Understanding Society

In a previous post I quoted Langston Hughes' 1938 poem "The Kids Who Die", which is very powerful in the context of our...

One of the more memorable parts of Capital is Marx's description of the “so-called primitive accumulation of capital” — the hist...

An earlier post commented on Tony Judt's magnificent book Postwar: A History of Europe Since 1945 . There I focused on the story he ...

In the dystopian vision of the future described in William Gibson's Sprawl novels, there are few people with normal jobs, regular sourc...

How does "work" take shape in an advanced manufacturing and service economy? Is the division of labor a natural outcome of tech...

One of the characteristics that observers notice when they consider the anti-globalization protests of the past decade or so is the extent o...

Most people would probably say they would prefer to live in a more just world to a less just one. There is a strong moral basis for preferr...

An important component of western political theory since Locke and Rousseau is the notion of civil society—the idea of a society in which me...

By official count, the incidence of popular protest in China has increased ten-fold in the past fifteen years.  Kevin O'Brien and Rache...