A conversation with Gemini about Orwell's Road to Wigan Pier

In previous posts I've been fairly skeptical about the value of ChatGPT as a research tool (link). In recent weeks I've been exploring Google's Gemini 2.0 Flash and Gemini Deep Research, and I'm cautiously more impressed. There are two core shortcomings of an AI tool based solely on large language models and massive training: lack of specific sources of factual knowledge and inability to provide references or sources for the statements the chatbot makes. The Gemini products address both problems. Gemini accesses a very broad range of factual knowledge -- partly through live internet searches, and perhaps partly through a knowledge graph of previously processed data sources.

Here is an extended trial of Gemini's capacities that I carried out in March, 2025. It is a query-response dialogue with Gemini Flash 2.0 to test the ability of the tool to answer a series of questions about the content, composition, and context of George Orwell's book The Road to Wigan Pier. The results were surprisingly good and factually detailed. The queries are provided by me, and the responses are unedited texts produced by Gemini Flash 2.0 in response to the queries. As a further pedagogical exercise I have digitized the text as spoken audio in my own voice using a digital reading tool and used it as a soundtrack for a YouTube video, with period photographs as visual content. The results can be viewed here:  https://youtu.be/pqr--ExiryI. 

It strikes me that the AI-generated text provided here provides an informative and thought-provoking introductory lecture for students who will be reading this book and discussing it as a piece of social criticism and commentary. The responses are thought-provoking because they provide useful pieces of information on a topic that can be pursued further -- for example, concerning the disagreements that arose between Orwell and his publisher, Victor Gollancz. And the response to the query "Does Orwell respect the poor and working people he describes?" is especially on the mark, and the response to the question whether miners have higher levels of solidarity than other groups of workers is also impressive. However, the text does not suggest an "intelligent" reader of Orwell's text. In fact, the final entry in the dialogue concerning the source of Orwell's description of the young woman and the frozen drain pipe demonstrates that Gemini does not have access to the text of the book at all. Rather, Gemini is serving as something like a careful "reviewer and compiler" of secondary sources on the book (encyclopedia articles, an occasional book review, an occasional academic blog entry, ...), with an impressive ability to pull themes and observations from various sources into a single coherent response to the query. It is notable as well (from the fact that Gemini provides documentation of its claims) that Gemini has only limited access to academic sources of knowledge in compiling its responses. It is functioning more like a real-time compiler of Wikipedia entries on a subject rather than a self-directed researcher.

Dialogue with Gemini Flash 2.0 about the content and context of George Orwell's Road to Wigan Pier

DL: What are the main findings of Orwell’s “Road to Wigan Pier”?

"The Road to Wigan Pier" is a non-fiction book by George Orwell, published in 1937. It is divided into two parts. The first part documents his sociological investigations of the bleak living conditions among the working class in Lancashire and Yorkshire in the industrial north of England before World War II. The second part is a long essay on his middle-class upbringing and the development of his political conscience, questioning British attitudes towards socialism.

Here are some of the main findings of the book:

• The appalling living conditions of the working class: Orwell provides a stark and detailed description of the poverty, unemployment, and squalor endured by the working class in the industrial north of England. He writes about overcrowded and unsanitary housing, the dangers of coal mining, and the constant struggle for survival.
• The psychological impact of poverty: Orwell argues that poverty not only causes physical hardship but also has a devastating effect on people's mental and emotional well-being. He describes the sense of hopelessness, despair, and resentment that he encountered among the working class.
• The need for socialism: Orwell concludes that socialism is the only way to address the social and economic problems facing Britain. He argues that it is necessary to create a more just and equal society, where everyone has access to basic necessities and opportunities.
• A critique of middle-class socialists: Orwell criticizes middle-class socialists for their lack of understanding of the working class and their patronizing attitudes. He argues that socialists need to connect with the working class and address their concerns in a genuine way.

"The Road to Wigan Pier" is a powerful and influential book that has had a lasting impact on British society. It is a valuable historical document that provides insights into the social and economic conditions of the 1930s. It is also a timeless work of political commentary that raises important questions about class, inequality, and the role of government.

DL: How did the Great Depression affect the conditions Orwell describes?

The Great Depression, which lasted from 1929 to 1939, had a devastating impact on the world economy, and Britain was no exception. The industrial north of England, where Orwell conducted his research for "The Road to Wigan Pier," was particularly hard hit.

Here are some of the ways in which the Great Depression affected the conditions Orwell describes in the book:

• Increased unemployment: The Depression led to a sharp rise in unemployment in the industrial north. Many factories and mines were forced to close down, leaving thousands of people without work. This exacerbated the poverty and hardship that Orwell witnessed.
• Lower wages: Even those who were lucky enough to keep their jobs often faced pay cuts. This made it even more difficult for working-class families to make ends meet.
• Worsening living conditions: The Depression made it even harder for people to afford decent housing. Overcrowding and unsanitary conditions became even more widespread.
• Increased poverty and hardship: The combined effects of unemployment, low wages, and poor living conditions led to a dramatic increase in poverty and hardship. Many people were struggling to survive, and some were even facing starvation.

Orwell's book provides a powerful and poignant account of the impact of the Great Depression on the lives of ordinary people. He shows how the economic crisis led to widespread suffering and despair. However, he also highlights the resilience and strength of the working class in the face of adversity.

"The Road to Wigan Pier" is a valuable historical document that sheds light on the social and economic conditions of Britain during the Great Depression. It is also a timeless work of political commentary that raises important questions about inequality and the role of government.

DL: What does Orwell have to say about the private ownership of coal mines?

In "The Road to Wigan Pier," George Orwell vividly portrays the grim realities of coal mining in the industrial north of England. While he doesn't explicitly advocate for nationalization in this book, his descriptions and analysis strongly suggest his belief that private ownership of coal mines was a major source of the problems he witnessed.

Here's what Orwell highlights about the private ownership of coal mines:

• Dangerous and exploitative conditions: Orwell describes the appalling conditions in the mines, with frequent accidents, lung disease, and back-breaking labor. He emphasizes that the mine owners prioritized profit over the safety and well-being of the workers.
• Low wages and job insecurity: Miners faced low wages and constant fear of unemployment. Orwell points out that the private owners had immense power over the lives of the workers, who had little bargaining power.
• Neglect of communities: The coal mine owners often neglected the communities where the miners lived. Orwell describes the squalid housing, lack of sanitation, and overall poverty in these areas.
• Inefficiency and waste: Orwell argues that private ownership led to inefficiency and waste in the coal industry. He suggests that a more rational and planned approach would benefit both the workers and the country as a whole.

While Orwell doesn't explicitly call for nationalization in "The Road to Wigan Pier," his critique of private ownership aligns with his socialist views. Later in his life, he became a strong advocate for public ownership of key industries, including coal mines. He believed that this would ensure fairer treatment for workers, improve efficiency, and serve the public interest.

DL: Who were some of the large owners and companies in the coal industry at that time?

Unfortunately, "The Road to Wigan Pier" doesn't specifically name the large owners and companies in the coal industry at that time. Orwell focuses more on the general system of private ownership and its effects on the workers and communities.

However, we can look at the historical context to understand who some of the major players were:

• Large landowners: Many coal mines were owned by large landowners who had inherited the land and the mineral rights beneath it. These landowners often leased the mines to operating companies.
• Industrialists: With the rise of industrialization, wealthy industrialists invested in coal mines to fuel their factories and other businesses. Some of these industrialists became major coal mine owners themselves.
• Mining companies: Specialized mining companies emerged, focusing solely on the extraction and sale of coal. These companies often owned multiple mines and employed large workforces.

Some of the prominent names in the British coal industry during the early 20th century included:

• The Marquess of Bute: A major landowner in South Wales with significant coal mining interests.
• The Londonderry family: Another aristocratic family with extensive coal mines in County Durham.
• Companies like Guest Keen and Nettlefolds: Large industrial conglomerates with diverse holdings, including coal mines.

It's important to remember that the coal industry was highly fragmented, with numerous owners and companies of varying sizes. This made it difficult to pinpoint a definitive list of the "large" owners, as the landscape was constantly shifting.

While Orwell doesn't name specific owners, his critique of the private ownership system sheds light on the broader power dynamics at play. He highlights how the pursuit of profit by mine owners, whoever they may be, often came at the expense of the workers' well-being and the communities they lived in.

