By official count, the incidence of popular protest in China has increased ten-fold in the past fifteen years. Kevin O'Brien and Rachel Stern report that the Chinese state reported 8,700 "collective incidents" in 1993, and this number had grown to 87,000 by 2005 (12). And the issues that have evoked protest have expanded as well: …
Business interests and democracy
The central ideal of democracy is the notion that citizens can express their political and policy preferences through political institutions, and that the policies selected will reflect those preferences. We also expect that elected officials will act ethically in support of the best interests of the public. This is their public trust. The anti-democratic possibility …
Equality and violence in Alabama, 1960s
image: Ben Shahn photo of Arkansas sharecropper Creating civil and political rights for African Americans in the 1960s required courage and persistence by hundreds of thousands of ordinary people. The system of Jim Crow assured subordination in fundamental rights and needs for millions of rural southern black people -- the right to vote, the right …
Symbolic logic and ontology
image: theorem from Russell and Whitehead, Principia Mathematica In what ways do the abstract features of symbolic logic reflect characteristics of thought? The syntax of symbolic logic is illustrative. First order predicate theory provides syntactic categories for individuals (a, b, c; x, y, z), properties (Fx, Gx), relations (xRy), n-place relations (R(x1, ..., xn)), logical connectives (∧, ∨, ~, ⊃), and quantifiers (∀x, ∃x). We also need …
Conceptual schemes and social ontology
What does grammar tell us about the nature of our representations of the world? Do the linguistic categories that we use fundamentally shape the way we organize our understanding of the world? Do different cultures or different linguistic communities possess different "conceptual schemes"? Are different conceptual schemes incommensurable or can we translate from one to …
Relations, processes, and activities
An earlier post asked what sorts of social entities exist. Posing the question this way leads us to think of persistent abstract things populating the social world -- for example, structures, organizations, or institutions. But as a commentator to the earlier post pointed out, there are persistent phenomena in the social world that don't look …
What exists in the social realm?
What sorts of social things exist? Does the "proletariat" exist as a social entity? There are certainly workers; but is there a "working class"? What is needed in order to attribute existence to a social agglomeration? We might want to say that things exist when they have enough persistence over time to admit of re-identification …
Defining and specifying social phenomena
Insect (df): a class within the arthropods that have a chitinous exoskeleton, a three-part body (head, thorax, and abdomen), three pairs of jointed legs, compound eyes, and two antennae. What is involved in offering a definition of a complex social phenomenon such as "fascism", "rationality", "contentious politics", "social capital", or "civic engagement"? Is there any …
The March on Washington, August 1963
African-American citizens and a host of supporters made some of this country's most important history almost forty-seven years ago in the mobilization that resulted in the March on Washington in August, 1963. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. gave his most famous speech on the occasion, and of course many of us are remembering Dr. King's …
Civic engagement and formative institutions
A disposition towards civic engagement and community service seems to be a very fundamental component of social psychology that differs significantly across cohorts and populations. But the frequency of this motivation across the population is also surely a key component of the health of social order. One would hypothesize that this is an aspect of …
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Understanding Society 