released its report in 1968, following months of intensive study of the series of major race riots and rebellions that had occurred in 1967. Here is the executive summary (link), and here is a detailed review of the context and reception of the report in Boston Review (link). It is enormously important …
Hofstadter on the progressive historians
I've frequently found Richard Hofstadter to be a particularly compelling historian of American politics and ideas. He is one of the writers from the 1950s and 1960s who still have insights that repay a close reading as we try to make sense of the swirling complexities of culture, politics, and ideas. His earliest book is …
Hofstadter on the American right
Richard Hofstadter opened his 1963 Herbert Spencer Lecture at Oxford with these prescient words: Although American political life has rarely been touched by the most acute varieties of class conflict, it has served again and again as an arena for uncommonly angry minds. Today this fact is most evident on the extreme right wing, which …
Predicting, forecasting, and superforecasting
I have expressed a lot of reservation about the feasibility of prediction of large, important outcomes in the social world (link, link, link). Here are a couple of observations drawn from these earlier posts: We sometimes think that there is fundamental stability in the social world, or at least an orderly pattern of development to …
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Samuel Dill on the late Roman Empire
An anonymous reader responds to my short discussion of Patrick Geary's treatment of the late Roman Empire to recommend Samuel Dill's treatment of this process 100 years ago in Roman Society in the Last Century of the Western Empire and Roman Society in Gaul in the Merovingian Age, books written in 1898 and 1926 respectively. In the anonymous …
Large structures and social change
The relationship between feudalism and the origins of capitalism was of great interest to Marx. Here is one way that Marx puts the idea in The Poverty of Philosophy: M. Proudhon the economist understands very well that men make cloth, linen, or silk materials in definite relations of production. But what he has not understood …
Origins of feudalism in the West
In the grand historical march postulated by historical materialism, ancient slavery and medieval feudalism preceded capitalism as distinct systems of domination and exploitation (e.g. Perry Anderson's Passages from Antiquity to Feudalism). In each social order small elites captured great wealth from the mass of producers, whether enslaved farmers and artisans in the ancient (Roman) world or …
Defining social phenomena
How does a field of phenomena come into focus as a subject of scientific study? When we want to know about weather, we can identify a relatively small number of variables that represent the whole of the topic -- temperature, air pressure, wind velocity, rainfall. And we can pick out the aspects of physics that …
Phase transitions and emergence
Image: Phase diagram of water, Solé. Phase Transitions, 4 I've proposed to understand the concepts of emergence and generativeness as being symmetrical (link). Generative higher-level properties are those that those that can be calculated or inferred based on information about the properties and states of the micro-components. Emergent properties are properties of an ensemble that have …
Understanding Society 