DL: Does Orwell respect the poor and working people he describes?

Yes, despite his sometimes critical observations, Orwell clearly respects the poor and working people he describes in "The Road to Wigan Pier." Here's how that respect manifests:

• He portrays their humanity: Orwell goes beyond simply documenting their poverty and hardship. He shows the resilience, humor, and dignity of the working-class people he encounters. He emphasizes their humanity, even in the face of dehumanizing conditions.
• He acknowledges their struggles: Orwell doesn't shy away from depicting the harsh realities of their lives, from the dangers of coal mining to the squalor of their living conditions. He acknowledges their daily struggles for survival and the systemic forces that keep them in poverty.
• He challenges stereotypes: Orwell actively challenges the common stereotypes and prejudices against the working class. He refutes the idea that they are lazy, ignorant, or inherently different from other people. He emphasizes their fundamental decency and their capacity for intelligence and compassion.
• He advocates for their rights: Orwell's critique of the private ownership of coal mines and his support for socialism stem from a genuine concern for the well-being of the working class. He advocates for their right to a decent standard of living, fair wages, and safe working conditions.
• He recognizes their value: Orwell acknowledges the vital role that working-class people play in society. He recognizes their labor, their contributions to the economy, and their importance to the social fabric of the nation.

While Orwell may sometimes express his own middle-class biases and discomfort with certain aspects of working-class culture, his overall portrayal is one of deep respect and empathy. He sees the working class as fellow human beings who deserve dignity, justice, and a better life.

DL: What does Orwell have to say about the importance of coal in the modern world?

In "The Road to Wigan Pier," George Orwell highlights the crucial role of coal in powering the modern world of his time. He emphasizes just how dependent society was on this fuel source. Here's a breakdown of his key points:

• Foundation of modern life: Orwell states that "our civilization... is founded on coal." He stresses that coal is essential for everything from powering factories and generating electricity to running transportation systems. He argues that most people don't realize how much their daily lives rely on the coal industry.
• Essential for industry: Orwell points out that coal is necessary for "all the arts of peace," meaning all aspects of industrial production and manufacturing. He also notes its importance in wartime, as it fuels the production of weapons and other war materials.
• The miner's crucial role: Orwell describes the coal miner as "second in importance only to the man who ploughs the soil." He emphasizes that the miners are the foundation upon which the entire industrial society is built. He calls them "a sort of caryatid," referring to the sculpted figures that support a building, symbolizing how the miners carry the weight of modern civilization on their shoulders.
• A hidden world: Orwell observes that most people are unaware of the harsh realities of coal mining. He describes it as "a sort of world apart which one can quite easily go through life without ever hearing about it." He suggests that this ignorance allows people to benefit from the products of coal mining while remaining detached from the suffering of the miners.

Overall, Orwell's observations highlight the paradoxical nature of coal's importance. While it was essential for modern life, the industry was also marked by exploitation, dangerous working conditions, and social inequalities. He brings to light the hidden costs of industrial progress and the need for a more just and equitable system.

DL: Do miners have a higher level of group solidarity than other groups of workers?

That's a great question that gets at the heart of some of Orwell's observations in "The Road to Wigan Pier" and beyond. While he doesn't explicitly make this comparison in the book, it's certainly a theme that emerges from his writing and his broader social commentary.

Here's what we can glean about miners and group solidarity:

• Dangerous and shared experience: Coal mining is an inherently dangerous job, requiring teamwork and mutual reliance. This shared experience of risk and hardship naturally fosters a strong sense of camaraderie and solidarity among miners. They depend on each other for safety and survival, creating bonds that extend beyond the workplace.
• Community and identity: Mining communities are often close-knit and isolated, with a strong sense of shared identity. This reinforces the bonds between miners, as their work and their social lives are intertwined.
• Historical struggles: Miners have a long history of labor struggles, fighting for better wages and working conditions. These collective struggles have further strengthened their sense of solidarity and collective action.

Comparing to other workers:

While Orwell doesn't directly compare miners to other groups, we can consider some points:

• Other industrial workers: Many other industrial workers in the early 20th century also faced harsh conditions and engaged in labor movements. They likely shared a similar sense of solidarity, though perhaps to varying degrees depending on the specific industry and circumstances.
• Modern workers: In today's economy, with the decline of traditional industries and the rise of service sector jobs, the nature of work and worker solidarity has changed. Some argue that the sense of collective identity and shared struggle has diminished in some sectors, while others point to new forms of solidarity emerging in different contexts.

Orwell's perspective:

Orwell's writings suggest that he recognized the unique level of group solidarity among miners. He admired their resilience, their sense of community, and their willingness to fight for their rights. He saw them as a symbol of working-class strength and resistance in the face of exploitation.

It's important to note that solidarity can vary within groups and across different historical periods. However, the unique challenges and shared experiences of coal miners have historically contributed to a strong sense of group solidarity, which has played a significant role in their struggles for social and economic justice.

DL: What does Orwell say about accidents and mine safety? Why are mines so dangerous?

In "The Road to Wigan Pier," George Orwell doesn't extensively detail specific accidents or mine safety regulations. However, he vividly portrays the inherent dangers of coal mining and hints at the reasons behind the frequent accidents. Here's what we can gather from his writing:

• Dangerous working conditions: Orwell describes the physical environment of the mines as inherently dangerous. He mentions the risk of roof collapses, explosions, and flooding. He also highlights the long hours, strenuous labor, and exposure to coal dust, which led to respiratory illnesses.
• Lack of safety measures: While not explicitly stated, Orwell implies a lack of adequate safety measures in the mines. He suggests that mine owners prioritized profit over worker safety, leading to negligence and a higher risk of accidents.
• Human cost of accidents: Orwell briefly mentions the impact of accidents on miners and their families. He describes the fear and anxiety that miners lived with, knowing that any day could be their last. He also hints at the financial hardship faced by families when a miner was injured or killed.

Why are mines so dangerous?

Orwell's descriptions and historical context point to several reasons why mines, particularly in that era, were so dangerous:

• Underground environment: Mines are inherently unstable environments with risks of collapses, gas explosions, and flooding. The deeper the mine, the greater the risks.
• Technological limitations: In the early 20th century, mining technology was less advanced than it is today. This meant fewer safety measures, less efficient ventilation, and less reliable equipment.
• Profit-driven priorities: As Orwell suggests, mine owners often prioritized profit over worker safety. This could lead to cutting corners on safety measures, ignoring warning signs, and pushing workers to take greater risks.
• Lack of regulation: In that era, government regulation of mine safety was often weak or poorly enforced. This allowed mine owners to operate with little oversight and accountability.

While Orwell doesn't provide a detailed analysis of mine safety, his descriptions of the working conditions and the inherent dangers of coal mining provide a powerful indictment of the industry's disregard for human life. He highlights the human cost of industrial progress and the need for greater attention to worker safety and well-being.

DL: How does Orwell's glimpse of the poor working girl trying to clear a drain in the cold contribute to his account?

The scene of the poor working girl trying to clear a drain in the cold is a small but powerful moment in "The Road to Wigan Pier" that contributes significantly to Orwell's overall account of poverty and social injustice. It's a moment of stark realism that amplifies his message in several ways:

• Humanizes poverty: Instead of just talking about poverty in abstract terms, Orwell shows it through the specific experience of this young woman. We see her struggling with a practical, unpleasant task in the cold, making the reality of her hardship tangible and relatable. It's not just about statistics or general descriptions; it's about this individual's struggle.
• Illustrates the everydayness of hardship: The scene isn't dramatic or extraordinary. It's a mundane, everyday occurrence for someone living in poverty. This underscores the fact that these hardships aren't isolated incidents but a constant, grinding reality for many people. It's a glimpse into the daily struggles that most people in more comfortable circumstances never see.
• Symbolic of larger problems: The clogged drain can be seen as a metaphor for the larger social and economic problems that Orwell is addressing. Just as the girl is struggling to clear the drain, society is struggling to address the systemic issues that cause poverty and inequality. It's a small problem that reflects a much larger one.
• Evokes empathy and outrage: By witnessing this girl's struggle, the reader is more likely to feel empathy for her and others like her. The scene also evokes a sense of outrage at the injustice of the situation. Why should this young woman have to deal with this in the cold? This emotional response is crucial to Orwell's goal of motivating readers to care about these issues.
• Contrasts with middle-class comforts: This image starkly contrasts with the lives of the middle and upper classes, who are shielded from such daily struggles. It highlights the vast disparity between the lives of the rich and the poor, making the injustice even more glaring.

