There is a clear and reasonably uncontroversial basis for a simple theory of justice that all nations/cultures can accept. This is grounded a few core values about human development and is expressed in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the Millenium Development Goals, and other founding documents of the United Nations. This conception emphasizes several key values: …
Ethical thinking for global public health
Here is a fine recent book that brings together recent thinking about development ethics with some of the specific issues faced in the field of global public health. Madison Powers and Ruth Faden published Social Justice: The Moral Foundations of Public Health and Health Policy in 2008, and it represents a genuinely interesting extended essay on …
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Economic thinking in Rawls’s thought
John Rawls's (1971) A Theory of Justice: Original Edition (TJ) had a sizable impact on a number of disciplines, including economics and economic policy thought. (His ideas in this original version of the theory are clarified and further developed in his 2005 Justice as Fairness: A Restatement (JF).) Rawls's influence on economics largely derived from one aspect of his …
Relative explanatory autonomy
In an earlier post I indicated a degree of disagreement with the premises of analytical sociology concerning the validity of methodological individualism (link). This disagreement comes down to three things. First, for reasons I've referred to several times here and elsewhere (link), I prefer to refer to methodological localism rather than methodological individualism. This theory …
Mapping sociology
Sociology is now composed of a wide expanse of approaches, theories, methodologies, and paradigms. The American Sociological Association has 49 sections, and even this variation doesn't capture the full diversity of the field (link). In fact, Jonathan Turner refers to the current situation as one of "hyper-differentiation of theories" (1). It is therefore useful to …
Peter Demeulenaere on analytical sociology
Here is another take on the core features of analytical sociology, this time from Peter Demeulenaere in the introduction to his very interesting recent collection on the subject, Analytical Sociology and Social Mechanisms. The volume includes thirteen essays by leading experts grouped around "Actions and Mechanisms," "Mechanisms and Causality," and "Approaches to Mechanisms," and it is an …
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Civil society in a globalizing world
An important component of western political theory since Locke and Rousseau is the notion of civil society—the idea of a society in which members have a variety of cross-cutting activities and associations, and where the state is not the sole source of social power. On this conception, a civil society is one that is characterized …
Steinmetz on colonialism
George Steinmetz offers a comparative sociology of colonialism in The Devil's Handwriting: Precoloniality and the German Colonial State in Qingdao, Samoa, and Southwest Africa. More specifically, he wants to explain differences in the implementation of "native policy" within German colonial regimes around the turn of the twentieth century. He finds that there are significant differences across three …
Social explanation and causal mechanisms
To explain a social outcome or regularity, we need to provide an account of why and how it came about; and this means providing a causal analysis in terms of which the explanandum appears as a result. Having a causal theory of a realm requires having an ontology: what kinds of things exist in this …
Marx’s critique
Marx was a critic above all else. His most comfortable intellectual stance was criticism -- most of the subtitles of his works involve the word "critique". He was, of course, a critic of other thinkers --Proudhon, Smith, Bakunin, for example. And here, the key to criticism is the unearthing of indefensible intellectual presuppositions. But even …
Understanding Society 