Much thinking about economic justice for working people has been framed by the nineteenth-century concept of “capitalism”: owners of enterprises constitute a minority of the population; they hire workers who represent the majority of the population; wages and profits define the distribution of income throughout the whole population. This picture still works well enough for …
Republicanism and multicultural democracy
Philip Pettit’s writings about republicanism offer a valuable and distinctive perspective on individual freedom and the nature of a good society. He develops those ideas most fully in Republicanism : a theory of freedom and government. Pettit’s core idea is that we should conceive of freedom as “non-domination” — that is, that an individual is …
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Asian Network for the Philosophy of the Social Sciences
The third meeting of the Asian Network for the Philosophy of Social Sciences (ANPOSS) took place in Bangkok last week (link). It was a highly stimulating success. Organizers Chaiyan Rajchagool, Kanit (Mitinunwong) Sirichan, Yukti Mukdawijitra, and others put enormous effort into carrying it off, and host institutions Thammasat University and Chulalongkorn University provided excellent coordination …
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Is there a working class in the US?
There is certainly a working class in the United States, and it is a majority of the population (persons who earn their livelihood through wage-paying employment). But it is highly fragmented, mostly in the service sector, unorganized, and often disinclined to believe in the possibility of serious social change. A recent Brookings research report by …
Gross economic inequalities in the US
An earlier post (link) highlighted the growing severity of inequalities of wealth and income in the United States, as well as Elizabeth Warren's very sensible "billionaire" tax proposal. According to a 2020 article in Forbes, "According to the latest Fed data, the top 1% of Americans have a combined net worth of $34.2 trillion (or 30.4% …
English socialism
What were the social conditions that led many English intellectuals in the 1930s to engage in fundamental critique of the society in which they lived? Why was social criticism so profound and sustained in Britain from the time of Carlyle and Engels to the surge of English socialism in the 1930s? The answer, of course, …
A 1934 debate about communism among American philosophers
The appeal of Marxist socialism -- communism -- as an alternative to the consumerism, inequality, and exploitation of European and American capitalism was a powerful draw for many intellectuals in the 1930s, especially in the context of the great Depression and widespread crisis and deprivation of the 1930s. This interest extended to many prominent American …
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Russia’s aggression against Ukraine as a war crime
When Nazi Germany attacked Poland in 1939 it committed a war crime, codified by the standards established in preparation for the Nuremberg Trials in 1945. Here is a very useful summary of the Nuremberg process ("The Influence of the Nuremberg Trial on International Criminal Law", edited by Tove Rosen) at the Robert H. Jackson Center …
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How to think about deliberate social change
What is involved in trying to create a better world? That is: what is involved in being an activist, a reformer, a radical, a revolutionary, or – for that matter – a reactionary? And how do the various forms of knowledge provided by areas of research in the social sciences play into this question? Is …
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Albert Hirschman on uncertainty
Albert Hirschman was a particularly important non-conformist in 20th-century social science. (Here is an earlier discussion of Jeremy Adelman's biography of Hirschman (link).) Two of the things I admire most about him are his unwillingness to be bound by disciplinary divisions and his deep understanding of the uncertainty of virtually all social-science predictions. The social …
Understanding Society 