In short, the scene of the girl clearing the drain is a powerful example of Orwell's method of using specific, concrete details to illustrate broader social problems. It's a moment of quiet realism that speaks volumes about the human cost of poverty and the urgent need for social change.

DL: Did conflicts arise between Orwell and his publisher concerning his book The Road to Wigan Pier?

Yes, there were significant conflicts between George Orwell and his publisher, Victor Gollancz, concerning "The Road to Wigan Pier." These conflicts primarily revolved around the second part of the book, where Orwell delves into his own social and political views, critiquing both capitalism and certain aspects of the socialist movement.

Here's a breakdown of the key points of contention:

• Gollancz's concerns: Gollancz, who was also the head of the Left Book Club, a popular socialist organization at the time, was worried that the second part of the book would alienate his readership. He felt that Orwell's criticisms of socialists, his discussion of his own middle-class background, and his frank exploration of the obstacles to socialism would be poorly received by the Left Book Club members.
• Gollancz's proposed changes: Gollancz suggested that Orwell remove or significantly alter the second part of the book. He wanted Orwell to focus more on the descriptive first part, which detailed the living conditions of the working class, and downplay the more controversial political analysis.
• Orwell's refusal: Orwell refused to make the changes suggested by Gollancz. He believed that the second part of the book was essential to his overall message. He felt it was important to honestly address the complexities of social and political change, even if it meant criticizing those who were ostensibly on the same side.
• Gollancz's compromise: Ultimately, Gollancz decided to publish the book as Orwell wrote it, but he included a foreword expressing his own reservations about the second part. In this foreword, Gollancz acknowledged the power of Orwell's writing but also cautioned readers against some of his arguments.

The conflict between Orwell and Gollancz highlights the tension between political advocacy and artistic integrity. Orwell was determined to express his views honestly, even if they were unpopular or challenged the conventional wisdom of the time. Gollancz, on the other hand, was concerned about the potential impact of the book on his readership and the broader socialist movement.

Despite these conflicts, "The Road to Wigan Pier" was published and became a significant work of social and political commentary. It remains a testament to Orwell's willingness to challenge orthodoxies and engage in critical self-reflection, even when it meant disagreeing with his allies.

DL: What was Orwell's thought process in setting out to analyze conditions in Wigan Pier?

George Orwell's thought process in setting out to analyze conditions in Wigan Pier was driven by a deep sense of social conscience and a desire to understand the realities of poverty and inequality in Britain during the 1930s. Here's a glimpse into his motivations and approach:

Motivations:

• Socialist convictions: Orwell was a committed socialist, believing in the need for a more just and equal society. He was deeply concerned about the widespread poverty and hardship he witnessed, particularly among the working class.
• Firsthand experience: Orwell had experienced poverty himself during his time in Burma and later in Paris and London. This firsthand experience gave him a unique understanding of the challenges faced by those living in poverty.
• Desire for understanding: Orwell didn't want to just talk about poverty in abstract terms. He wanted to understand its root causes and its impact on the lives of ordinary people. He sought to go beyond stereotypes and gain a deeper understanding of the working class.
• Call to action: Orwell hoped that his investigation would raise awareness about the social and economic problems facing Britain and inspire action to address them. He wanted to motivate people to care about these issues and to work towards a better future.

Approach:

• Direct observation: Orwell traveled to Wigan and other industrial towns in the north of England to observe conditions firsthand. He lived among the working class, visited their homes, and spoke with them about their experiences.
• Immersive journalism: Orwell employed a style of immersive journalism, embedding himself in the communities he was studying. This allowed him to gain a deeper understanding of their lives and perspectives.
• Honest and unflinching portrayal: Orwell was committed to providing an honest and unflinching portrayal of the conditions he witnessed, even if it meant challenging his own preconceptions or criticizing aspects of the socialist movement.
• Personal reflection: Orwell included a significant amount of personal reflection in "The Road to Wigan Pier," sharing his own thoughts and feelings about the issues he was addressing. This made the book more engaging and relatable for readers.

Orwell's thought process in setting out to analyze conditions in Wigan Pier was driven by a genuine desire to understand and address the social and economic problems of his time. His approach was characterized by direct observation, immersive journalism, and a commitment to honest and unflinching portrayal. The result was a powerful and influential book that continues to resonate with readers today.

DL: What are some examples of Orwell's personal reflections in this book?

You're right to pick up on that! Orwell's personal reflections are a key part of what makes "The Road to Wigan Pier" so compelling. It's not just a dry sociological study; it's a deeply personal journey of discovery. Here are some examples of his reflections:

• His own class background: Orwell spends a considerable amount of time dissecting his own middle-class upbringing and the ingrained prejudices he had to overcome. He reflects on his education, his assumptions about the working class, and the ways in which his social background shaped his views. This self-awareness is crucial to his analysis, as he acknowledges his own biases and strives to overcome them.
• His struggle with socialism: Orwell was a socialist, but he wasn't afraid to critique aspects of the socialist movement. He reflects on his own disillusionment with certain types of socialists, particularly those who seemed more interested in abstract theory than in the real lives of working-class people. He also grapples with the challenges of achieving socialism in a class-divided society.
• His feelings about the working class: Orwell's reflections on the working class are complex and nuanced. He expresses admiration for their resilience, their sense of community, and their genuine decency. However, he also acknowledges his own discomfort with certain aspects of working-class culture, such as their taste in entertainment or their use of language. He's honest about his own struggles to fully connect with people from a different social background.
• His observations on industrial England: Orwell's reflections on the industrial landscape are filled with a sense of both fascination and disgust. He's struck by the sheer scale of industrial production and the ingenuity of human labor. But he's also appalled by the ugliness, the pollution, and the dehumanizing conditions in the factories and mines. He captures the emotional impact of this environment on both himself and the people who live there.
• His search for truth: Underlying all of these reflections is Orwell's relentless search for truth. He's determined to understand the realities of poverty and inequality, even if it means confronting uncomfortable truths about himself or the society he lives in. He invites the reader to join him on this journey of discovery, sharing his doubts, his insights, and his evolving understanding of the world.

By weaving these personal reflections into his analysis, Orwell creates a more intimate and engaging reading experience. He invites us into his thought process, allowing us to see the world through his eyes and to grapple with the same questions that he is struggling with. This personal approach is a key part of what makes "The Road to Wigan Pier" such a powerful and enduring work.

DL: Why did Orwell reject communism?

George Orwell's rejection of communism stemmed from his deep commitment to democratic socialism and his firsthand experiences with the realities of Stalinist Russia. Here's a breakdown of his key reasons:

• Betrayal of socialist ideals: Orwell believed that the Soviet Union under Stalin had betrayed the core principles of socialism. He saw it as a totalitarian regime that suppressed individual freedom, crushed dissent, and created a new class system based on privilege and power. This was the antithesis of what Orwell envisioned as a socialist society.
• Experience in the Spanish Civil War: Orwell's experiences fighting in the Spanish Civil War alongside the POUM, an anti-Stalinist Marxist group, were pivotal in his disillusionment with communism. He witnessed the brutal tactics used by the Soviet-backed communists to eliminate their political rivals, including the POUM. This experience solidified his opposition to Stalinism.
• Distrust of totalitarianism: Orwell was fundamentally opposed to all forms of totalitarianism, whether from the left or the right. He believed in individual liberty, freedom of expression, and the importance of democratic institutions. He saw that the Soviet Union under Stalin had become a totalitarian state, suppressing these fundamental values.
• Concern about intellectual dishonesty: Orwell was deeply troubled by the intellectual dishonesty and propaganda that he saw emanating from the Soviet Union and its supporters. He believed that it was essential to tell the truth, even when it was uncomfortable or inconvenient, and he saw that the communist movement often engaged in distortion and manipulation of facts.
• Defense of democratic socialism: Orwell remained a socialist throughout his life, but he believed in a democratic form of socialism that respected individual rights and freedoms. He saw that the Soviet model was a perversion of socialism, and he was determined to defend the democratic socialist ideal against both communist and capitalist threats.

