James Lee and Byong-Ho Lee have created a remarkable new course on Coursera titled "A New History for a New China, 1700-2000: New Data and New Methods, Part 1". This production is a genuinely important contribution to Chinese history. The course is not designed as an up-to-date summary of the history of early modern China, …
Quine’s indeterminacies
W.V.O. Quine's writings were key to the development of American philosophy in the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s. His landmark works ("Two Dogmas of Empiricism," "Ontological Relativity," and Word and Object, for example) provided a very appealing combination of plain speaking, seriousness, and import. Quine's voice certainly stands out among all American philosophers of his period. …
Marx and the physiocrats
An earlier post highlighted an interesting piece of Marx scholarship by Regina Roth, included in a Routledge collection of important articles on the history of political economy (link). Another article that is of special interest in the Routledge collection is "Karl Marx on physiocracy" by Christian Gehrke and Heinz Kurz (link). The illustrations reproduced above …
Adelman on Albert Hirschman
Jeremy Adelman's detailed and illuminating biography of Albert Hirschman in Worldly Philosopher: The Odyssey of Albert O. Hirschman is an excellent example of intellectual biography. Even more, it is a valuable contribution to our understanding of the development of social science theories and frameworks. Born to a professional Jewish family in Berlin in 1915, Hirschman's …
Life-course histories and methods
source: G. Alter, "Completing Life Histories with Imputed Exit Dates" (link) I talked recently with George Alter, a leading historical demographer at the University of Michigan and author of Family and the Female Life Course: The Women of Verviers, Belgium, 1849-1880. (Here is George's presidential address to the Social Science History Association in 2010; link.) …
Graphing metadata
One element of the NSA revelations of the past month is the apparent fact that the NSA's PRISM program enables the agency to collect wholesale the transactions that occur on the Internet, including email header information. This follows the revelation that all metadata for phone calls made on the Verizon network (and presumably others) have …
Marx’s thinking about technology
It sometimes seems as though there isn't much new to say about Marx and his theories. But, like any rich and prolific thinker, that's not actually true. Two articles featured in the Routledge Great Economists series (link) are genuinely interesting. Both are deeply scholarly treatment of interesting aspects of the development of Marx's thinking, and …
Causal concepts
source: D. Little, “Causal Explanation in the Social Sciences,” Southern Journal of Philosophy (1995) (link) It may be useful to provide a brief account of some of the key ideas that are often invoked in causal explanations in the social sciences. (Here is an earlier post that summarized some current issues in causation research; link. And …
Social causation
The idea of social causation is a difficult one, as we dig more deeply into it. What does it mean to say that "poor education causes increased risk of delinquency" or "population growth causes technology change" or "the existence of paramilitary organizations contributed to the rise of German fascism"? What sorts of things can function …
Institutional design for democracies
How can we design practical, effective, and fair institutions for making the basic decisions that are needed within a democratic government? This is, of course, one of the oldest questions in democratic theory; but it is also a recent concern of Jon Elster's. Under this rubric we can investigate, for example, the ways a legislature …
Understanding Society 