Dlittle30

LATEST ARTICLES ( 893 )

• Slipping Towards Authoritarianism

  

  Many observers have raised concerns about the direction that American politics has taken in the past decade, and especially since the election of 2016. Read more

  Posted on 28 October 2020 SOCIETY

• An Allegory for the Philosophy of History

  

  What is the role of history and narrative for human beings and peoples? What do we gain by learning of "our" past and the often horrendous crimes that we human... Read more

  Posted on 22 October 2020 SOCIETY

• Orwell on Revolutionary Spain

  

  Barcelona barricade, 1937Spanish Civil War poster (UC San Diego Library)It is very interesting to reread George Orwell's Homage to Catalonia (1938) after a gap... Read more

  Posted on 20 October 2020 SOCIETY

• Theories of Authoritarian Personality

  

  A key problem faced today by liberal democracies throughout the world is the fact that millions of citizens in those democracies seem to support parties and... Read more

  Posted on 14 October 2020 SOCIETY

• The Moral Emotions of Liberal Democracy

  

  Recent discussions in a class on democracy and the politics of hate (link) have been very stimulating and thought provoking. We have spent several weeks... Read more

  Posted on 02 October 2020 SOCIETY

• Marc Bloch's Phenomenology

  

  Marc Bloch's Historian's Craft: Reflections on the Nature and Uses of History and the Techniques and Methods of Those Who Write It is challenging to read, in... Read more

  Posted on 28 September 2020 SOCIETY

• Marc Bloch's Philosophy of History

  

  Marc Bloch wrote The Historian's Craft: Reflections on the Nature and Uses of History and the Techniques and Methods of Those Who Write It. after the defeat of... Read more

  Posted on 20 September 2020 SOCIETY

• The Uyghurs and Cultural Genocide

  

  In the last several weeks I've been thinking a lot about the twentieth century and its unimaginable crimes against humanity on an almost inconceivable scale. Read more

  Posted on 12 September 2020 SOCIETY

• Mass Murder in the Borderlands

  

  The facts of mass murder in eastern Europe in the 1930s through the 1950s are simply too horrific to fully absorb. These decades include the mass killings of... Read more

  Posted on 07 September 2020 SOCIETY

• The Gulag

  

  The ruthless authoritarianism and tyranny of Stalinist rule depended on a leader, a party, and a set of institutions that worked to terrorize and repress the... Read more

  Posted on 05 September 2020 SOCIETY

• Analytic Philosophy of Meaning and Smart AI Bots

  

  One of the impulses of the early exponents of analytic philosophy was to provide strict logical simplifications of hitherto vague or indefinite ideas. Read more

  Posted on 03 September 2020 SOCIETY

• New Thinking About European Genocide and the Holocaust

  

  Image: names of Holocaust victimsIt sometimes seems that some questions in history are resolved, finished, and understood. At various times the industrial... Read more

  Posted on 26 August 2020 SOCIETY

• Rational Life Plans and the Stopping Problem

  

  Image: a poor solution to the stopping problemIn earlier posts I discussed the question of "rational plans of life" (link, link, link, link) and argued that... Read more

  Posted on 25 August 2020 SOCIETY

• Are Randomized Controlled Trials the Gold Standard for Establishing Causation?

  

  The method of randomized controlled trials (RCT) is often thought to be the best possible way of establishing causation, whether in biology, or medicine or... Read more

  Posted on 24 August 2020 SOCIETY

• Tony Judt and Tim Snyder on the Twentieth Century

  

  Timothy Snyder helped Tony Judt to create a "spoken book" during Judt's final months of illness through a truly unique series of conversations about biography... Read more

  Posted on 21 August 2020 SOCIETY

• Judt on "A Clown in Regal Purple"

  

  There is an intriguing paragraph in Tony Judt and Tim Snyder's Thinking the Twentieth Century that made me curious. Judt says to Snyder:My own tenure case at... Read more

  Posted on 09 August 2020 SOCIETY

• Tony Judt on Memory and Myth in the Twentieth Century

  

  One of the historians whose work I greatly appreciate is Tony Judt. I've posted about his seminal book about Europe after World War II (Postwar: A History of... Read more

  Posted on 04 August 2020 SOCIETY

• Experimental Methods in Sociology

  

  An earlier post noted the increasing importance of experimentation in some areas of economics (link), and posed the question of whether there is a place for... Read more

  Posted on 23 July 2020 SOCIETY

• Mounk on the Crisis of Democracy

  

  Yascha Mounk's recent The People vs. Democracy: Why Our Freedom Is in Danger and How to Save It is one of several important efforts to understand the crisis tha... Read more

  Posted on 20 July 2020 SOCIETY

• A New Social Ontology of Government

  

  After several years of thinking about the nature of government as a network of organizations, I am happy to share the news that Palgrave Macmillan has... Read more

  Posted on 10 July 2020 SOCIETY