Health disparities across a population are among the most profound indicators of social inequalities that we can find. And the fact of significant disparities across groups is a devastating statement about the circumstances of justice under which a society functions. These disparities translate into shorter lives and lower quality of life for whole groups of …
China’s role in world history?
People sometimes want to make large statements about China's future in the coming fifty years. These range from a Sinocentric paen -- "The twenty-first century will be marked by a hegemonic China on the world stage", to the dubious -- "China's polity will ultimately shatter under the pressures of regional inequalities and competing political interests …
Beijing Forum 2011
I'm attending the Beijing Forum 2011 this week, and it's a superb international conference. Much of the conference took place at Peking University. Over three hundred international scholars were invited to participate, and there are dozens of interesting conversations going on at any one time. The goal is to stimulate productive dialog among scholars from …
Four years of UnderstandingSociety
Today marks the fourth anniversary of UnderstandingSociety. This is the 613th posting since I began in November 2007 and the 135th in the past year. I continue to find this medium a good way of pushing forward my own learning and thinking about a swirl of topics around the central thrust, making sense of the …
Notes from Xi’an
People here in Xi'an say: "The Chinese city of the present is Beijing. The city of the future is Shanghai. The city of China's past is Xi'an." This seems to be more than a slogan. People in Xian seem deeply proud of the history and heritage that Xian represents -- the thirteen dynasties that made …
Theories of the actor
I'm attracted to an approach to sociological thinking that can be described as "actor-centered." The basic idea is that social phenomena are constituted by the actions of individuals, oriented by their own subjectivities and mental frameworks. It is recognized, of course, that the subjectivity of the actor doesn't come full-blown into his or her mind …
Can justice be causal?
Is social justice an empirical characteristic of a set of social arrangements? And can social justice be a causal factor in processes of social change or social stability? Before justice could be considered an empirical feature of a set of social arrangements, we would need to have a more specific understanding of what we mean …
Complex systems
Social ensembles are often said to be "complex". What does this mean? Herbert Simon is one of the seminal thinkers in the study of complexity. His 1962 article, "The Architecture of Complexity" (link), put forward several ideas that have become core to the conceptual frameworks of people who now study social complexity. So it is …
Levels of politics
I've focused occasionally on the idea of "levels" of social arrangements, from the local to the intermediate to the higher levels, with the idea that higher levels are composed of structures and activities at lower levels. Generally I've had in mind examples from one specific area of the social sciences to illustrate these points -- …
Historiography and the philosophy of history
The topic of the philosophy of history comes up frequently here. The related domain of "historiography" has not come up yet, however. What is the relation between these bodies of study about the writing of history? Let's begin by asking the basic question: what is historiography? In its most general sense, the term refers to …
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