Every democracy I can think of has a meaningful (though usually small) proportion of citizens who fall on the extreme right by any standard: racist, White supremacist, hateful, anti-immigrant, anti-Semitic, anti-Muslim, nativist, nationalist, or violently anti-government individuals and groups. In the United States we have many, many organizations that are basically racist and potentially violent …
India’s Naxalites
India is the world's largest democracy. It also is home to one of the more persistent and deadly Maoist insurgencies in the world, the Naxalite movement in eastern India (Communist Party of India (Maoist) (CPI/M)). The Naxalites were a splinter group that separated from India's Communist Party in the 1960s, and their hallmarks have been …
Granularity
If we think back over the history of sociology and political science since 1800, one thing that is striking is the trend away from the most macro-level frameworks of thought in the direction of more situated and proximate social and political arrangements. There was a tendency among the founders -- Montesquieu, Spenser, Comte, for example …
Lukes on power
Steven Lukes's Power: A Radical View was a very important contribution when it appeared in 1974. Lukes emphasized several important points that became landmarks in subsequent discussions of the social reality of power: that power is a multi-dimensional social factor, that power and democracy are paradoxically related, and that there are very important non-coercive sources of …
Strategies of economic adaptation
Charles Sabel and Jonathan Zeitlin made a powerful case for there being alternative institutional forms through which modern economic development could have taken place in their 1985 article, "Historical Alternatives to Mass Production: Politics, Markets and Technology in Nineteenth-Century Industrialization" (link). In an important volume in 1997, World of Possibilities: Flexibility and Mass Production in …
Skilled synchronized cooperation
One kind of social behavior that is particularly interesting to observe is what we might call "small group skilled cooperation." This kind of social action arises when -- there is a recurring task to be performed by a small defined group of actors; success in the task requires effective performance of specialized actions by members …
Intangible services
Neoclassical economics presents a pretty simple theory of the equilibrium price of a manufactured good. This theory also extends to a theory of the wage for skilled and unskilled labor. We postulate production and demand curves, and the equilibrium price is the point where supply equals demand. The supply curve is influenced by factors governing …
Race and racism
Race has been a fundamental fact in American society for centuries, since the sixteenth century with the arrival of African slaves. And many would observe that racism has been a part of that history from beginning to end. These are distinct statements; it is possible for race to be a factor, without racism being present. …
System changes in healthcare
One of the largest and most interesting processes of change going on in the United States today is the rapid redesign and adjustment of the American healthcare system. A key driver is this spring's passage of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (PPACA), but the more fundamental causes are the twin crises we face …
Radicals, activists, and reformers
Several posts have drawn attention to the acts of criticism of the present and advocacy for change. But both criticism and programs of advocacy have enormous variation when it comes to analytical and theoretical rigor. Babeuf's conspiracy of equals set the stage for radicalism during the French Revolution. But how good were his diagnosis of …
Understanding Society 