Comparative history

One of Marc Bloch's most important contributions was to reinvigorate the idea of "comparative history."  Bloch believed that we could understand French feudalism better by putting it into the context of European legal and property regimes; and more broadly, he believed that the careful comparison of agrarian regimes across time and space could be an important source of insight into human societies.  Moreover, he did not believe that the cases needed to be sociologically connected.  He thought that we would learn important new truths by comparing medieval French serfdom with bonded labor in Senegal in the twentieth century, and one of the innovations developed in Bloch's editorship of Annales d'histoire économique et social was...

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Posted in: CAT_history,comparative method

The German mandarins

Fritz Ringer's The Decline of the German Mandarins: The German Academic Community, 1890-1933 is a key source on the content and social location of German academic and intellectual culture in a crucial period of its development, 1870-1933. The book appeared in German in 1967, and it presents a detailed intellectual and institutional history of the issues and actors.  The concept of mandarin is Ringer's shorthand for "influential educated elite."  Humanistically educated in a system that emphasized literature, classical languages, and philosophy, the mandarins played the role of the educated and powerful elites of late nineteenth-century Germany, as officials, professors, and other highly educated professionals.  These were men...

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Posted in: CAT_foundations,education

Marc Bloch and the French social sciences

Marc Bloch was one of the twentieth century's most important and pathbreaking historians.  Several features of his work are particularly important: his attention to the specifics of medieval economic institutions, his interest in historically specific customs and practices, and his interest in uncovering the social and technical characteristics of medieval agriculture.  He helped to define contemporary social history and economic history.  (See an earlier post on Bloch's historical writings.)  Somehow Bloch developed a way of thinking about the history of France that deeply incorporated some of the mental frameworks of the emerging social sciences -- geography and sociology, for example -- at a time when mainstream French...

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Posted in: CAT_foundations,CAT_history,France,sociology

Defining the university curriculum

What is the purpose of a university education? And who ought to answer this question when it comes to the practical business of maintaining and reforming a university curriculum?The second question is the easier of the two. In the United States university, the faculty generally have the responsibility and authority to make decisions about the curriculum -- from the content of a particular course to the requirements of a disciplinary major, to the nature of the general education requirements to the university's graduation requirements. To be sure, there are other significant sources of influence and constraint on this faculty-centered process. Accreditation agencies like the HLC (Higher Learning Commission), ACS (chemistry),  AACSB (business),...

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Posted in: CAT_misc,education

Was Durkheim a professional sociologist?

At some point in the history of sociology there was a transition from the founding non-professional genius to the professional disciplinary researcher. Marx and Tocqueville certainly fall in the former category; Robert Merton, Mayer Zald, and Neil Smelser fall clearly in the latter. By some time in the mid-twentieth century sociology had become "professionalized." What is the situation of the "professional" sociologist? To what extent and why is this an improvement? And where do Durkheim and Weber fall in this transition?We might characterize a discipline as --a complex set of social institutions that organize, validate, and evaluate the work products of knowledge seekers. This means several things: organized processes for identifying...

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Posted in: CAT_foundations,disciplines,profession

Variation as a social fundamental

Over 700 historians, sociologists, demographers, and political scientists enjoyed a splendid program of panels at the Social Science History Association in Long Beach this week (link). There were panels on recent historical demography, comparative historical analysis, and social mobilization research, as well as a pair of great panels on the work of Charles Tilly. There was even a smattering of papers suggesting possible opportunities for innovation in theory and research methods in historical sociology.  (A book panel on Neil Smelser's recent The Odyssey Experience: Physical, Social, Psychological, and Spiritual Journeys illustrates this point: the book is highly original and demonstrates the value of seeking out new perspectives and...

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Posted in: CAT_ontology,causal mechanism,comparative method,heterogeneity

Localism and assemblage theory

Several earlier posts have described the idea of "methodological localism" (post).  This is part of an argument I want to defend in support of the idea that we need new and better ways of thinking about the "stuff" of society. We need to thoroughly question and rethink the assumptions we make about social objects -- groups, mentalities, structures, forces, power, states, and organizations. In short, we need a better social ontology -- one that is free from the patterns of thinking we have inherited from positivism and the natural sciences (post).Here is the thrust of methodological localism. The only ontologically stable stuff that exists in the social world is the socially constructed and socially situated individual actor, embedded within...

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Posted in: assemblages,CAT_ontology,localism

Methodological localism

I offer a social ontology that I refer to as methodological localism (ML).  This theory of social entities affirms that there are large social structures and facts that influence social outcomes.  But it insists that these structures are only possible insofar as they are embodied in the actions and states of socially constructed individuals.  The “molecule” of all social life is the socially constructed and socially situated individual, who lives, acts, and develops within a set of local social relationships, institutions, norms, and rules.This account begins with the socially constituted person. Human beings are subjective, purposive, and relational agents. They interact with other persons in ways that involve competition and...

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Posted in: agency,CAT_ontology,causal mechanism,localism,microfoundations

Are social networks fundamental?

There are several natural starting points when we begin thinking seriously about the social world and how it works. For example, we can begin with individual agents and try to understand social patterns as the expression of common features of reasoning and motivation by stylized agents. This is roughly the strategy underway in rational choice theory, neoclassical economics, game theory, and methodological individualism. Or we might begin with an account of group attributes -- race, class, gender, ethnicity, religion. This is roughly the way in which Durkheim, Giddens, and Du Bois begin -- with a kind of macro-social set of categories in terms of which we attempt to understand social structure and behavior.The concept of a social network doesn't...

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Posted in: CAT_ontology,methodological individualism,social networks

Singular and generic causal assertions

It is worthwhile to notice that we can ask causal questions at two extremes of specificity and generality. We can ask why the Nicaraguan Revolution occurred—that is, what was the chain of circumstances that led to the successful seizure of power by the Sandinistas? This is to invite a specific historical narrative, supported by claims about causal powers of various circumstances. And we can ask why twentieth-century revolutionary movements succeeded in some circumstances and failed in others—that is, we can ask for an account of the common causal factors that influenced the course of revolution in the twentieth century. In the first instance we are looking to put forward a causal hypothesis about a particular event; in the latter we are seeking...

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Posted in: CAT_mechanisms,causal mechanism,history