Earlier posts have remarked upon the interesting fact that large historical events are often significantly reconsidered and re-understood through the passage of time. China's Cultural Revolution is one such example (link), as are the revolutions of 1848 (link). A truly stunning example of this kind of historical recasting of something that we think we've fully …
Searle on social ontology
Speech Acts: An Essay in the Philosophy of Language made a big impression on the field of the philosophy of language when it appeared in 1969. But its author, John Searle, thinks the theory of speech acts has a much broader scope than simply the philosophy of language; he thinks it provides a foundation for …
Spartacus, Kitty Genovese, and social explanation
youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-8h_v_our_Q What is most interesting in paying attention to social life is noticing the surprising outcomes that often materialize from a number of uncoordinated choices and actions by independent individuals. We want to understand why and how the aggregate-level social fact came to be: was it a set of features of the individual actors' preferences or …
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New thinking about the Red Guards
https://youtu.be/gaz8sVaK8s4 Andrew Walder has spent almost all of his academic life, on and off, studying the Chinese Cultural Revolution. In Fractured Rebellion: The Beijing Red Guard Movement (2009) he offers some genuinely new insights into this crucial and chaotic period of China's revolutionary history. Some historians have focused on the political motivations of Mao and other top leaders …
Steve Pincus on revolution
Steve Pincus offers a sweeping and compelling reinterpretation of the English Revolution in 1688: The First Modern Revolution. Along the way he provides a review of existing theories of revolution -- Skocpol, Huntington, Barrington Moore, and Goldstone, in particular (chapter 2). Pincus's definition of revolution goes along these lines: Revolutions thus constitute a structural and ideological …
Thinking about disaster
Katrina flooding Charles Perrow is a very talented sociologist who has put his finger on some of the central weaknesses of the American social-economic-political system. He has written about corporations (Organizing America: Wealth, Power, and the Origins of Corporate Capitalism), technology failure (Normal Accidents: Living with High-Risk Technologies), and organizations (Complex Organizations: A Critical Essay). …
Democracy in a polarized society
What are some of the institutional arrangements that can work to preserve a functioning democracy in a society with extensive inequalities of wealth and power? This is a key question in part because we can easily see the factors that work against the democratic outcome. A Berlusconi in Italy is capable of dominating the political …
Is there a revolution underway in Egypt?
Guardian, February 8, 2011 Is what is going on in Egypt today a "revolution"? What about Tunisia? And how about the Georgian "Rose" Revolution (2003) or the Philippine Yellow Revolution of 1986? Do these social and political conflicts and outcomes add up to a "revolution" in those societies? Are they analogous in any way to …
History of economic thought and the present
What is the relationship between the history of economic thought and contemporary economics? There are polar views on this issue. At one extreme, it is sometimes held that the history of economics, like the history of physics, is irrelevant to contemporary theory and analysis. Alfred North Whitehead is quoted with approval: "A science which hesitates to …
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Bourdieu’s “field”
image: Emile Zola, 1902 How can sociology treat "culture" as an object of study and as an influence on other sociological processes? This is, of course, two separate questions. First, internally, is it possible to treat philosophy or literature as an embedded sociological process (a point raised by Jean-Louis Fabiani in his treatment of French …
Understanding Society 