Orwell's rejection of communism wasn't a rejection of socialism itself. Rather, it was a rejection of the specific form of totalitarian communism that had emerged in the Soviet Union under Stalin. He remained a committed socialist, but he believed that true socialism could only be achieved through democratic means and with a strong emphasis on individual liberty and social justice.

DL: Can you give me the passage in which Orwell discussed the girl clearing the drain?

You're looking for a powerful passage, and it's definitely there! Here it is, from the first chapter of "The Road to Wigan Pier":

"I was passing up a horrible squalid side-alley... when I saw a woman, youngish but very pale and with the usual draggled exhausted look, kneeling by the gutter outside a house and poking a stick up a leaden waste-pipe, which was blocked. I was almost near enough to catch her eye. What I saw in her face was not the ignorant suffering of an animal. She knew well enough what was happening to her—understood as well as I did how dreadful a destiny it was to be kneeling there in the bitter cold, on the slimy stones of a slum backyard, poking a stick up a foul drain-pipe."

This passage is impactful for several reasons, as we discussed earlier:

•  It's a stark image: The description is vivid and unpleasant, forcing the reader to confront the harsh realities of poverty.
•  It's about an individual: Orwell focuses on the woman's face and expression, making her a real person, not just a symbol of poverty.
•  It's about everyday hardship: Clearing a drain is a mundane task, but in this context, it highlights the constant struggle of those living in poverty.
•  It evokes empathy: Orwell's language invites the reader to feel sympathy for the woman and to understand the indignity of her situation.

This passage, though brief, is a powerful example of Orwell's ability to use specific details to illustrate broader social problems. It's a moment of quiet realism that speaks volumes about the human cost of poverty and the need for social change.

(DL: This is one clear error in Gemini's responses. The passage is quoted from a blog by Sally Minogue in Wordsworth. However, this is not the text contained in the book, but rather is extracted by Minogue from Orwell’s diary. This is the clearest indication that Gemini's responses in this dialogue do not derive from analysis of Orwell's text itself, but rather from other secondary sources about the book.)

The continuing reality of racism

source: https://www.kff.org/key-data-on-health-and-health-care-by-race-and-ethnicity/?entry=health-status-and-outcomes-birth-risks-and-outcomes

The rightwing extremist war on DEI intensifies by the week, it appears. And the scope of its prohibitions expands as well. Universities throughout the United States are being bullied through the threat of the loss of Federal funds -- sometimes in the billions -- unless all traces of DEI programs, offices, webpages, and staff are erased. But recall what DEI signifies: it abbreviates the ideas of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion. And these ideas are fundamental to the idea of a free community of equals in a multicultural society. An administration and a movement that cares nothing about racial discrimination is now of the opinion that DEI exists primarily as a form of "white exclusion". It does not. Rather, it exists to help ensure that people of all backgrounds and identities are treated fairly, respectfully, and inclusively. And regrettably, the social outcomes across the population of the United States with respect to characteristics that profoundly matter to every human being -- longevity, health status, educational status, income, job mobility, and residential freedom -- demonstrate that the US is still a great distance from welcoming diversity, ensuring fairness and equity, and creating environments that are genuinely inclusive for all groups. 

These disparities are especially pronounced with regard to race in America. It is especially timely, therefore, to welcome the publication of Race and Inequality in American Politics by Zoltan Hajnal, Vincent Hutchins, and Taeku Lee (Cambridge University Press, 2025). The book is outstanding. It is factually detailed, it makes sophisticated use of population data and public opinion studies, and it is honest in confronting the shameful realities of persistent patterns of racial discrimination, exclusion, and disadvantage that continue to exist in our country. As they put it in the opening chapter, "Our views on racial inequality and democratic politics -- whether and how they are related -- are not based on doctrinal assertions or theoretical assumptions. Rather, as social scientists, we follow the evidence" (11). As for the current realities, they believe the evidence is clear. "It is also beyond dispute that across most measures of social, economic, and political well-being America remains a nation with a clear racial hierarchy and profoundly uneven outcomes. On almost every core metric, there are sharp differences in average well-being by race with Whites and Asian Americans often falling near the top of the racial spectrum and Backs, Latinos, Native Americans, and others often residing near the bottom of that hierarchy with lower incomes, less wealth, higher rates of poverty and unemployment, more limited educational attainment, and worse health outcomes" (14). Each of these summary judgments is clearly documented in the following pages. (See also the KFF report on racial health disparities from which the graph of maternal mortality outcomes above is drawn. This graph shows that maternal mortality for the black population is about 2.6 times the rate as that for the white population.)

The book considers many aspects of racial difference in the United States today. But a central concern is about race in the politics of the US democracy. How does race affect turnout in elections? How does it affect the actions of state legislatures when redistricting occurs -- creating the possibility or likelihood of gerrymandering? How have changes in voter registration laws had differential effects on white and black voters? And how do differences in voter participation behavior seem to influence the policy preferences and choices of elected officials? In each case the authors document a pattern of disadvantage for black voters.

The war on DEI -- waged against the universities, private companies, and government health agencies like the CDC and the NIH -- is clearly intended to silence research on historical and ongoing patterns of racial discrimination and disadvantage, and to cripple the dissemination of research on these topics. This is unconscionable for multiple reasons -- reasons concerning the freedom to engage in scientific and academic research on any topic; more fundamentally, reasons concerning the truthful telling of history; and most importantly, reasons having to do with the hope that our multicultural democracy can genuinely address and eliminate the institutional and structural features of our society that continually reproduce disparities based on race and ethnicity. It is a symptom of the inclination towards white supremacy and racial antagonism within the rightwing populist movement that this war is being pursued with such fierce and unrelenting determination. Students at every level, and researchers at every level, should have the freedom and encouragement to follow the lead of Race and Inequality in American Politics, and to endeavor to understand and address the climate of racial discrimination in which we all live.

Rethinking Analytical Sociology

My current book Rethinking Analytical Sociology has now appeared in print. The book is intended to provide a sympathetic but critical review of analytical sociology as a relatively new sub-discipline within sociology. Here is a video preview of the book.

The book argues that the "generativist" approach offered by analytical sociologists is suitable to a fairly specific range of problems within sociology, and that it has achieved genuine empirical and theoretical successes within that range. However, the field is hampered by an overly rigid commitment to methodological individualism and to a fairly thin theory of the motivations and mental frameworks of the actors who make up social processes. The book also argues that the field also minimizes the "autonomous" causal role that is played in social processes by social arrangements, institutions, and cognitive schemes. Third, the generativist paradigm has led practitioners of analytical sociology to place too much explanatory reliance on agent-based modeling. 

The book generally applauds the importance given by analytical sociologists to the role played in social explanations by well-developed accounts of the causal mechanisms that bring about an outcome of interest. But their commitment to methodological individualism hampers the analytical-sociology tradition from adequately understanding the causal processes in the social world because they are led to insist that "all causal mechanisms take place ultimately at the level of individuals". This is to say, social institutions, normative systems, cultural schemes, or organizational imperatives cannot be invoked as independent social causes or included in descriptions of social mechanisms. And, crucially, it is then impossible to capture the dynamic processes through which structures influence individuals and their actions, and individuals in turn alter some of the characteristics of the structures they inhabit and constitute.

Against these methodological premises, Rethinking Analytical Sociology argues that many tasks of sociological investigation require attention to a "thick" understanding of the actor's mentality (culture, norms, ways of reasoning). Second, many social processes cannot be properly understood without recognizing the dynamic and fluid causal role played by higher-level social structures. And third, agent-based modeling unavoidably requires a level of abstraction about actors and social situations that forces the researcher to ignore important and particular features of both actors and structures. The book suggests, for example, that Doug McAdam's account of the US Civil Rights struggle and extended events like the Montgomery bus boycott cannot be explained on the basis of a fixed set of institutional-context parameters and a simple set of "desire-belief-opportunity" features of the actors. (McAdam's Political Process and the Development of Black Insurgency provides an outstanding example of a comparative historical sociology analysis of an extended, complex, and multilayered social process.)

