Social change and historical events are highly contingent processes, in a specific sense: they are the result of multiple causal influences that "could have been otherwise" and that have conjoined at a particular point in time in bringing about an event of interest. Contrast this situation with what we are looking for when …
Social change and leadership
Historians pay a lot of attention to important periods of social change -- the emergence of new political movements, the development of a great city, the end of Jim Crow segregation. There is an inclination to give a lot of weight to the importance of leaders, visionaries, and change-makers in driving these processes to successful …
Ideologies, policies, and social complexity
The approach to social and historical research that I favor is one that pays attention to the heterogeneity and contingency of social processes. It advises that social and historical researchers should disaggregate the large patterns they start with and try to identify the multiple underlying mechanisms, causes, motivations, movements, and contingencies that came together …
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Critical points in history and social media
Recent posts have grappled with the interesting topic of phase transitions in physics (link, link, link). One reason for being interested in this topic is its possible relevance to the social world, where abrupt changes of state in the social plenum are rare but known occurrences. The eruption of protest in numerous countries across the …
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What is “conceptual history”?
The post-war German historian Reinhart Koselleck made important contributions to the theory of history that are largely independent from the other sources of Continental philosophy of history mentioned elsewhere in this blog. (Koselleck’s contributions are ably discussed in Niklas Olsen's History in the Plural: An Introduction to the Work of Reinhart Koselleck (2012).) Koselleck contributed to …
Large structures and social change
The relationship between feudalism and the origins of capitalism was of great interest to Marx. Here is one way that Marx puts the idea in The Poverty of Philosophy: M. Proudhon the economist understands very well that men make cloth, linen, or silk materials in definite relations of production. But what he has not understood …
Historical vs. sociological explanation
Think of the following matrix of explanatory possibilities of social and historical phenomena: Vertically the matrix divides between historical and sociological explanations, whereas horizontally it distinguishes general explanations and particular explanations. A traditional way of understanding the distinction between historical and sociological explanations was to maintain that sociological explanations provide generalizations, whereas historical explanations …
Turning points in history?
We often think that the histories of nations or peoples take turning points. A series of events occur that could have gone either way, things went badly rather than well, and the future development of this people is forever changed. It is on a different branch line, going to a different destination altogether. And if …
The near future
There is a lot going on in America and the world today: climate change, increasing separation between the rich and the non-rich, entrenched poverty in cities, continuing effects of racism in American life, and a rising level of political extremism in this country and elsewhere, for starters. Add to this politico-military instability in Europe, continuing …
The historian and the archives
Generally speaking everyone understands that one important kind of research conducted by historians takes place in archives -- repositories of records and documents that have been preserved by governments or organizations for some purpose, in which documents are preserved that shed light on the past. But it is common to imagine that the trip …
Understanding Society 