Robin Blackburn has assembled a fascinating book drawing out some surprising connections between Abraham Lincoln and Karl Marx, An Unfinished Revolution: Karl Marx and Abraham Lincoln. Since both thinkers are highly original in their thinking about the worlds they inhabited, I’ve found the book to be absorbing. It consists of a brilliant hundred-page historical essay …
Causal narratives, mechanisms, and powers
A million termites move around industriously without supervisors or external coordination. Some months later, a great structure has arisen — a termite cathedral mound. It is a structure that has apparent functionality (figure 2), it is oriented to the sun in a way that optimizes its ability to handle heat and cold, and the design …
Continue reading "Causal narratives, mechanisms, and powers"
“How does it work” questions
Source: Karl Ove Moene in Alternatives to Capitalism, p. 85 One of the strengths of the causal-mechanisms approach to social explanation is how it responds to a very fundamental aspect of what we want explanations to do: we want to understand how something works. And a mechanisms account answers that question. Let’s consider an example …
Skocpol on the 1979 revolution in Iran
An earlier post reviewed Theda Skocpol's effort in States and Social Revolutions: A Comparative Analysis of France, Russia and China to provide a comparative, structural account of the occurrence of social revolutions. There I suggested that the account is too deterministic and too abstract. It gives the impression, perhaps undeserved, that there are only a …
Skocpol on the Chinese Revolution
(Sources: States and Social Revolutions, pp. 155, 282) In States and Social Revolutions: A Comparative Analysis of France, Russia and China (1979) Theda Skocpol set out to discover a causal analysis of the occurrence of social revolution, and she offered case-study narratives of the major revolutions in France, Russia, and China. She provides a 54-page narrative …
Understanding the Chinese Revolution
source: Lucien Bianco, Origins of the Chinese Revolution, frontispiece The Chinese Revolution is one of the world-historical events that has set the stage for the modern world. And, unlike the French Revolution or the Russian Revolution, it is sufficiently contemporary that there are very substantial sources of data and informants about its occurrence. Several generations …
The historian and the archives
Generally speaking everyone understands that one important kind of research conducted by historians takes place in archives -- repositories of records and documents that have been preserved by governments or organizations for some purpose, in which documents are preserved that shed light on the past. But it is common to imagine that the trip to …
Mechanisms and methodology
In its origin the causal mechanisms approach (link) is chiefly an answer to the question, “what is a good social explanation?”. So it turns out that much of the mechanisms discussion has taken place within the philosophy of science, especially the philosophy of social science and the philosophy of biology. The question I’d like to formulate …
SSHA 2014 Call for Papers
SSHA CALL FOR PAPERS Macrohistorical Dynamics Network 39th Annual Meeting of the Social Science History Association Toronto, Ontario 6-9 November 2014 Submission Deadline: 14 February 2014 "Inequalities: Politics, Policy, and the Past" http://www.ssha.org We invite you to take part in Macrohistorical Dynamics (MHD) panels of the 39th annual meeting of the Social Science History Association, November …
Mechanisms and intellectual movements
I am particularly interested in the idea that we can explain social outcomes by identifying the social mechanisms that (often, typically, occasionally) bring them about. I also find the evolution of science and systems of ideas to be particularly fascinating within contemporary sociology, in that this aspect of human life embraces both rationally directed thought …
Understanding Society 