Rethinking Analytical Sociology closes with a set of problems for sociological research that would currently be difficult to handle within the strictures of existing methodological dogmas in analytical sociology, but for which the tools of analytical sociology could nonetheless contribute fruitfully if these dogmas were relaxed. The examples include -- 

• explaining racial health disparities in the United States, 
• explaining the rapid rise of radical populism in liberal democracies, 
• explaining large technology failures, 
• explaining the pathways through which new disciplines of thought emerge in academic fields, and
• explaining the worldwide surge of migration and how this has led to political and economic turmoil in numerous countries.

Each of these areas of ongoing social processes involves actors who are embedded in history and culture, social arrangements that interact with individual behavior in sometimes unexpected ways, and causal influences that operate on multiple levels of social life. There are some aspects of these problems that are very suitable to generative models, network analysis, and models of contagion from individual to individual; but there are also aspects of these problems that involve dynamic and interactive causal influences between individuals and meso-level institutions and cultural systems.

In short, Rethinking Analytical Sociology offers an appeal for a more pluralistic and collaborative approach to sociology. There are obvious points of intersection between numerous sub-fields of sociology -- for example, the study of contentious politics, comparative historical sociology, or the new institutionalism -- where collaboration would be fruitful. The social world is heterogeneous and contingent, and we need a plurality of theories and methods in order to make sense of the processes and crises we now experience.

Why are English majors disappearing?

Many universities have witnessed a decline in students pursuing majors in the humanities, including English literature. Why has this happened? 

This sounds like a fairly simple and parochial subject -- why are students and families losing interest in liberal arts majors like philosophy, literature, or history? But this impression is misleading. The subject is not simple: there are multiple causal processes at work, at multiple levels. Many of these have to do with shifts in cultural assumptions and norms, others concern the ways in which the media have influenced parents about what contributes to a young person's success in life, and yet others have to do with the workings of several thousand complex organizations called "universities". So in order to begin to answer the question we need to be prepared to confront diverse levels of social life, diverse systems of meaning and value, and diverse actors within university administration and faculties. 

And the topic is not parochial either. It may sound as though it only concerns university planners who are having to deal with declining enrollments and revenues in important areas of curriculum, but in fact it illustrates a very general methodological problem. This is the problem of arriving at an explanation of a social outcome that is inherently associated with the complexities of conjunctural causation, multi-level social processes, influences on the mentalities of the individuals and groups of individuals within a population, and and analysis of the strategies and actions of university leaders and faculty members, at a huge range of colleges and universities. 

In other words, the question is a good example of the difficulties associated with answering apparently simple questions about multi-layered and multi-causal social processes.

Let's simplify a bit in order to identify some of the actors whose beliefs and actions have contributed to the "decline of the English major". We can identify a handful of major players: parents whose advice and financial support to their children have a great deal of influence on the student's goals and educational choices; media critics who have an axe to grind with universities and their leaders; politicians who are actively hostile to the liberal arts precisely because of the independent thinking fostered by disciplines like philosophy, history, and anthropology; university leaders who are too quick to try to solve financial problems by reducing resources to liberal arts departments and faculty members; and sometimes faculty members in the liberal arts themselves who have failed to make the case for the deep value offered by a liberal education in these disciplines. 

Add to that the priorities often expressed in research universities that place great weight on publication records and little weight on successful engagement with students, and we have something like a perfect storm for the liberal arts: a public that no longer believes in the "career" value of a liberal arts degree, university administrators who are willing to shift teaching resources to more "practical" fields, and some elements of faculty culture that express a lack of concern for broad intellectual and personal growth in their classes. Demand falls, supply shrinks, and, in the worst case, the quality of the product from the perspective of the sophomore or junior student declines as well.

We must also consider some threads of American popular culture that cast suspicion on "pointy-headed intellectuals" and the universities who cultivate them -- what a particularly venal US vice president called "nattering nabobs of negativism". A strident (and often highly insincere) version of anti-elitism is a feature of right-wing populism. (We can say insincere, because leading right-wing populist firebrands like Donald Trump (Wharton), Ted Cruz (Princeton, Harvard), Josh Hawley (Stanford, Yale), and Elise Stefanik (Harvard) are all graduates of elite institutions.)

I raise this question to illustrate a deep feature of the general problem of "explaining social events and outcomes". In chemistry or biology there are many unsolved problems needing scientific explanation. But in a fairly routine sense we know what to look for in seeking an explanation of a puzzling natural phenomenon: the properties of the constituents and the causal relations that exist among them. The domain of sociological puzzles seems to be vastly more complex,  disorderly, and uncategorizable than that of natural phenomena. Social outcomes are vastly more diverse and heterogeneous than the universe of natural phenomena. Wherever we look we find new puzzles, and only rarely do the new questions yield explanations based on paradigm answers to other questions. Rather, we are forced to provide substantial descriptive detail and then piece together multi-level explanations that depend unavoidably on the specifics of the case. Causal influences emerge at a range of levels -- just as we have seen in the case of declining enrollments in the humanities. Many of those influences are conjunctural -- they depend upon the simultaneous occurrence of other independent causal influences -- and the occurrence of the outcome itself is highly contingent. 

This understanding of the variety of sociological research questions has some affinity with Karl Popper's "situational logic". Explanations begin with historically contingent situations, within which actors both individual and collective act and interact. However, Popper's account is hampered by its commitment to methodological individualism: for Popper it is individual rational actors who confront "situations". On the view taken here, it is the total situation and the actions and responses of both individual and collective actors (organizations, movements) that constitute a sociological explanation of the outcome. 

(Here is a thoughtful piece from the Harvard Crimson in 2022 that treats the fortunes of the humanities at Harvard in detail; link.)

"Rigorous" sociology

There is sometimes an inclination within the social sciences to unify and "improve" the methodologies of the social sciences to allow them to be "fully scientific" in the way that chemistry or physics were thought to be in the neo-positivist phase of the philosophy of science. With something like these ambitions Klarita Gërxhani, Nan D. de Graaf, and Werner Raub's recent Handbook of Sociological Science: Contributions to Rigorous Sociology (2022) purports to be a "handbook for rigorous sociology" of all stripes.

Thomas Voss puts the perspective of the "scientific sociology" framework in these terms:

The core features of a scientific approach to sociology as described in this Handbook (see the chapter by Raub, De Graaf & Gërxhani) are as follows: sociology and social science in general is an explanatory empirical science – at least it is the goal to establish such a science. The aim of science is the explanation of regularities that have been established by systematic observation. Theories specify causal relationships and in conjunction with boundary conditions imply testable hypotheses. There are obviously some contrasts between the natural and the social sciences. However, scientific sociology is based on the idea of the unity of science, the conviction that there are no fundamental differences with respect to the methodological rules and criteria of evaluating theories between the sciences, such as physics or biology, and the social sciences. (492)

The preferred model of the structure of sociological knowledge expressed here is familiar from the philosophy of science of the 1950s and the writings of Carl Hempel. It is the hypothetico-deductive model of scientific knowledge, explanation, and confirmation. Scientific knowledge (in a given area of research) ideally consists of a set of abstract hypotheses about the way the world works in this area; logical-mathematical deductions from those hypotheses, along with supporting statements of boundary conditions, leading to "testable" predictive consequences for observable social facts. A social outcome or regularity is "explained" when the scientist succeeds in deducing its occurrence from a set of empirically supported theoretical hypotheses. This is familiar within the philosophy of science; it is the view of scientific knowledge that emerged when the verificationist and radical empiricist versions of philosophy of science associated with the Vienna Circle collapsed. Carl Hempel, Ernest Nagel, and Richard Rudner were central voices of this approach (link). And invoking "the unity of science" is harmful, since it brings with it a host of assumptions -- including reductionism -- that are positively harmful for our framework of thinking about the intellectual work needed in sociology. The social world is not unified, and neither are the sciences (link, link).

Another component of their view of core tools for "rigorous sociology" is the use of sophisticated statistical techniques to sort out large data sets of sociological data. They are also favorable towards computational social science and the use of tools like agent-based models and simulations.

