A period of demonstration and protest in the Chinese village of Wukan has caught the attention of world media in the past several weeks (link, link). The village is in Guangdong, the dynamic coastal province. The demonstrations began in September against major land seizures by local government in alignment with developers, and became more intense in …
Global history?
A question that arises in historiography and the philosophy of history is that of the status of the notion of "global history." I've addressed the topic several times here in a limited way -- often by making the case for Eurasian history rather than French history or Japanese history. There the view is that expanding …
The sociology of ideas: Richard Rorty
Where do new ideas and directions of thought come from? Is it possible to set a context for important changes in intellectual culture, in the sciences or the humanities? Can we give any explanation for the development of individual thinkers' thought? These are the key questions that Neil Gross raises in his sociological biography of …
Structural adjustment for the middle class?
Working people in the US have suffered big economic losses in the past four years. Losses of jobs in the economy have pushed many working people from high-wage to low-wage jobs, and as we all know, many people have been pushed out of jobs altogether. The national unemployment rate was 8.6% in November, and very …
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Neil Gross’s pragmatist sociology
An earlier post discussed Neil Gross's attempt to understand social mechanisms from the point of view of a pragmatist sociology. Gross's attempt to flesh out a pragmatist theory of action is intriguing and worthy of further exploration. So here I'll look at a subsequent article, "Charles Tilly and American Pragmatism" (2010), in which Gross extends this …
David Graeber on the anarchist movement
Progressives seem to be confronted with some real conundrums (or is it conundra?), here in the early part of the 21st century. We want to see a world that is genuinely committed to some basic principles of social justice, equality, and personal freedom. And we generally acknowledge the point that the modern world can only …
Transnational labor activism
One of the characteristics that observers notice when they consider the anti-globalization protests of the past decade or so is the extent of transnational relationships that exist among activists and activist organizations. Sidney Tarrow provides a scholarly examination of these kinds of movements in The New Transnational Activism, where he tries to understand the organizational and …
David Graeber’s reflections on money, debt, and violence
David Graeber's Debt: The First 5,000 Years has hit a chord with a lot of people who are concerned about rising inequalities in the United States and elsewhere. Graeber is an economic anthropologist, a discipline that pays close attention to the ways that material arrangements worked in detail in pre-state societies. One of the great works …
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Race and American inequalities
Douglas Massey is a leading US social scientist who has worked on issues of inequality in America throughout his career. His 2008 book (Categorically Unequal: The American Stratification System) is a huge contribution to our understanding of the mechanisms producing inequalities in American society, and it amounts to a stunning indictment of racism and anti-poor …
New tools for digital humanities
One of the innovative papers I heard at the SSHA last week was a presentation by Harvard graduate student Ian Miller, with a paper called "Reading 500 Years of Chinese History at Once". (In the end Ian apologized for only getting to the last 188 years of the Qing Dynasty.) I won't mention the details, …
Understanding Society 