Is there such a thing as "French philosophy"? Or is philosophy a purely universal discipline, raising the same abstract questions no matter whether the philosopher is Chinese, English, French, or Brazilian? One way to address this question is to consider the collective intellectual practice of "philosophy" from the point of view of sociology -- that …
Anthropology as a discipline
Several posts have focused recently on the meandering pathways through which the social science disciplines have developed in the past century or so -- within and across nations (link, link). Anthropology is a particularly interesting example because of its proximity to power and empire. And Gustavo Lins Ribeiro and Arturo Escobar's recent World Anthropologies: Disciplinary Transformations …
Links between literature and the social sciences
Some novelists take as part of their task the description and evocation of certain social realities. James Baldwin captured one slice of African-American life in the 1950s and 60s. Tim O'Brien captured aspects of infantry life in Vietnam in The Things They Carried. And Tolstoy caught much about social attitudes and relations in elite Russia …
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How many Geertz’s?
Clifford Geertz's contributions are wide-ranging, in a couple of ways. He wrote about North Africa as well as Indonesia; and he touched on Islam as well as water systems. So there was both geographical as well as topical diversity in his research life. But here is another dimension of range: Geertz demonstrated a surprisingly wide …
Area studies and social science theories
image: The ruins of Bagan, Myanmar Understanding a particular place seems to involve a very specific kind of knowledge and research. It involves understanding the unique combination of historical circumstances, social processes, cultural formations, and unique institutions that give rise to the current complex social reality. And yet it also involves an effort to understand …
International social science
Last month the International Social Science Council (ISSC) launched a major review of the status of the social sciences worldwide (link). The report was commissioned and partially funded by UNESCO. The full report is available as a PDF file, and it is an important piece of work. It includes review essays by leading social scientists …
Short thoughts from Clifford Geertz
Clifford Geertz was a frequent contributor to the New York Review of Books, and he succeeded remarkably well in bridging the gap between the university and the public in many of his "postings." (I think of these contributions as a pre-web version of a blog.) Many of these contributions are collected in a superb recent …
Scott’s social imagination
Image: Le Corbusier, Paris plan What is most remarkable about Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed is the texture and grain of the argument that Scott makes. This is a high-resolution argument that leaves little to doubt. The guiding thesis is original and striking enough -- that …
The disciplines of economics
Economics is sometimes presented as the most "scientific" of the social science disciplines. It is mathematical, it involves sophisticated models, it makes use of enormous data sets, and it is invoked in the formulation of social and economic policies in much the way that the science of mechanics is invoked in the building of bridges. …
Alternative economists
Traditional neoclassical economics has missed the mark quite a bit in the past two years. There is the financial and banking crisis, of course; neoclassical economists haven't exactly succeeded in explaining or "post-dicting" the crisis and recession through which we've traveled over the past year and more. But perhaps more fundamentally, neoclassical economics has failed …
Understanding Society 