Dlittle30

LATEST ARTICLES ( 866 )

• Hofstadter on the Progressive Historians

  

  I've frequently found Richard Hofstadter to be a particularly compelling historian of American politics and ideas. He is one of the writers from the 1950s and... Read more

  Posted on 08 May 2016 SOCIETY

• Hofstadter on the American Right

  

  Richard Hofstadter opened his 1963 Herbert Spencer Lecture at Oxford with these prescient words:Although American political life has rarely been touched by the... Read more

  Posted on 05 May 2016 SOCIETY

• Predicting, Forecasting, and Superforecasting

  

  I have expressed a lot of reservation about the feasibility of prediction of large, important outcomes in the social world (link, link, link). Read more

  Posted on 01 May 2016 SOCIETY

• Samuel Dill on the Late Roman Empire

  

  An anonymous reader responds to my short discussion of Patrick Geary's treatment of the late Roman Empire to recommend Samuel Dill's treatment of this process... Read more

  Posted on 28 April 2016 SOCIETY

• Large Structures and Social Change

  

  The relationship between feudalism and the origins of capitalism was of great interest to Marx. Here is one way that Marx puts the idea in The Poverty of... Read more

  Posted on 23 April 2016 SOCIETY

• Origins of Feudalism in the West

  

  In the grand historical march postulated by historical materialism, ancient slavery and medieval feudalism preceded capitalism as distinct systems of... Read more

  Posted on 18 April 2016 SOCIETY

• Defining Social Phenomena

  

  How does a field of phenomena come into focus as a subject of scientific study? When we want to know about weather, we can identify a relatively small number... Read more

  Posted on 16 April 2016 SOCIETY

• Phase Transitions and Emergence

  

  Image: Phase diagram of water, Solé. Phase Transitions, 4I've proposed to understand the concepts of emergence and generativeness as being symmetrical (link). Read more

  Posted on 11 April 2016 SOCIETY

• Social Progress in India?

  

  A few days in Bangalore, Kerala, and Mumbai have been very interesting, from a social-change point of view. There is an election cycle underway, with prospects... Read more

  Posted on 07 April 2016 SOCIETY

• ABM Fundamentalism

  

  image: Chernobyl control roomQuite a few recent posts have examined the power and flexibility of ABM models as platforms for simulating a wide range of social... Read more

  Posted on 17 March 2016 SOCIETY

• What is Anchor Individualism?

  

  Brian Epstein has attempted to shake up some of our fundamental assumptions about the social world in the past several years by challenging the idea of... Read more

  Posted on 15 March 2016 SOCIETY

• Wendt's Strong Claims About Quantum Consciousness

  

  Alex Wendt takes a provocative step in Quantum Mind and Social Science: Unifying Physical and Social Ontology by proposing that quantum mechanics plays a role i... Read more

  Posted on 12 March 2016 SOCIETY

• Quantum Biology?

  

  I have discussed several times an emerging literature on "quantum consciousness", focusing on Alex Wendt's provocative book Quantum Mind and Social Science:... Read more

  Posted on 12 March 2016 SOCIETY

• Non-generative Social Facts

  

  Is every social process generated by facts about individuals? For example, consider a television advertising campaign for a General Motors truck. Read more

  Posted on 10 March 2016 SOCIETY

• Reduction and Generativeness

  

  Providing an ontology of complex entities seems to force us to refer to some notion of higher-level and lower-level things. Proteins consist of atoms; atoms... Read more

  Posted on 08 March 2016 SOCIETY

• Critical Realism Meets Peasant Studies

  

  Critical realism is a philosophical theory of social ontology and social science knowledge. This philosophy has been expressed through the writings of systemati... Read more

  Posted on 06 March 2016 SOCIETY

• Values, Directions, and Action

  

  Several earlier posts have raised the question of rational life planning. What is involved in orchestrating one's goals and activities in such a way as to... Read more

  Posted on 27 February 2016 SOCIETY

• Guest Post by Gianluca Pozzoni on Political Entities

  

  Gianluca Pozzoni is a PhD Candidate in Political Studies at the University of Milan, Italy. His interests span the foundations of the social sciences, and he ha... Read more

  Posted on 25 February 2016 SOCIETY

• Causal Diagrams and Causal Mechanisms

  

  There is a long history of the use of directed causal diagrams to represent hypotheses about causation. Can the mathematics and graphical systems created for... Read more

  Posted on 20 February 2016 SOCIETY

• Assemblage Theory as Heuristic

  

  In A New Philosophy of Society: Assemblage Theory and Social Complexity Manuel DeLanda takes up one of Deleuze's key ideas. This is the idea of "assemblage", an... Read more

  Posted on 11 February 2016 SOCIETY