Dlittle30

LATEST ARTICLES ( 896 )

• Greenblatt on Civilization

  

  Steven Greenblatt's recent book, The Swerve: How the World Became Modern, is an ambitious widening of Greenblatt's intellectual palette. Read more

  Posted on 22 December 2012 SOCIETY

• New Metaphors for the Social

  

  The social world is not like the natural world. Nature is composed of things, forces, and geometries that have strong determining regularities whose interaction... Read more

  Posted on 16 December 2012 PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY

• Why Does Social Science Matter?

  

  What is the good of social science knowledge? In the natural sciences the answer is often pretty simple and pragmatic: natural science knowledge allows us to... Read more

  Posted on 14 December 2012 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY

• Historians of Sociology and Classical Social Theory

  

  Several readers of the recent post on Raymond Aron asked about other surveys of the history of sociology that are sometimes considered helpful. So I've pulled... Read more

  Posted on 13 December 2012 PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY

• Simulating Social Mechanisms

  

  A key premise of complexity theory is that a population of units has "emergent" properties that result from the interactions of units with dynamic... Read more

  Posted on 09 December 2012 SOCIETY

• Neighborhood Effects

  

  In Great American City: Chicago and the Enduring Neighborhood Effect Robert Sampson provides a very different perspective on the "micro-macro" debate. Read more

  Posted on 06 December 2012 SOCIETY

• Raymond Aron as Historian of Sociology

  

  How can we best tell the story of the development of sociology as an empirical social science? Raymond Aron undertook to do so in Main Currents in Sociological... Read more

  Posted on 04 December 2012 SOCIETY

• Latour's Invisible Paris

  

  Almost the first words of Bruno Latour's Reassembling the Social: An Introduction to Actor-Network-Theory include this intriguing statement: This somewhat... Read more

  Posted on 01 December 2012 SOCIETY

• Veblen on Universities

  

  In 1918 Thorstein Veblen wrote a surprising short book about the administration and governance of American universities, The Higher Learning In America. What... Read more

  Posted on 29 November 2012 SOCIETY

• Marketing Wittgenstein

  

  Who made Wittgenstein a great philosopher? Why is the eccentric Austrian now regarded as one of the twentieth century's greatest philosophers? Read more

  Posted on 27 November 2012 PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY

• Pragmatist Arguments for Democracy

  

  Jack Knight and Jim Johnson engage in a particular kind of political theory in their recent The Priority of Democracy: Political Consequences of Pragmatism. Read more

  Posted on 25 November 2012 HISTORY, POLITICS, SOCIETY

• Deliberation for Activists

  

  What is involved in deliberating within an activist group? This isn't quite as simple a question as it might appear. Deliberation has to do with a discussion... Read more

  Posted on 19 November 2012 POLITICS, SOCIETY

• Assemblage Theory

  

  Deleuze's theory (metaphor?) of assemblage as a way of thinking about the social world is an intriguing one. Fundamentally the idea is that there does not... Read more

  Posted on 15 November 2012 PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY

• How is "work" Socially Constituted?

  

  How does "work" take shape in an advanced manufacturing and service economy? Is the division of labor a natural outcome of technology, or is it the result of a... Read more

  Posted on 10 November 2012 BUSINESS, ECONOMICS, SOCIETY

• Five Years of UnderstandingSociety

  

  This week represents the end of the fifth year of the UnderstandingSociety blog. Writing the blog continues to be a source of great intellectual growth for me,... Read more

  Posted on 06 November 2012 SOCIETY

• Learning from History: Non-Violence and Civil Rights

  

  Read more

  Posted on 06 November 2012 CULTURE, HISTORY, POLITICS, SOCIETY

• Intellectual History as History?

  

  How do fields like the history of art or the history of philosophy relate to history simpliciter? Are there similar problems and methods in the history of... Read more

  Posted on 04 November 2012 HISTORY, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY

• Methodological Individualism Today

  Is it possible to draw a few conclusions on the topic of methodological individualism after dozens of years of debate? (Lars Udehn's Methodological... Read more

  Posted on 01 November 2012 CURRENT, DEBATE, PHILOSOPHY, POLITICS, SOCIETY

• The Philosophy of Economics

  intersects with several different areas of philosophy, including the philosophy of science, ethics, and social philosophy. (Dan Hausman is the leading expert... Read more

  Posted on 30 October 2012 PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY

• Character and History

  

  How do features of character play into the fabric of history? The first has to do with psychology, motives, and agency; the second has to do with large events... Read more

  Posted on 25 October 2012 SOCIETY