Daniel Little
The previous post summarized some of Kathleen Thelen's thinking about the prospects for a more egalitarian capitalism in our future. Saskia Sassen offers a more negative view of the direction of the development of European capitalism in her most recent book, Expulsions: Brutality and Complexity in the Global Economy. Here is a post in Open Democracy in …
Continue reading "Saskia Sassen on austerity and social exclusion"
source: Kathleen Thelen, Varieties of Liberalization (kl 3310) There is a version of economic historical thinking that we might label as "capitalist triumphalism" -- the idea that the institutions of a capitalist economy drive out all other economic forms, and that they tend towards an ever-more pure form of unconstrained market society. "Liberalization," deregulation, and …
Continue reading "Thelen on the prospects for egalitarian capitalism"
My university work involves quite a bit of interaction with leaders in different sectors of society — non-profits, elected officials, community organizations, business, law enforcement, and education, for example. Over the years I have noticed some striking differences in profile across sectors in terms of the qualities of mind and character that leaders in these …
Continue reading "Differences in leadership qualities across professions"
In an earlier post I made an effort at providing the beginnings of an inventory of social mechanisms from several areas of social research. Here I’d like to go a little further with that idea in order to see how it plays into good thinking about social-science methodology. Some Types of Social Mechanisms CONTENTION …
Carl Craver and Lindley Darden provide in In Search of Mechanisms: Discoveries across the Life Sciences an extensive treatment of what a mechanisms-based methodology looks like. Their work originates in study of the biological sciences, but I find that much of what they have to say is very helpful in the philosophy of social science …
Part of the dispute between analytical sociology and critical realists comes down to a complicated interplay between ontology and methodology. Both groups have strong (and conflicting) ideas about social ontology, and both think that these ideas are important to the conduct of social-science research. Analytical sociologists tend towards an enlightened version of methodological individualism: social …
Several recent posts have raised the question, what would be needed to move US public policy towards a more equitable treatment of the bottom 75% of American society? Conditions for much of this super-majority of society have gradually declined in the past several decades, and public programs designed to ameliorate conditions of health, education, nutrition, …
Continue reading "Public attitudes towards market fundamentalism"
Karl Polanyi is underrated as a theorist of capitalist modernity. Margaret Somers and Fred Block's latest book, The Power of Market Fundamentalism: Karl Polanyi's Critique aims to correct this failure and to work out in some detail the analysis and critique that Polanyi provided between the wars. The book is an important contribution to the …
Continue reading "Polanyi’s substantive theory of a decent society"
We would like to think that it is possible for a society to embody basic institutions that work to preserve and enhance the wellbeing of all members of society in a fair way. We want social institutions to be beneficent (producing good outcomes for everyone), and we want them to be fair (treating all individuals and groups with equal …
Continue reading "Basic social institutions and democratic equality"
Nancy Cartwright is one of the best philosophers of science around, in many people's opinion. I find her work particularly interesting for the new ways she offers of thinking about old ideas like "laws of nature" and the ways things work in the natural world. Much of what she writes about the entities and processes …
Understanding Society 