Excessive empiricism is one shortcoming of the "rigorous sociology" framework. There is a second shortcoming of the conception of sociological knowledge that emerges from the volume. In spite of the statements of openness to theoretical and methodological diversity, the editors and many of the contributors are in fact committed to very specific theoretical and methodological ideas. The introduction of the volume is explicit: the best explanations in the social sciences conform to the assumptions of methodological individualism; and the editors clearly prefer micro- to macro-explanations as "most scientific". Coleman's boat is a central tool for their philosophy of science: explanations proceed down the strut from "social context" to "individuals acting and interaction", and up the strut from "individuals" to "macro-conditions". From these assumptions, the priority of rational-choice sociology, analytical sociology, and other individual-grounded approaches is all but unavoidable. John Goldthorpe, James Coleman, and Peter Hedström are cited repeatedly as examples of "good sociology". 

There is an obvious and important relationship between these ideas about rigorous sociology and the manifestos of analytic sociology. Gianluca Manzo draws out this close connection in his contribution to the volume, "Analytical sociology". The editors emphasize that they don't mean to propose that the social sciences should reflect a unified set of foundational theories or research methods; they are all for "diverse approaches" to the study of the social world. But they emphatically advocate for a core commitment to an agreed-upon core of methods of evaluation for scientific hypotheses in the social sciences. On their view, only such a core set of commitments about confirmation and falsification can provide a basis for "cumulative knowledge formation in the social sciences".

More interesting than general calls for "rigorous" verification of sociological claims is Ivan Ermakoff's contribution to the volume, "Validation strategies in historical sociology". Ermakoff's work falls broadly within the fields of historical sociology, and his views about the use of evidence and validation are specific and helpful. He considers a number of works in historical sociology, including Michael Mann's Dark Side of Democracy, and his perspective is a long way from the apparent positivism of the introductory essay. He considers a range of techniques used by historical sociologists to empirically evaluate their hypotheses and theories about mid-level social processes. He uses the umbrella term of "validation" rather than the loaded ideas of confirmation and verification as the crucial link between hypothesis and evidence. He writes, 

Validation is the linchpin of scientific rigor. Claims relying on arguments by seeing, embedding themselves in self-validating discursive serious, or dodging critical assessments undercut the prospect of sound and cumulative knowledge. A significant stake of therefore attached to clear-cut validation yardsticks. (196)

Ermakoff proposes seven different kinds of validation strategies for evaluating hypotheses in historical sociology. (He doesn't suggest the list is exhaustive.)

1. Descriptive fit
2. Probing observable implications of casual hypotheses
3. Counterfactuals
4. Natural experiments
5. Inductive comparisons
6. Process tracing
7. Simulation 

This is a much more diverse set of ideas about how to consider the relation between hypothesis, evidence, and inference than is often offered by empiricist theorists, and deserves careful study. The implications of the idea of "conjunctural causation" comes in for very useful discussion. And he emphasizes the importance to having a clear and coherent set of working ideas about social causation as well.

Descriptive claims are especially important in historical sociology, just as they are within the discipline of history itself. Consider the strategy of analysis and argument pursued in McAdam, Tarrow, and Tilly's Dynamics of Contention. Their goal is to discover some important mid-level generalizations about social contention in a range of settings. However, they do not seek to establish generalizations about the high-level categories of social contention -- civil war, ethnic violence, inter-state war, or riots, which they believe to be unattainable in principle. Instead, they purport to identify an open-ended list of "mechanisms of contention" that occur and recur in a variety of instances and episodes.  ("We search for mechanisms that appear variously combined in al these forms of contention and in others as well. A viable vision of contentious politics, we claim, begins with a search for causal analogies: identification of similar causes ni ostensibly separate times, places, and forms of contention" (74).) In Dynamics they consider a range of episodes of contention from many places and times and seek to describe them in sufficient detail to allow them to identify some of the mechanisms of mobilization, escalation, and repression that occurred in some of these cases. 

The three sequences sketched in Chapters 1 and 2 represent distinctive and well known varieties of contentious politics in the western tradition. Our treatment of them raised standard questions concerning mobilization, actors, and trajectories. In the course of contentious politics: (1) What processes move people into and out of public, collective claim making, and how? (2) Who's who and what do they do? (3) What governs the course and outcomes of contentious interaction? In each case, we found that the standard social movement agenda -- social change, mobilizing structures, opportunity -- provided a disciplined way of asking questions about the events, but pointed to unsatisfactory answers. The answers were unsatisfactory because they were static, because they provided accounts of single actors rather than relations among actors, and because at best they identified likely connections rather than causal sequences. (72)

McAdam, Tarrow, and Tilly are equally interested in asserting the causal efficacy of various kinds of social mechanisms, based on their analysis of the episodes. What would be involved in "validating" or empirically supporting the account provided in Dynamics? Ermakoff's seven approaches provide a good beginning to answering this question, and it would appear that McAdam, Tarrow, and Tilly have done a credible job of providing the right kinds of evidence and arguments that would serve to support their account. We would like to know whether the authors have provided reasonably accurate synopses of the episodes they have considered, and whether their accounts  are based on substantiated historical evidence (primary or secondary). Have they taken appropriate steps to avoid the kinds of biases in historical accounts about which Ermakoff warns us? Second, we would like to know whether the social mechanisms (issue escalation, for example) that they attribute to the episodes under review are reasonably clear and well defined. And third, we would want to explore the degree to which their claims of causal relevance for these mechanisms are justified by the available historical record. Here the techniques associated with process tracing and paired comparisons are most relevant to their arguments; they attempt to show in historical detail how various mechanisms worked in the given historical circumstances. This also makes "natural experiments" a credible basis for their causal reasoning as well. If, for example, the mechanism of issue escalation requires a moderate to high level of density in local social networks, and if it emerges that cases A, B, and C had the causal preconditions of issue escalation but showed substantial variation of network density, then the fact that low-density C did not experience issue escalation while high-density A and B did experience issue escalation, then this looks a lot like a natural experiment evaluating the causal efficacy of issue escalation.

MTT do not use other methods mentioned by Ermakoff. They do not use statistical measures to validate claims they make about the contentious episodes they consider. And they do not show any interest in computational simulations or "generative systems" that would permit them to predict outcomes. "Will current popular unhappiness in China about environmental degradation develop into organized demonstrations and demands against the state for greater environmental regulation?" -- this is not the kind of question that McAdam, Tarrow, and Tilly would find interesting or fruitful, because they are fundamentally aware of the contingency and path dependency that characterizes the emergence of unrest in most settings.

In short, Ermakoff's analysis of descriptive rigor and justification of causal claims seem to be rich enough to provide a basis for classifying the empirical practices of historical sociologists McAdam, Tarrow, and Tilly. And, significantly, these historical sociologists measure up: their work should be classified as "rigorous sociology".

Assessing causes in the past (Kreuzer)

Quantitative social scientists have something of a catechism when it comes to providing evidence for causal assertions. If we want to assert that A is a contributing cause to B (for example, living in a neighborhood with many sub-standard housing units is a cause of higher rates of delinquency), we need to conduct a study involving a reasonably large number of cases and then assess whether cases with high-A values are also found to have high B-values. And in order to avoid well-known problems of spurious correlation, we are advised (when possible) to attempt to arrange some kind of experiment -- a field experiment, a natural experiment, or a controlled experiment -- in which the value of A is changed and we observe whether the value of B changes as well. And some quantitative social scientists urge the importance of identifying a possible causal mechanism that would convey influence from A to B.

But this "catechism" gives no credence at all to other forms of causal inference that have been long practiced within the historical social sciences. Mill's methods of similarity and difference offered one such example. Likewise, process-tracing (Bennett), comparative studies of similar cases (Skocpol), case-study methods (Hopkins), and other approaches have been used in comparative historical sociology to formulate and defend hypotheses about causation in history. 

In The Grammar of Time Marcus Kreuzer undertakes to bring these forms of historical-causal reasoning together under the rubric of comparative historical analysis (CHA). He describes the ambitions of CHA in these terms:

Like historians, CHA scholars use the past to formulate research questions, describe complex social processes, and generate new inductive insights. And, like social scientists, they compare those patterns to formulate generalizable and testable theories. (1)

A notable feature of Kreuzer's account is his view that comparative historical analysis permits both exploration (hypothesis formulation) and assessment (hypothesis evaluation). This point corresponds to a distinction of longstanding, the distinction between the context of discovery and the context of justification. Kreuzer takes the view that we can analytically separate the two contexts, but in practice the researcher needs to be involved in both activities. "CHA makes such exploration an integral part of the research process, because studying a constantly changing world requires continuously updating your research questions" (4).

