A recent post focused on the conception of society involved in seventeenth and eighteenth English political thinking, the theory of possessive individualism. The post suggested that this conception has a lot of resonance with the ideas and rhetoric of the Tea Party today. I've also posted a number of discussions of the social ideals of John …
Inequalities and the ascendant right
The playing field seems to keep tilting further against ordinary people in this country -- poor people, hourly workers, low-paid service workers, middle-class people with family incomes in the $60-80K range, uninsured people, .... 75% of American households have household incomes below $80,000; the national median was $44,389 in 2005. Meanwhile the top one percent …
Basic institutions and democratic equality
Modern societies seem to produce persistent social inequalities that are contradictory to many of the values we espouse when it comes to the idea of democratic equality. We continue to find wealth and income inequalities, inequalities of educational and health outcomes, inequalities of political power and influence, and these disparities seem to increase over time. …
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Democracy and contentious politics
Democracy and contention are back on the front page, thanks to the uprisings in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA). As always, Chuck Tilly provided some important insights into today's events based on his depth analysis of several hundred years of contentious politics. The relevant work on the intersection between democratization and contention is Contention …
Violent rhetoric and violent behavior
Is there a possible causal relationship between an increasing occurrence of violent political rhetoric in broadly available media channels and the occurrence of violent political behavior? How would a social scientist investigate this hypothetical relationship? (Here is a pretty worrisome timeline of events, statements, and actions over the past several years involving violent rhetoric …
Rawls on political liberalism
Long after the transformative impact Rawls brought to social and political philosophy with A Theory of Justice: Original Edition (1971), Rawls continued to wrestle with the question of how a just society ought to work. One major part of this question is how a just society ought to encompass major disagreements among its citizens about values …
The public sphere
The current issue of Social Science History is devoted to a series of articles in honor of Charles Tilly (link), around the general theme of the "public sphere" (the theme of the Social Science History Association annual meeting in 2007). Tilly was an active presence in the Social Science History Association, and this issue recognizes Tilly's …
Rousseau the democrat
Rousseau's political philosophy probably represents the richest and most adequate view of the moral foundations of the state of any of the great figures in the history of political thought. But it is also complex and opaque. Rousseau is usually cast as falling within the social contract tradition, according to which the legitimacy of the …
A property-owning democracy
John Rawls offered a general set of principles of justice that were formally neutral across specific institutions. However, he also believed that the institutions of a "property-owning democracy" are most likely to satisfy the two principles of justice. So what is a property-owning democracy? In Justice as Fairness: A Restatement (2001) Rawls offered a more explicit discussion …
Feasibility conditions on social reform
Several earlier posts have raised the issues of social change and social progress (post, post). People sometimes want society to be different (change), and they want it to be better (progress). But not all outcomes are possible, and some possible outcomes are not sustainable over time. So how should we think about sweeping prescriptions for …
Understanding Society 