Searle on social ontology

Speech Acts: An Essay in the Philosophy of Language made a big impression on the field of the philosophy of language when it appeared in 1969.  But its author, John Searle, thinks the theory of speech acts has a much broader scope than simply the philosophy of language; he thinks it provides a foundation for the philosophy of mind, and -- of particular interest here -- for the philosophy of society.   Two books in the past decade or so have pushed this programme forward -- The Construction of Social Reality (1995) and Making the Social World: The Structure of Human Civilization (2010).  So -- how much insight into the social world can we get from the ideas underlying speech act theory?Fundamentally, Searle's...

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Posted in: CAT_ontology,collective action,convention

Spartacus, Kitty Genovese, and social explanation

What is most interesting in paying attention to social life is noticing the surprising outcomes that often materialize from a number of uncoordinated choices and actions by independent individuals. We want to understand why and how the aggregate-level social fact came to be: was it a set of features of the individual actors' preferences or decision-making?  Was it the unintended result of strategic choices by various actors?  Was it simply the path-dependent and contingent outcome of a serial interactive process?  Was it brought about by structural conditions -- power, wealth, race -- within the context of which actors made their choices?  And what were the mechanisms of constraint, aggregation, contagion, and escalation...

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Posted in: CAT_explanation,collective action,localism,mechanism

New thinking about the Red Guards

Andrew Walder has spent almost all of his academic life, on and off, studying the Chinese Cultural Revolution.  In Fractured Rebellion: The Beijing Red Guard Movement (2009) he offers some genuinely new insights into this crucial and chaotic period of China's revolutionary history.  Some historians have focused on the political motivations of Mao and other top leaders in the party; others have examined the economic and social cleavages that existed in China only a decade and a half into its Communist Revolution.  Walder is interested in a much more grass-roots question: what were the motivations, calculations, and states of mind of the "foot soldiers" of the CR, the Red Guards in the earliest years of the...

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Posted in: CAT_China,mobilization,revolution

Steve Pincus on revolution

Steve Pincus offers a sweeping and compelling reinterpretation of the English Revolution in 1688: The First Modern Revolution. Along the way he provides a review of existing theories of revolution -- Skocpol, Huntington, Barrington Moore, and Goldstone, in particular (chapter 2). Pincus's definition of revolution goes along these lines:Revolutions thus constitute a structural and ideological break from the previous regime. They entail changes to both the political and socioeconomic structures of a polity. They involve an often violent popular movement to overturn the previous regime. Revolutions change the political leadership and the policy orientations of the state. And revolutionary regimes bring with them a new conception of time, a notion...

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Posted in: CAT_history,revolution

Thinking about disaster

Charles Perrow is a very talented sociologist who has put his finger on some of the central weaknesses of the American social-economic-political system.  He has written about corporations (Organizing America: Wealth, Power, and the Origins of Corporate Capitalism), technology failure (Normal Accidents: Living with High-Risk Technologies), and organizations (Complex Organizations: A Critical Essay).  (Here is an earlier post on his historical account of the corporation in America; link.) These sound like very different topics -- but they're not, really.  Organizations, power, the conflict between private interests and the public good, and the social and technical causes of great public harms have been the organizing themes of...

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Posted in: CAT_institutions,organization,technology

Democracy in a polarized society

What are some of the institutional arrangements that can work to preserve a functioning democracy in a society with extensive inequalities of wealth and power? This is a key question in part because we can easily see the factors that work against the democratic outcome. A Berlusconi in Italy is capable of dominating the political institutions in his country through his wealth and control of a media empire. An Abhisit in Thailand is able to maintain his political power through his reliance on the support of the armed forces and their willingness to use force against popular movements like the Redshirts (link). And the sham democracy resulting from elections rigged by Burma's junta last fall demonstrates how the generals can exert their rule...

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Posted in: CAT_institutions,democracy

Is there a revolution underway in Egypt?

source: Guardian, February 8, 2011Is what is going on in Egypt today a "revolution"? What about Tunisia? And how about the Georgian "Rose" Revolution (2003) or the Philippine Yellow Revolution of 1986? Do these social and political conflicts and outcomes add up to a "revolution" in those societies? Are they analogous in any way to other revolutions in the post-World War II period -- e.g. Cuba, Nicaragua, Zimbabwe?In the case of Tunisia, the world witnessed several things: large, sustained street demonstrations by tens of thousands of people demanding the resignation of Tunisia's president; tactics of repression and intimidation by the state intended to quiet the protests; an unexpected ability of the population to sustain its demonstrations;...

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Posted in: CAT_history,revolution

History of economic thought and the present

What is the relationship between the history of economic thought and contemporary economics? There are polar views on this issue. At one extreme, it is sometimes held that the history of economics, like the history of physics, is irrelevant to contemporary theory and analysis. Alfred North Whitehead is quoted with approval: "A science which hesitates to forget its founders is lost" (‘The Organization of Thought’. Science, 1916(22) : 409–19). Where useful analytical or theoretical insights were put forward in the past, they have been incorporated into more general theories; and the fine grain of how Marshall or Pareto constructed his economics is simply not pertinent to contemporary economics. This position does not necessarily dismiss...

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Posted in: CAT_disciplines

Social Science History Association call for papers

SSHA CALL FOR PAPERSMacrohistorical Dynamics Network36th Annual Meeting of the Social Science History AssociationBoston, Massachusetts 17-20 November 2011Submission Deadline: 15 February 2011"Generation to Generation"We invite you to take part in Macrohistorical Dynamics (MHD) panels of the 36th annual meeting of the Social Science History Association, November 17-20, 2011 in Boston.  For more information on the meeting as well as the call for proposals, please refer to the SSHA website:www.ssha.orgThe deadline for paper and/or panel submissions is February 15, 2011.The members of the Social Science History Association share a common interest in interdisciplinary and systematic approaches to historical research.The thematic topic...

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Bourdieu's "field"

image: Emile Zola, 1902How can sociology treat "culture" as an object of study and as an influence on other sociological processes? This is, of course, two separate questions. First, internally, is it possible to treat philosophy or literature as an embedded sociological process (a point raised by Jean-Louis Fabiani in his treatment of French philosophy (link))?  Can we use the apparatus to pull apart the sociology of the fashion industry?And second, externally, can we give a rigorous and meaningful interpretation of "bringing culture back in" -- conceptualizing the ways that thought, experience, and the institutions and mental realities of culture impact other large social processes -- e.g. the rise of fascism (link)? The problem...

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Posted in: CAT_institutions,culture,materialism