James Scott is one of the really exceptional social scientists of his generation. His contributions to peasant studies have been transformative -- his ideas of the "moral economy of the peasant" and "weapons of the weak" are now part of the tool set that we all use in trying to make sense of agrarian societies …
Who invented the totalitarian state?
The world has known ruthless, violent, and murderous rulers for centuries. Queen Elizabeth ran a secret service that ruthlessly pursued her enemies in the Catholic underground. Isabella and Ferdinand persecuted and expelled the Jews of Spain. And the French government was perfectly ready to use deadly force against workers and rebels in Paris in …
Koestler’s nightmares
Image: book burning by National Socialist paramilitaries, 1933 Image: Ukraine peasants fleeing famine Image: street battle, Spanish Civil War Arthur Koestler was an articulate witness of the atrocities of the twentieth century; and much of what he witnessed was terrible. Reading his books gives one an intense and personal vision of fascism, dictatorship, mass murder, …
What is the Burmese junta doing?
Burma has been a cauldron of surprising news in the past two years or so. The generals have taken a series of actions in a number of areas: brutal repression of the monks' demonstrations in 2007, prosecution and conviction of Aung Sun Suu Kyi (ASSK) in a bizarre show trial, a major rainy season assault …
Labor protest in China
C.K. Lee’s book, Against the Law: Labor Protests in China's Rustbelt and Sunbelt, is a very important contribution to the sociology of contemporary China. The field needs this kind of innovative and theoretically adept work. And one of the great strengths of the research is the fact that it takes the Chinese context seriously in …
Is publicity an important source of power?
What is publicity in the sense intended here? It is shared public knowledge of a given state of affairs. It stands in contrast to secrecy and deception, and it is cognate to transparency. Public knowledge is shared knowledge. And philosophers such as Rawls and Habermas have given great moral importance to this circumstance of publicity …
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New forms of collective behavior?
Personal electronic communication and the Internet -- have these new technologies changed the game for collective action? Here I am thinking of email and instant messaging, but also cell phones and other personal communications devices, as well as the powerful capacity for dissemination of ideas over the web -- has this dense new network of …
Structure, psychology, power
Political and social power involves the exercise of social resources to compel various kinds of unwilling behavior by others. What creates power in society? What are the sorts of social and structural factors that permit individuals to exercise power? And what features of personality lead a given individual to choose to use the instruments of …
The power of the authoritarian state
If any collective entity possesses power, surely it is the state in a dictatorship – the Burmese military dictatorship or the single-party states of Cuba or China. So how does an authoritarian state exercise power? It is common to equate power with the ability to coerce and threaten in order to compel behavior. And certainly …
Understanding Society 