The moral basis for an extensive state

A recent post focused on the conception of society involved in seventeenth and eighteenth English political thinking, the theory of possessive individualism.  The post suggested that this conception has a lot of resonance with the ideas and rhetoric of the Tea Party today.  I've also posted a number of discussions of the social ideals of John Rawls (link, link), expressing a liberal democratic view of the good society.  These posts remind me how important it is to have some fairly specific ideas about how we would want society to be organized in the future, so we can also have some ideas about current reforms that might take us in that direction.  And today we don't seem to have a lot of clarity about this kind of vision,...

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Posted in: CAT_policy,inequality,justice

Causal narratives about historical actors

A common kind of causal narrative employed by historians is to identify a set of key actors, key circumstances, and key resources; and then to treat a period of time as a flow of actions by the actors in response to each other and changing circumstances. We might describe this as "explanation of an outcome as cumulative result of actions by differently situated actors, within a specified set of institutions, resources, and environmental factors."Individual actions make sense in the context, so we have explained their behavior at the micro level. But we can also "calculate" aggregate structural consequences of these actions, and we can thereby reach conclusions about how change in one set of structural conditions led to another set of structural...

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Posted in: CAT_agency,CAT_history,explanation

Small cities

A recent post on the suburbs closed with the observation that there is an important "other" social space in the United States beyond the categories of urban, rural, and suburban.  These are the small cities throughout the United States where a significant number of people come to maturity and develop their families and careers.  I speculated that perhaps there is a distinctive sociology associated with these lesser urban places.  Here I will look into this question a bit more fully.There are about 275 cities in the US with populations 100,000 or larger (Wikipedia link).  201 of these cities are small, with populations between 100,000 and 250,000.  There are 30.3 million people living in these cities -- about 10% of...

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Posted in: CAT_misc,city

The suburbs

There has been lots of work on urban history, and rural life has come in for its own specialized study for almost two centuries as well. But what about the suburbs? Is there anything distinctive about suburban life in the United States that suggests that it needs its own sociology and history? Kevin Kruse and Tom Sugrue think so, and their volume, The New Suburban History (Historical Studies of Urban America), makes the case. Kruse and Sugrue think that this history is actually crucial to understanding many things about the United States since the 1950s.In the still-developing history of the postwar United States, suburbs belong at center stage. The rise and dominance of suburbia in America after the Second World War is inescapable. In...

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Posted in: CAT_history,city,urbanization

Possessive individualism

C. B. Macpherson was a political philosopher who placed a genuinely novel interpretation on the history of political thought in The Political Theory of Possessive Individualism: Hobbes to Locke when the book appeared in 1962. Macpherson was a Canadian philosopher who influenced quite a few young scholars in the 1970s in North America and Great Britain. Macpherson offered the basis of a strong critique of a certain kind of liberalism -- the liberalism that places essentially the whole normative weight on the value of the individual and his/her liberties, and essentially no emphasis on the social obligations we all have towards each other. A first wave of criticism of narrow liberalism took this form:The repair that was needed [to liberal...

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Posted in: CAT_moraltheory,justice

Global justice

There is a clear and reasonably uncontroversial basis for a simple theory of justice that all nations/cultures can accept. This is grounded a few core values about human development and is expressed in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the Millenium Development Goals, and other founding documents of the United Nations. This conception emphasizes several key values:equal worth of all persons value of freedom value of democracy and self-determinationthe injustice of hunger, lack of education, lack of healthcarethe injustice of capricious arrest and state violence (illegality)These values provide a basis for steering our core institutions and practices in the direction of greater justice: whenever it is possible to reform institutions...

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Posted in: CAT_policy,globalization,justice

Ethical thinking for global public health

Here is a fine recent book that brings together recent thinking about development ethics with some of the specific issues faced in the field of global public health. Madison Powers and Ruth Faden published Social Justice: The Moral Foundations of Public Health and Health Policy in 2008, and it represents a genuinely interesting extended essay on the topic of justice in global health policy.  Here is an early statement of their governing perspective:Our central focus, only vividly appreciated in hindsight, was in a notion of social justice that went beyond issues of distributive justice, micro-allocational questions of priority setting in medical care, or any number of questions centered on how one individual fares relative to some...

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Posted in: CAT_policy,globalization,justice

Economic thinking in Rawls's thought

John Rawls's (1971) A Theory of Justice: Original Edition (TJ) had a sizable impact on a number of disciplines, including economics and economic policy thought. (His ideas in this original version of the theory are clarified and further developed in his 2005 Justice as Fairness: A Restatement (JF).)  Rawls's influence on economics largely derived from one aspect of his theory of justice, the theory of justice in distribution, which has implications for economic inequalities, taxation, and social welfare benefits.  Did Rawls actually think about these issues in the ways that an economist would have done?One of the primary goals of Rawls's theory of justice is directly relevant to economic policy. He specifically...

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Posted in: CAT_moraltheory,justice,Rawls

Relative explanatory autonomy

In an earlier post I indicated a degree of disagreement with the premises of analytical sociology concerning the validity of methodological individualism (link). This disagreement comes down to three things. First, for reasons I've referred to several times here and elsewhere (link), I prefer to refer to methodological localism rather than methodological individualism. 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,...

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Posted in: analytical sociology,CAT_epistemology,methodological individualism

Mapping sociology

Sociology is now composed of a wide expanse of approaches, theories, methodologies, and paradigms.  The American Sociological Association has 49 sections, and even this variation doesn't capture the full diversity of the field (link). In fact, Jonathan Turner refers to the current situation as one of "hyper-differentiation of theories" (1). It is therefore useful to try to map out some of the main dimensions of activity, aspiration, and method that currently define the discipline.  One way of doing this is to look closely at some of the handbooks that leaders in the field have compiled over the past fifteen years or so.  Several are particularly useful in my opinion, including Craig Calhoun's Sociology in America: A History (2007), Jonathan...

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Posted in: CAT_disciplines