Dlittle30

LATEST ARTICLES ( 899 )

• 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

• 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