Becoming an intellectual in any society is a chancy thing, and this is especially true for young people coming from backgrounds of disadvantage and discrimination. What were the influences that gave the child and young adult the curiosity and other intellectual qualities that led him or her to seek out new knowledge and new questions …
Tilly on moving through history
We have long given up on the idea that history has direction or a fundamental motor driving change. There are no iron laws of history, and there is no fundamental driver of history, whether market, class struggle, democracy, or "modernization." And there is no single path forward into a more modern world. At the same …
Thurgood Marshall’s future
Thurgood Marshall was awarded the Liberty Medal by the National Constitution Center in 1992 (link). Marshall had stepped down as a justice of the US Supreme Court as its first African-American justice. Prior to his distinguished service on the Supreme Court he was the lead lawyer in the 1954 Supreme Court case Brown v. Board of …
Karl Polanyi as a critical realist?
In The Power of Market Fundamentalism: Karl Polanyi's Critique Fred Block and PeggySomers focus on a phrase that Karl Polanyi uses in The Great Transformation: The Political and Economic Origins of Our Time, the idea of treating society as “real”. They address this issue in the final chapter of the book. (This is in the …
Making change happen
There are many large social ills that we would collectively like to change. We would like to see an end to debilitating poverty; we would like to end the systematic disparities by race that exist in our society, in health, education, or income; we would like to see gun violence rates drop to levels found …
LBJ’s commitment to cities
In the United States we have been in the desert for decades when it comes to big, transformative policy reforms aimed at addressing our most serious social issues. But the 1960s marked a decade of vigorous national effort to address some of our most serious and difficult social problems -- racial discrimination, war, poverty, education, …
The Kerner Commission report
The Kerner Commission released its report in 1968, following months of intensive study of the series of major race riots and rebellions that had occurred in 1967. Here is the executive summary (link), and here is a detailed review of the context and reception of the report in Boston Review (link). It is enormously important …
Social progress in India?
A few days in Bangalore, Kerala, and Mumbai have been very interesting, from a social-change point of view. There is an election cycle underway, with prospects for a strong showing for the secular Left in several states. There is a resurgence of bigotry of various forms, including both anti-Muslim activism and violence against student activists, …
Social progress in India?
A few days in Bangalore, Kerala, and Mumbai have been very interesting, from a social-change point of view. There is an election cycle underway, with prospects for a strong showing for the secular Left in several states. There is a resurgence of bigotry of various forms, including both anti-Muslim activism and violence against student activists, …
A fresh approach to life plans
There isn't a clear philosophy of life-planning in the literature. So let's start from scratch. What do we need in order to make a plan for any temporally extended project? An assessment of the outcomes we want to bring about An assessment of the likely workings of the natural and social environment in which action …
Understanding Society 