image: Arch of Septimius Severus, Forum (203 CE) The history of Rome has a particular fascination for twenty-first century readers, especially in the West. Roman law, Roman philosophy, Roman legions, and Roman roads all have a powerful resonance for our imaginations today. Mary Beard's recent SPQR: A History of Ancient Rome is an interesting recent synthesis of …
Strategies for resisting right-wing populism
Social Europe is a vibrant publisher of current progressive thought in Europe. Readers can find data, opinion, and policy analysis on the site, highly relevant to the core priorities of progressives across the continent and Britain -- social opportunity, inequalities, work, the threat of right-wing populism, the refugee crisis, and the future of the European Union. …
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Perspectives on transport history
I view transport as a crucial structuring condition in society that is perhaps under-appreciated and under-studied. The extension of the Red Line from Harvard Square (its terminus when I was a graduate student) to Davis Square in Somerville a decade later illustrated the transformative power of a change in the availability of urban transportation; residential …
New understandings of populism
It is apparent, on this first round of the presidential elections in France, that we urgently need to understand better the dynamics and causes of radical populism in democratic polities. What is populism? Why does it have such virulence in the current moment as a political movement? What roles do racism, xenophobia, resentment, and economic …
Complexity and contingency
One of the more intriguing currents of social science research today is the field of complexity theory. Scientists like John Holland (Complexity: A Very Short Introduction), John Miller and Scott Page (Complex Adaptive Systems: An Introduction to Computational Models of Social Life), and Joshua Epstein (Generative Social Science: Studies in Agent-Based Computational Modeling) make bold …
Observation, measurement, and explanation
An earlier post reiterated my reasons for doubting that the social sciences can in principle give rise to general theories that serve to organize and predict the domain of social phenomena. The causes of social events are too heterogeneous and conjunctural to permit this kind of systematic representation. That said, social behavior and social processes …
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Science policy and the Cold War
The marriage of science, technology, and national security took a major step forward during and following World War II. The secret Manhattan project, marshaling the energies and time of thousands of scientists and engineers, showed that it was possible for military needs to effectively mobilize and conduct coordinated research into fundamental and applied topics, leading …
Social science or social studies?
A genuinely difficult question is this: does the idea of a rigorous "social science" really make sense, given what we know of the nature of the social world, the nature of human agency, and the nature of historical change? There are of course large areas of social inquiry that involve genuine observation and measurement: demography, …
The soft side of critical realism
Critical realism has appealed to a range of sociologists and political scientists, in part because of the legitimacy it renders for the study of social structures and organizations. However, many of the things sociologists study are not "things" at all, but rather subjective features of social experience -- mental frameworks, identities, ideologies, value systems, knowledge …
Mechanisms according to analytical sociology
One of the distinguishing characteristics of analytical sociology is its insistence on the idea of causal mechanisms as the core component of explanation. Like post-positivists in other traditions, AS theorists specifically reject the covering law model of explanation and argues for a "realist" understanding of causal relations and powers: a causal relationship between x and y exists solely insofar …
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Understanding Society 