Kreuzer uses the terms "induction" and "patterns" frequently, but it is worth questioning whether historical research supports either term. Induction means discovering persistent regularities; patterns are the regularities that are discovered by induction. But does history really support "induction"? This seems to imply that there is an unchanging underlying order to history, that produces recurring patterns of outcomes. But why should we believe this? In other places Kreuzer emphasis the "chaos" and unpredictability of history, the contingency of historical processes; but this seems to seriously undercut the idea of underlying order that appears to be crucial for an ontological justification of induction. So perhaps the idea of "historical induction" is unfounded.

The title of Kreuzer's book -- The Grammar of Time -- is intriguing, and it requires that we think carefully about what Kreuzer means by the phrase "grammar of time". Kreuzer briefly explains the metaphor in the introduction:

The grammar analogy is meant to highlight several features of CHA. Grammars analyze cultural phenomena – language – that emerged independently of one another in different places. The same goes for CHA. It established itself in different disciplines independent of one another and therefore sub- sumes different traditions that are distinct without necessarily being unique. Grammars also incorporate time to capture change. The conjugation of verbs differentiates degrees of the past and their relationship to the present and the future. And the past perfect tense even makes the past come alive by identify- ing activities that were ongoing in the past rather than having just occurred in the past. Grammars also consider geography, since their rules vary with each language. And etymology, a cognate discipline of grammar, recognizes that language itself is a changing and hence historical phenomenon. Finally, learn- ing grammars is peculiar because it involves understanding more systematic- ally what we already mastered intuitively. It requires paying attention to the scaffold of language, which neither is particularly elegant nor serves many uses after we have learned a language. (2)

However, the features mentioned there do not capture much of what we mean by "grammar" in post-Chomsky linguistics. Making the metaphor of grammar central to this style of analysis suggests that CHA offers the kind of abstract analysis offered by "syntax" (as distinguished from "semantics" or meanings), which in turn suggests that CHA offers an abstract and general way of "parsing" historical moments and changes. A sentence can be grammatically parsed into "noun", "verb", "state-term". And perhaps Kreuzer means to suggest that historical events can be parsed into abstract elements that combine to instantiate a moment of historical change. A second association created by reference to grammar is the idea of a "generative" grammar: the idea that, once we have a correct analysis of a string of words, we can generate a full representation of the state of affairs represented by the string. We might take a further step and follow Chomsky's distinction between "surface grammar" and "depth grammar", and postulate that there is a common structure of events that underlies the apparent diversity of event-types in the historical flow. (This idea is not discussed in the book.) 

An idea that Kreuzer uses frequently is "unfreezing": 

While unfreezing geography and history constitutes the first step in historical thinking, comparisons guide the explorations of this newly unfrozen temporal and geographic terrain. (10) 

It isn't clear what this means, however. It has something to do with putting aside the theoretical categories in terms of which a social scientist characterizes an event. But why "unfreezing"? He contrasts "types of comparison" in these terms in Table 1.1: 

• Frozen (Thin) (Single or multiple moments without dates)
• Unfrozen (Thick) (Multiple moments with specific date)

But the point of the contrast is not obvious. Perhaps a clue is offered in "thin" versus "thick"; this seems to be a reference to the idea that one set of observations is contextualized, whereas the second set is abstracted from context. But this does not have much to do with the physical processes of "freezing" when we think of ice and water. So the concepts of "frozen" and "unfrozen" history seem too flimsy to provide clarity about how to think about historical processes, historical change, and historical contingency. And table 2.1 (Varieties of historical time) doesn't do much to clarify the concepts or to demonstrate their meaning and value. The ideas of "solidly frozen", "partially thawed", "fluid, thick", and "fully fluid" don't seem to shed light on different "phases" of historical process, and it isn't clear how they are thought to correspond to the "types of comparison" listed in the final row of the table: "cross-sectional", "contextual", "serial", and "historical".

In Figure 1.1 (CHA's genealogy) Kreuzer suggests that CHA aims at discovering large differentiated processes of change and transformation in world history. 

One of the more interesting chapters is Chapter 5, a detailed review of the evolution of research on proportional representation systems of voting in Europe. Here Kreuzer tries to illustrate the way that a research effort guided by the assumptions of comparative historical analysis might proceed. He holds that this case illustrates the assumptions of "eventful history".

All in all, I'm not sure the metaphor of "grammar" works well for Kreuzer's interpretation of the methodology provided by CHA. Do historical events reflect an underlying syntax, so that we can see the "structural similarity" that exists between the Russian Revolution, the Copernican Revolution, and the Black Lives Matter movement? Do "time" or "history" possess an underlying set of rules that generate all possible outcomes? Surely the answer is no. Compare a technical analysis of the idea of a grammar with McAdam, Tarrow, and Tilly's alternative in Dynamics of Contention. MTT suggest that episodes of contentious politics can be grouped under descriptive categories -- "revolution", "uprising", "riot", "civil war"; but they insist that these categories do not reveal much about the events that they embrace. Instead, MTT argue, it is useful to examine an open-ended set of mechanisms and processes at the meso-level that can be found to recur across the various instances of revolutions or riots; and that the mechanisms of social contention are more explanatory than the high-level categories. This approach is not syntactic; it is more analogous to evolutionary biology, which seeks to identify proximate mechanisms (and one large mechanism) through which populations differentiate into distinct groups.

The book is a welcome contribution to discussions of methodology in historical sociology, and a refreshing alternative to more narrow approaches to the problem of empirically supporting causal claims about historical processes.

Popper and Parfit: the minds of philosophers

Derek Parfit hit the philosophy firmament in the early 1960s, while Karl Popper arrived on the Vienna scene three decades earlier. David Edmonds' biography of Parfit provides a careful and detailed account of Parfit's main philosophical preoccupations and some details about his life in Parfit: A Philosopher and His Mission to Save Morality. Popper's autobiographical essay in Paul Arthur Schilpp, The Philosophy of Karl Popper Part I and Part II (published separately as An Unended Quest) offers a deeply reflective account by Popper of the evolution of his philosophical thinking. It is very interesting to read the two books side by side, in order to consider two styles of thinking and imagination in the doing of philosophy. Both were analytical philosophers, but their intellectual frameworks and their philosophical approaches were markedly different. Both thinkers are well known in analytic philosophy, and each has energetic admirers and a handful of critics. On balance, I find that I greatly prefer Popper to Parfit.

I read Parfit's Reasons and Persons within a year or so of its publication in 1984, and I never shared the astoundingly flattering assessment of Parfit's brilliance and impact that Edmonds offers. Edmonds closes his book by suggesting that Parfit ranks with Kant and Sidgwick as the greatest moral philosophers of the past three centuries. And he suggests that Parfit's work may have greater longterm impact than Rawls's Theory of Justice. This suggests something bordering on "Oxford hero worship" rather than sober philosophical assessment. And in fact the biography has some of the flavor of "inside baseball" in the world of the Oxford common room, the fellowships, the dons, and the rivalries that defined the context for much of Parfit's career. (Edmonds himself holds a PhD in philosophy, and is certainly well qualified to offer his own assessments of various philosophers. On the other hand, he makes it clear that he has had fairly close personal connections with Parfit over the past thirty years.)

For myself, I have generally found Parfit's philosophical ideas as being annoyingly dependent on clever thought experiments, rather than substantive and sustained analysis of serious issues and principles that matter. (Ironically, the title that Parfit chose for his final work -- and what he believed would be his most important book -- is On What Matters (in three volumes).) The title is ironic because so few of Parfit's chains of argument actually do seem to matter much in the world. To give one example, pertaining to the question of personal identity: what are we to make of a breakdown in the Star Trek teleportation system, where Derek winds up in both the destination cubicle and the source cubicle? Which is which? If Derek committed a crime before entering the booth, which "person" deserves to be punished? (Edmonds makes it clear in another place that the question is doubly difficult, because Parfit doesn't believe that anyone "deserves" punishment for any act; but that's a different point.) Reasons and Persons seems to consist mostly of logical puzzles, conceptual conundrums, and refutations of existing philosophical answers to traditional problems and questions. But in the end, it all seems sort of trivial, and almost a caricature of what good philosophy should be. It has a kind of obsessive character that prevents Parfit from moving forward. (How could a set of Tanner Lectures morph into a three-volume set of books?)

