diagram: Erik Olin Wright, The Value Controversy and Social Research (link) Margaret Archer's research collaboration on topics concerning the theory of morphogenesis continues with the publication of the third volume in the Social Morphogenesis series, Generative Mechanisms Transforming the Social Order. (The first two volumes have been treated in earlier posts; link, link.) Like the earlier volumes, this volume offers …
Marx on peasant consciousness
One of Marx's more important pieces of political writing is the The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte (1851) (pdf). Here is his analysis of the causes of the specific nature of peasant political consciousness leading to the election of Napoleon III: The small-holding peasants form an enormous mass whose members live in similar conditions but without entering into …
Durkheim’s nightmare
So here is Paris today ... thousands of anonymous strangers on Boulevard Saint-Germain at 5 pm, no sense of common bond or shared identity, a void of powerful values, lives of bleak consumerism. Anomie writ large. No friends, no community, no ceremony, no shared rituals. No eye contact on the street, no presumption of common …
Microfoundations and mechanisms
The topics of microfoundations and causal mechanisms have come up frequently in this work. The microfoundations thesis maintains that social attributions and explanations based on macro-level entities and structures depend upon pathways at the level of the individual actors through which the entities and processes are maintained. The causal mechanisms thesis maintains that the best …
A survey of agent-based models
Federico Bianchi and Flaminio Squazzoni have published a very useful survey of the development and uses of agent-based models in the social sciences over the past twenty-five years in WIREs Comput Stat 2015 (link). The article is a very useful reference and discussion for anyone interested in the applicability of ABM within sociology. Here …
Range of reactions to realism about the social world
My recent post on realism in the social realm generated quite a bit of commentary, which I'd like to address here. Brad Delong offered an incredulous response -- he seems to think that any form of scientific realism is ridiculous (link). He refers to the predictive success of Ptolemy's epicycles, and then says, "But just …
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M I Finley on the dynamics of the Roman Empire
One of the books I found influential in graduate school in philosophy was M. I. Finley's The Ancient Economy, which appeared in 1973. Finley's book sought to explain important parts of the Roman world by piecing together the best knowledge available about the economic relations that defined its socioeconomic foundation. And the book proposes to consider …
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The case for realism in the social realm
Image. Orderly chaos in flight path of ocean-foraging albatross The case for scientific realism in the case of physics, microbiology, and chemistry is a strong one. The theories of physics, biology, and chemistry postulate unobservable entities, forces, and properties. These hypotheses are specified in a fair degree of precision. They are not individually testable, because …
Guest post by Doug Porpora on social structures
Here is a response to my earlier post on social ontology and structure from Doug Porpora, professor of sociology, Drexel University. Doug is the author of Reconstructing Sociology: The Critical Realist Approach. Thanks, Doug, for this thoughtful and considered reflection! FROM DOUG PORPORA: I have four comments in response. First, while I am happy to stand …
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A flat social reality?
I've been inclined to talk about the social world in terms of levels or layers, with a few provisos -- multiple layers, causation across layers, fuzzy boundaries (link, link). But is this perhaps a misleading ontology? Would we be better served by thinking of the social world as "flat" -- involving processes and relations all …
Understanding Society 