(Sources: States and Social Revolutions, pp. 155, 282) In States and Social Revolutions: A Comparative Analysis of France, Russia and China (1979) Theda Skocpol set out to discover a causal analysis of the occurrence of social revolution, and she offered case-study narratives of the major revolutions in France, Russia, and China. She provides a 54-page narrative …
Understanding the Chinese Revolution
source: Lucien Bianco, Origins of the Chinese Revolution, frontispiece The Chinese Revolution is one of the world-historical events that has set the stage for the modern world. And, unlike the French Revolution or the Russian Revolution, it is sufficiently contemporary that there are very substantial sources of data and informants about its occurrence. Several generations …
The historian and the archives
Generally speaking everyone understands that one important kind of research conducted by historians takes place in archives -- repositories of records and documents that have been preserved by governments or organizations for some purpose, in which documents are preserved that shed light on the past. But it is common to imagine that the trip to …
Mechanisms and methodology
In its origin the causal mechanisms approach (link) is chiefly an answer to the question, “what is a good social explanation?”. So it turns out that much of the mechanisms discussion has taken place within the philosophy of science, especially the philosophy of social science and the philosophy of biology. The question I’d like to formulate …
SSHA 2014 Call for Papers
SSHA CALL FOR PAPERS Macrohistorical Dynamics Network 39th Annual Meeting of the Social Science History Association Toronto, Ontario 6-9 November 2014 Submission Deadline: 14 February 2014 "Inequalities: Politics, Policy, and the Past" http://www.ssha.org We invite you to take part in Macrohistorical Dynamics (MHD) panels of the 39th annual meeting of the Social Science History Association, November …
Mechanisms and intellectual movements
I am particularly interested in the idea that we can explain social outcomes by identifying the social mechanisms that (often, typically, occasionally) bring them about. I also find the evolution of science and systems of ideas to be particularly fascinating within contemporary sociology, in that this aspect of human life embraces both rationally directed thought …
Guest post by Ruth Groff on causal powers
Ruth Groff is Assistant Professor of Political Science at St. Louis University. She specializes in the philosophical underpinnings of Western social and political thought. She is author of Powers and Capacities in Philosophy: The New Aristotelianism (2012, with John Greco), Ontology Revisited: Metaphysics in Social and Political Philosophy (Ontological Explorations) (2012), and Revitalizing Causality: Realism …
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ANT and the philosophy of social science
What does Actor-Network Theory have to add to the kinds of issues in the foundations of the social sciences that are of interest here? ANT is primarily associated with Bruno Latour (Reassembling the Social: An Introduction to Actor-Network-Theory, Laboratory Life: The Construction of Scientific Facts), John Law, and Manuel DeLanda (A New Philosophy of Society: …
How do the poles of current PSS interact?
An earlier post offered a diagram of current topics in the philosophy of social science. The three poles of this diagram were analytical sociology, critical realism, and actor-network theory. Here I would like to look more closely at how these polar perspectives interact with each other. To start, it is clear that these three beacons …
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New philosophy of social science
The philosophy of social science is a living field with several distinct areas of growth and dozens of talented young contributors bringing fresh ideas and rigorous thinking. (Here are a number of earlier posts documenting this activity; link, link, link, link.) It sometimes happens in a field of philosophy that a period of involution sets in, …
