What is involved in assembling the history of a complicated period like the US civil rights movement? This is a difficult question for any complex historical phenomenon, and there are many choices that the historian is forced to make. When should we start the story? End of the Civil War Reconstruction Jim Crow period 1950s …
Organizations and the Chicago School
Andrew Abbott is a fascinating sociologist, and he is an expert on the Chicago School. His book Department and Discipline: Chicago Sociology at One Hundred provides an excellent analytical discussion of the theories and people of the school. So his contribution to The Oxford Handbook of Sociology and Organization Studies: Classical Foundations, "Organizations and the Chicago School," on the …
Recent historiography of China
The field of China history evolved rapidly after the McCarthy attacks on the field in the 1950s. The most significant developments, in my view, are these. First, there developed in the 1960s and 1970s what Paul Cohen refers to as a “China-centered” approach to the study of the history of China (Discovering History in China: …
Causal realism and historical explanation
Are there plausible intuitions about the ways the world works that stand as credible alternatives to Hempel's covering law model? There are. A particularly strong alternative links explanation to causation, and goes on to understand causation in terms of the real causal powers of various entities and structures. Rom Harre's work explored this approach earliest …
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Hempel after 70 years
Carl Hempel published his sole contribution to the philosophy of history in 1942, almost exactly 70 years ago. The article is "The Function of General Laws in History" (link), and it set the stage for several fruitless decades of debate within analytic philosophy about the nature of historical explanation. Hempel argued that all scientific explanation has …
Philosophy and social knowledge
Throughout this blog I’ve addressed a very large subject: what is involved in understanding society? What sorts of ontological assumptions do we need to make as we attempt to analyze and explain social processes? What is involved in explaining some of the social outcomes we are most interested in? How do we provide empirical confirmation …
Defining a social subject: Weber
How does a sociologist define and conceptualize a subject for research and investigation? And how does a research tradition -- a group of scholars linked by training, scholarly interaction, and mentorship -- do the same thing? What is the intellectual work that goes into framing an empirical and theoretical conception of a group of related …
Information technology and new human capabilities
For a billion or so of us on planet earth, we are immersed in a sea of ever-changing technology. How does technology shape us? And how do we shape technology? How do current technologies change our capacities as human beings? In what ways are we better able to fulfill our plans of life using the …
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Technology change
The past century has witnessed an amazing amount of technology change, and the pace seems to be quickening. How does a technology develop, and how do social conditions and institutions interact with this process? These aren't new questions, of course. There is a well developed field of the history of technology, with its own research …
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 …
Understanding Society 