image: Timothy Snyder, On Tyranny Here we are in November 2022, and the House, Senate, governors, and state houses are all up for grabs. An appalling number of GOP candidates have continued to spread lies about voter fraud in 2020 and have refused to commit to accepting the results of today’s election. (Remember that Donald …
Fifteen years of Understanding Society
This week represents the fifteenth anniversary of publication of Understanding Society, with a total of 1,484 posts and 13.3 million page views to date. There have been 72 posts and 657K page views in the past twelve months. The blog has remained consistent with the original vision of a "lab notebook for open-source philosophy". And the topics …
Critical realism and ontological individualism
Most critical realists would probably think that their philosophy of social science is flatly opposed to ontological individualism. However, I think that this opposition is unwarranted. Let's begin by formulating a clear idea of ontological individualism. This is the view that social entities, powers, and conditions are all constituted by the actions, thoughts, and mental …
Continue reading "Critical realism and ontological individualism"
João Ohara’s new synthesis of the philosophy of history
What is the subject matter of the philosophy of history? This is an extremely difficult question to answer given the wide range of topics, methods, and philosophical perspectives that have been included under the umbrella since 1750. It is therefore a welcome development to read João Ohara's very interesting and illuminating discussion of this topic …
Continue reading "João Ohara’s new synthesis of the philosophy of history"
Constitution Day lecture 2022
Note: these are notes for a short talk I gave this month to students at my university on the topic of the importance of maintaining and defending our liberal constitutional democracy. Democracy at risk? Dan Little University of Michigan-Dearborn Student Government session on the US Constitution October 20, 2022 Thanks for this opportunity. It is …
A culturally conservative streak in Tony Judt
Tony Judt was a remarkable historian of the twentieth century and a sparkling public intellectual. In most dimensions he was a progressive force within the space of commentators on recent history and contemporary politics. However, in a number of instances he was a bit tone-deaf in his version of American progressive values. This tendency is …
Continue reading "A culturally conservative streak in Tony Judt"
Scientific rationality and anomaly
Some discussion of the empirical status of social science theories and hypotheses in the past has revolved around Karl Popper's formulation of the doctrine of falsifiability. However, this criticism is almost always misplaced in the context of the social sciences. This is true for several reasons: sociologists rarely offer unified deductive theories of social phenomena; …
Marx’s influences as a social scientist
image: Menzel depicting a proletarian (Adolf von Menzel) It is customary to hold that the main influences on Marx's thought fell into three streams: French socialism, English political economy, and Hegelian philosophy. Each strand is evident in his writings, from early to late. Certainly Marx's ideas about a communist society were developed in relation to …
Democratic socialism in the 1930s
Is it still possible to think big in western democracies about social and economic change in a way that substantially improves the lives and freedoms of most of society? We see the deprivation and indifference of the economic system that has governed most industrialized countries for the past century and a half, leading to gross …
River warfare in the US Civil War
The mental images that most Americans have of the American Civil War involve the scenes of major land battles -- Bull Run, Antietam, Gettysburg. Armies marched dozens of miles, prepared encampments and defensive works, and either attacked the enemy in its own prepared defenses or awaited contact with the enemy. The picture is Napoleonic: an …
Understanding Society 