Edmonds refers to quite a few philosophers who became close colleagues and sometimes friends with Parfit. Among them include thinkers whom I would certainly rank as being more insightful and more important to the progress of philosophy on issues that matter than Parfit: for example, Tom Nagel, Tim Scanlon, John Rawls, Bernard Williams, and especially Amartya Sen.

Edmonds closes the biography with some commentary on Parfit's remarkably peculiar lack of interpersonal skills -- no small talk, no special loyalty to the romantic partners in his life, no understanding of the ways in which most people conduct their relationships with colleagues, lovers, friends, and random strangers. Edmonds explores the question of a possible diagnosis of autism in the case of Derek Parfit. This seems like a very reasonable question to ask about Parfit's social ineptitude, but perhaps it is relevant to the obsessiveness of his philosophical preoccupations as well.

So what about Popper's account of his intellectual development since his beginnings as a cabinet-maker's apprentice in Vienna? Popper's autobiography An Unended Quest is simply fascinating, and it sheds important light on the circumstances, questions, and influences through which Popper's philosophical ideas took shape. Anyone trained in analytic philosophy knows the outlines of Popper's most famous theories -- falsifiability, the demarcation criterion, his rejection of historicism, his rejection of Vienna Circle positivism, his critique of Marxism. What is deeply interesting to me in reading his autobiography is how much more there is to his intellectual and philosophical life beyond these familiar ideas. He seems to have been very deeply interested in music, the visual arts, the breakthroughs in physics of the 1920s and 1930s, recent thinking about cognitive psychology, and the political events of the 1930s, and he thought deeply about each of these topics. Chapters 11-14 of Unended Quest offer a highly interesting and informed discussion of classical western music, polyphony, and innovation in composition. (Here is Chapter 12 where Popper discusses the invention of polyphony.)

Two important features of Popper's autobiography include --

• a very genuine impression of modesty and generous praise for other thinkers -- in contrast to Parfit's view of his own stature in philosophy as a deserving super-star
• a serious, learned, and deeply reflective philosophical mind.

Unended Quest makes it clear that there is much more to Karl Popper than falsifiability and his critique of historicism. This was a philosopher who thought creatively, seriously, and deeply about a wide range of issues that matter in the world. Further, Popper was a philosopher who believed that he saw important analogies across apparently disparate sets of questions -- for example, the serious analogy that he finds between "learning through trial and error" by children and animals and "dogmatic hypothesis and critical evaluation" in science. If Edmonds proposes ranking Parfit with Kant and Sidgwick, I'll propose ranking Popper with Kant and Poincaré for his contributions to better understanding scientific ideas and cognitive frameworks. In spite of having criticized Popper strongly in The Scientific Marx, I now think it would have been wonderful to have had him as a teacher.

Limitations of Hobsbawm's historical writing

A defining component of Eric Hobsbawm’s historical writings is the quartet of “Age” books: Age of Revolution, Age of Capital, Age of Empire, and Age of Extremes. These are synthetic works, offering a narrative of the long nineteenth century and the short twentieth century. They give primary attention to developments pertaining to economic, political, and social change in Britain, Europe, and North America, with occasional commentary on the rest of the world (Asia, Africa, and South America). Perhaps the most interesting of these is the first of them, Age of Revolution. Hobsbawm’s central interest – the central story he tries to tell – is the unfolding of the “dual revolutions” – the industrial revolution and the French Revolution – and the consequences these revolutions had for the lives, political identities, and historical agency and activism of working people. These revolutions formed “modernity”, whether in technology, in political forms, or in conditions of material life. And they gave rise to the central social formations (“great classes”) and political ideologies (nationalism, socialism, fascism) that continue to orient our world today.

These books are highly detailed. But we should observe that they are almost entirely grounded in secondary scholarship – Hobsbawm seems to have read almost everything written on this two-century period, and has undertaken to crystallize the main currents of research and interpretation into a reasonably coherent and connected narrative. But very little of the Age of Revolution depends upon Hobsbawm’s own primary research as a social historian. And though the tone of the narrative is even-handed and calm, the impression emerges over the 350-plus pages of the book that it is very deeply informed by the narrative of the Communist ManifestoConditions of the Working Class in England. This is a coherent narrative; but there are other stories that might be told of the nineteenth century, and other organizing themes that might be the hinges of the story.

Hobsbawm’s own primary scholarship focused on “indigenous” class movements and uprising, largely in England. He was a labor historian, and he was interested in uncovering documents and narratives that shed light on the ways that ordinary working people in the 18th and 19th centuries lived, how they conceived of the social relations around them, and how they rebelled. Key works here include Labour’s Turning Point 1880-1900 (1948), Primitive Rebels: Studies in archaic forms of social movements in the 19th and 20th centuries (1959), Labouring Men: Studies in the History of Labour (1964), and Captain Swing (1969; co-authored with George Rudé). The recurring theme of these earlier works was the topic of resistance and popular identities among “working people”. In “Captain Swing: A Retrospect” (link) Adrian Randall describes Hobsbawm’s orientation in these terms:

Hobsbawm’s earlier work, mainly concentrated on the labour history of later nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, was steeped in the well- established Marxist interpretation of economic and social history which saw the years from the later eighteenth century as marking an industrial revolution which had transformed economic, and thence social and political, relations into a more clearly class-divided form. The displacement of a peasantry and the degradation of agricultural labourers formed part of that narrative. (Randall 2009: 421)

But even here Hobsbawm’s role seems to be synthetic rather than primary. The division of labor in Captain Swing seems to divide sharply between Rudé’s primary scholarship on eighteenth-century uprisings (Randall 2009:421) and Hobsbawm’s synthetic historical imagination, guided by Marx’s conceptualization of history. Here too, then, Hobsbawm works as a theoretically-minded historical narrativist rather than as a primary historical researcher.

Might we say, then, that we need less from a historian than what Hobsbawm gives us? Hobsbawm paints a consistent, detailed picture of the evolution of social unrest. But it is fundamentally just an extensive interpretation based on a reading of secondary sources, and it may even be a caricature – certain features may be over-drawn and others minimized, in order to make the coherent and consistent Marxist story plain. But we don’t want our knowledge of history to be “pre-digested” according to a prior plan; we want a reasonable, evidence-based account that is open to contingency, unexpected developments, and details that do not fit the model.

In my mind I contrast Hobsbawm’s Ages books with Jill Lepore’s These Truths, which provides an account of the history of the United States that is not wedded to any particular trope. Instead, Lepore seeks to document and discuss the many themes that enter into US history, without bending the edges to make the facts fit the frame. And I think of more regional and local historians, such as William Sewell (Work and Revolution in France), whose analysis of the “working-class consciousness” of working people of Marseille breaks many stereotypes of the Marxist hymnal. And Sewell’s work, unlike Hobsbawm’s, is deeply grounded in his own research on primary documents and sources. Here is how Lynn Hunt describes Sewell’s primary research in Work and Revolution (link):

Sewell’s sources are eclectic: they range from a philosophical tract by Diderot to the statutes of mutual-aid societies, from artisanal and working-class newspapers to quasi-official reports on the conditions of the working poor, from intellectual tracts on socialism to workers’ poetry. All these comprise “a set of interrelated texts that demand close reading and careful exegesis” (11-12). Sewell rereads and reinterprets these texts with an eye for their linguistic and historical logic. The “socialist vision of labor” was a logical development of certain fundamental Enlightenment concepts, but that logic was pushed forward not so much by intellectual as by social and political developments, in particular, by the revolutionary “bursts” of 1830-34, 1839-40, and 1848-51 (278). In attempting to explicate this “dialectical logic,” Sewell synthesizes an extensive published literature on French labor, and he effectively underlines the importance of paying very close attention to what people in the past said, sometimes indirectly, about what they were doing.

Perhaps this suggests that we need another category of historical misrepresentation beyond the two offered by Andrus Pork (link). In addition to “direct lies” and “blank-page lies”, we need “interpretations of history cut to order by an antecedent interpretation of history”.