Civil society in a globalizing world

An important component of western political theory since Locke and Rousseau is the notion of civil society—the idea of a society in which members have a variety of cross-cutting activities and associations, and where the state is not the sole source of social power. On this conception, a civil society is one that is characterized by multiple associations, free activities and choices by individuals, and a framework of law that assures rights and liberties for all citizens. It is a society with multiple forms of power and influence, minimizing the potential for exploitation and domination by powerful elites or the state. And it is a society in which citizens have developed a sense of mutual respect and consideration for each other. The fact of...

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Posted in: CAT_globalization,economic development,justice,labor rights

Steinmetz on colonialism

George Steinmetz offers a comparative sociology of colonialism in The Devil's Handwriting: Precoloniality and the German Colonial State in Qingdao, Samoa, and Southwest Africa.  More specifically, he wants to explain differences in the implementation of "native policy" within German colonial regimes around the turn of the twentieth century.  He finds that there are significant differences across three major instances of German colonialism (Samoa, Qingdao, Southwest Africa), and he wants to know why. (For example, the Namibia regime was much more violent than the Samoa or Qingdao examples.) This is a causal question, and Steinmetz is one of the most talented sociologists of his cohort in American sociology. So it is worth...

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Posted in: analytical sociology,CAT_disciplines,comparative method,mechanism

Social explanation and causal mechanisms

To explain a social outcome or regularity, we need to provide an account of why and how it came about; and this means providing a causal analysis in terms of which the explanandum appears as a result. Having a causal theory of a realm requires having an ontology: what kinds of things exist in this realm, and how do they work? Along with others, I offer a social ontology grounded in the actions and relations of socially constituted actors, which I refer to as methodological localism (link). (This is also the ontology asserted by the programme of "analytical sociology";  link.) This entails, basically, that we need to understand all higher-level social entities and processes as being composed of the activities and thoughts of individual...

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Posted in: analytical sociology,CAT_explanation,localism,microfoundations

Marx's critique

Marx was a critic above all else. His most comfortable intellectual stance was criticism -- most of the subtitles of his works involve the word "critique". He was, of course, a critic of other thinkers --Proudhon, Smith, Bakunin, for example. And here, the key to criticism is the unearthing of indefensible intellectual presuppositions. But even more importantly, he was a critic of the society he observed around him. The key here is to uncover systemic features of a given society that are fundamentally inconsistent with important human values. His earliest social criticism took its aim at the German society he inhabited in the 1830s and 1840s. But it is his critique of modern capitalist society that is the most enduring, and this critique took...

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Posted in: alienation,CAT_foundations,Marx,power

Academic freedom from Hofstadter to Dworkin

Academic freedom is a core value in American higher education. At certain times in our history it is a value that has been severely challenged, including especially during the McCarthy period of the 1950s. But what, precisely, does it entail?One way of starting on this topic is to consider Richard Hofstadter's writings on the subject. Hofstadter was an historian who did an excellent job of tracking some deep currents in American political culture, including the powerful currents of progressivism, conservatism and paranoia that American politics have embodied over the past two centuries (The Progressive Movement: 1900-1915, Anti-Intellectualism in American Life, The Paranoid Style in American Politics). (Here is an informative review of Hofstadter's...

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Posted in: academic freedom,CAT_policy

Food and water

It seems likely enough that one of the largest global security issues in the next fifty years will be food and water.  There is a brewing food crisis underway already, with prices for staple grains rising world wide, and poor countries are beginning to experience the consequences.  But a crisis in fresh water seems not too far in the future as well.  Both these necessities depend on inherently scarce resources: arable land and large sources of fresh water.  Along with energy, these goods are crucial to every person and every country in the world; and this in turn suggest the possibility of serious conflict over these resources in the future.So what makes food and water a global security crisis? How does the possibility of...

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Posted in: CAT_globalization,environment

Idealist philosophy of history

In a previous post I commended W.H. Walsh's approach to the philosophy of history for Walsh's sympathetic effort to understand both traditions in the field, including what is called "speculative" philosophy of history (An Introduction to Philosophy of History). And Walsh is to be commended as well for his analytical ability to formulate and explicate these positions. This is in fact what we want from good historians of philosophy -- a detailed, text-based explication of the theories of difficult thinkers such as Hegel and Dilthey.So the fact that Walsh offers an extended and nuanced interpretation of the efforts by Hegel, Herder, and Dilthey is to his credit as an exegetical scholar. But a key issue remains: do the positions that he explicates...

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Posted in: CAT_history,CAT_materialism

W. H. Walsh's philosophy of history

English-speaking philosophers have often made a hash of the philosophy of history. Either they have had such disdain for continental philosophy that they could not get their minds around the thoughts of a Hegel or a Dilthey, or they became pre-occupied with certain minor linguistic or logical issues and therefore couldn't get to the more serious problems. W. H. Walsh was a surprising exception in the British environment of the 1950s. His Philosophy of History. An Introduction, first published in 1951 and revised in 1960, is an open-minded and very well grounded effort to provide an in-depth presentation of the field.The book attempts to treat both major aspects of the philosophy of history: the nature of historical knowledge and the possibility...

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Posted in: CAT_history,verstehen