Dlittle30

LATEST ARTICLES ( 866 )

• 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

• Fire Safety in Urban China

  

  A rapidly rising percentage of the Chinese population is living in high-rise apartment buildings in hundreds of cities around the country. Read more

  Posted on 15 October 2021 SOCIETY

• Ludwik Fleck and "thought Styles" in Science

  

  Let's think about the intellectual influences that have shaped philosophers of science over the past one hundred years or so: Vienna Circle empiricism, logical... Read more

  Posted on 10 October 2021 SOCIETY

• Striving for Consensus in Nazi Germany?

  

  Nathan Stoltzfus's Hitler's Compromises: Coercion and Consensus in Nazi Germany has a remarkable and startling thesis: though the Nazi regime used absolutely... Read more

  Posted on 09 October 2021 SOCIETY

• Vasily Grossman on Treblinka

  

  Vasily Grossman was an important Soviet writer and journalist from the 1930s through his death in 1964. He was a Ukrainian Jew born in 1905, and his mother... Read more

  Posted on 02 October 2021 SOCIETY

• Fascist Populism and the Threat to Democracy

  

  What features of a political regime contribute to political loyalty and commitment on the part of its citizens? Can a fascist dictatorship inspire political... Read more

  Posted on 25 September 2021 SOCIETY

• Snyder's Big Idea About Genocide: State Smashing

  

  Tim Snyder's Black Earth: The Holocaust as History and Warning is an exceptional and innovative history of the Holocaust, and of the mass killings that... Read more

  Posted on 23 September 2021 SOCIETY

• A Socratic Morality of War?

  

  An earlier post raised the question of whether Socrates had participated, directly or indirectly, in atrocities in war during his celebrated service as hoplite... Read more

  Posted on 19 September 2021 SOCIETY

• Probing Atrocity in Miropol

  

  photo: execution site at Babi Yar, Kiev, Ukraine, September 1941It is challenging to form a mental picture of the significance and reality of the events and... Read more

  Posted on 15 September 2021 SOCIETY

• Socrates the Hoplite

  

  An earlier post considered the Melian massacre and the Athenian conduct of war during the Peloponnesian War (link). Since we know that Socrates served as an... Read more

  Posted on 11 September 2021 SOCIETY

• Social Behavior and the Covid Pandemic

  

  Anyone who thinks that the social world is orderly and predictable needs to reflect carefully on the way the covid pandemic has played out in the United States... Read more

  Posted on 27 August 2021 SOCIETY

• Albert Hirschman on Uncertainty

  

  Albert Hirschman was a particularly important non-conformist in 20th-century social science. (Here is an earlier discussion of Jeremy Adelman's biography of... Read more

  Posted on 21 August 2021 SOCIETY

• Social Change and Agency

  

  Much of the drama of history is found in processes of large social and political change, both slow and rapid. The sudden collapse of the Soviet system in 1989... Read more

  Posted on 17 August 2021 SOCIETY

• New Email Feed for Understanding Society

  

  I have some welcome news for readers who rely on the Feedburner email feed to receive the Understanding Society blog. Since Google is no longer supporting... Read more

  Posted on 16 August 2021 SOCIETY

• Tony Judt on Twentieth-century Marxism

  

  Tony Judt was especially astute when it came to linking history and intellectuals. One strand of thought in his collection of essays, Reappraisals: Reflections... Read more

  Posted on 15 August 2021 SOCIETY

• Do Norms and Moral Attitudes Change Over Generations?

  

  Moral philosophers have often written of ethical obligations, principles, and theories as if they were timeless and unchanging. Kant, for example, argued that... Read more

  Posted on 03 August 2021 SOCIETY

• Evil and the Philosophy of History

  

  images: Two residents of Königsberg (now Kaliningrad)Vast numbers of words have been written about the atrocities of the twentieth century -- about the... Read more

  Posted on 27 July 2021 SOCIETY

• The Warsaw Experience of Janina Bauman

  

  Janina Bauman, along with her sister Sophie and her mother Alina, miraculously survived the slaughter of the Jews of Warsaw and the crushing of the Warsaw ghett... Read more

  Posted on 27 July 2021 SOCIETY