Daniel Little
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 …
Continue reading "David Graeber’s reflections on money, debt, and violence"
As I've noted in previous posts, there has been a major debate in economic history in the past 20 years about what to make of the contrasts between economic development trajectories in Western Europe and East Asia since 1600. There had been a received view, tracing to Adam Smith and Thomas Malthus, that European "breakthrough" was …
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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The prior post offered a schematic description of the tasks involved in arriving at historical knowledge. Here I want to ask a related question: what is the work that we can hope to do with a philosophy of history? We don't have a philosophy of office furniture; we do have a philosophy of technology. So what is …
What is "history"? And what is involved in historical research and knowledge creation? We might begin by attempting to specify the meaning of the word. Consider this: History is the sum total of human actions, thoughts, and institutions, arranged in temporal order. Call this "substantive history." History is social action in time, performed by a …
A common kind of causal narrative employed by historians is to identify a set of key actors, key circumstances, and key resources; and then to treat a period of time as a flow of actions by the actors in response to each other and changing circumstances. We might describe this as "explanation of an outcome …
Continue reading "Causal narratives about historical actors"
There has been lots of work on urban history, and rural life has come in for its own specialized study for almost two centuries as well. But what about the suburbs? Is there anything distinctive about suburban life in the United States that suggests that it needs its own sociology and history? Kevin Kruse and …
Marx was a critic above all else. His most comfortable intellectual stance was criticism -- most of the subtitles of his works involve the word "critique". He was, of course, a critic of other thinkers --Proudhon, Smith, Bakunin, for example. And here, the key to criticism is the unearthing of indefensible intellectual presuppositions. But even …
In a previous post I commended W.H. Walsh's approach to the philosophy of history for Walsh's sympathetic effort to understand both traditions in the field, including what is called "speculative" philosophy of history. And Walsh is to be commended as well for his analytical ability to formulate and explicate these positions. This is in fact what we …
English-speaking philosophers have often made a hash of the philosophy of history. Either they have had such disdain for continental philosophy that they could not get their minds around the thoughts of a Hegel or a Dilthey, or they became pre-occupied with certain minor linguistic or logical issues and therefore couldn't get to the more …
Understanding Society 