Dlittle30
I am a philosopher of social science with a strong interest in China and Southeast Asia. Paying attention to the logical and conceptual issues raised by the social sciences is key to better understanding the modern world. I think philosophers need to interact seriously and extensively with working social scientists and historians if they are going to be able to make a useful contribution.
MY BLOGS
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Understanding Society
http://understandingsociety.blogspot.com/
Innovative thinking about social agency and structure in a global world
LATEST ARTICLES ( 863 )
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Silence About the Holocaust After 1945
Image: Holocaust memorial at Camp Westerbork, The NetherlandsEach of the great evils of the twentieth century -- the Holocaust, the Holodomor, the Gulag -- was... Read more
Posted on 24 January 2022 SOCIETY -
Poetry in Remembrance of the Shoah
Theodor Adorno wrote that “To write poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric." But there are good reasons not to agree with Adorno. There is a body of powerful,... Read more
Posted on 22 January 2022 SOCIETY -
Frankl and Shalamov on Existence in the Camps
Image: Viktor FranklImage: Varlam Shalamov, NKVD photoViktor Frankl, born in Austria in 1905, had the tragic misfortune to be swept up into the maelstrom of... Read more
Posted on 20 January 2022 SOCIETY -
Bandera, Shukhevych, and Memory Debates About the Ukrainian Nationalist Movement
When in 2007 Ukrainian president Viktor Yushchenko designated Roman Shukhevych as a Hero of Ukraine, he brought new heat into the debate in Ukraine and in the... Read more
Posted on 04 January 2022 SOCIETY -
Strange Defeat
One of the consequential puzzles of the Second World War was the sudden, catastrophic collapse of the French army following German invasion in 1940. Read more
Posted on 01 January 2022 SOCIETY -
Inclusivity as a Democratic Goal
Many organizations express the goal of embracing diversity and inclusiveness. This is an admirable goal, but it is often only weakly pursued in practical terms. Read more
Posted on 29 December 2021 SOCIETY -
De-mythologizing Ukraine Under Nazi Occupation
Ukraine was quickly and violently occupied by the Nazi military in 1941 in the onset of Hitler's Barbarossa plan for defeat of the Soviet Union, and the most... Read more
Posted on 27 December 2021 SOCIETY -
Greenblatt's New Historicism
Stephen Greenblatt is a pathbreaking literary critic. But since the 1990s I've also looked at Greenblatt as a genuinely innovative and insightful contributor... Read more
Posted on 22 December 2021 SOCIETY -
Online Mobilization Strategies by Right-wing Extremists
graphic: White supremacist podcast network (SPLC link)The surge of right-wing extremism has been evident in the United States for the past five years,... Read more
Posted on 18 December 2021 SOCIETY -
China's Food-safety Governance System
Food safety is a very high-level concern for ordinary consumers. This is true because the food we eat can poison us or ruin our health, and yet consumers have... Read more
Posted on 10 December 2021 SOCIETY -
The Holodomor
is one of the great evils of the twentieth century. The facts are grim and horrific. Robert Conquest's The Harvest of Sorrow: Soviet Collectivization and the... Read more
Posted on 01 December 2021 SOCIETY -
Herder's Philosophy of History and Humanity
An earlier post attempted to express the idea that "humanity" and human culture are self-creators: there is no fixed and prior system of meanings, values,... Read more
Posted on 27 November 2021 SOCIETY -
Bauman on the Holocaust
There sometimes seems to be an important intertwining between personal biography and a person's sociological and historical imagination. Read more
Posted on 21 November 2021 SOCIETY -
Jedwabne as Memory and History
In July 1941 a terrible massacre of Jews took place in Jedwabne, a town in eastern Poland. The town consisted of some 3,000 residents, about half of whom were... Read more
Posted on 19 November 2021 SOCIETY -
Decline of Democracy in India
The entrenched rule of the BJP and its leader, Narendra Modi, has led to a truly alarming degradation in India's democratic institutions. Read more
Posted on 18 November 2021 SOCIETY -
Fourteen Years of Understanding Society
Greetings, readers... This week marks the fourteenth anniversary of Understanding Society. With this post there are 1,412 entries in the blog -- about 1.4... Read more
Posted on 07 November 2021 SOCIETY -
How Are Institutions Sustained, Reproduced, and Changed?
Institutions are "supra-individual", in the sense that they establish a context of identity and mental-framework formation for all individuals, and they create... Read more
Posted on 06 November 2021 SOCIETY -
Telling the Truth About Genocide and Totalitarian Terror
A central question in the past year or so in Understanding Society is how historians and philosophers should confront the evils of the twentieth century. Read more
Posted on 29 October 2021 SOCIETY -
United States After the Failure of Democracy ...
Democracy is at risk in the United States. Why do leading political observers like Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt (How Democracies Die) fear for the fate... Read more
Posted on 21 October 2021 SOCIETY -
Human Cultures as Self-creating Systems
Some philosophers and others have imagined that human beings are largely fixed in their most fundamental capacities -- their "human nature". Read more
Posted on 18 October 2021 SOCIETY