Daniel Little
I am spending several weeks in one of my courses on the struggle in South Africa to bring the apartheid system to an end. This is a struggle many of us remember well from the 1970s and 1980s, largely because it became a leading issue for activists in the United States as well as many …
Continue reading "The difference between “apartheid” and apartheid"
Is solving the mind-body problem crucial to providing a satisfactory sociological theory? No, it isn't, in my opinion. But Alex Wendt thinks otherwise in Quantum Mind and Social Science: Unifying Physical and Social Ontology. In fact, he thinks a solution to the mind-body problem is crucial to a coherent social science. Which is to …
Continue reading "Is the mind/body problem relevant to social science?"
Numerous previous posts have emphasized the importance of having a theory of the actor when we do social science or history. Are people impulsive, emotional, envious, prudent, or moral -- or a mix of all of these things in different settings? We need to have some explicit and fact-based ideas about how and why people …
At any given time there are huge areas of the unknown when it comes to the question, what do various members of our society care about? We have opinion research tools, of course. But we don't really have good answers to any of these questions: How do West Bloomfield teenagers think about their futures? Why …
What difference does it make to a person's personality, values, agency, or interpretive schemes that she was born in 1950 rather than 1930 or 1970? How does a person's place in time and in a stream of historical events influence the formation of his or her consciousness? (I've raised some of these questions in prior …
Twenty-five years ago, Robert Darnton offered a highly original perspective on historical understanding in his The Great Cat Massacre: And Other Episodes in French Cultural History (1984), and the book still warrants close attention. He proposes to bring an ethnographic perspective to bear on historical research, attempting to arrive at nuanced interpretation of the mentalities …
Understanding Society 