Understanding Society

An anonymous reader responds to my short discussion of Patrick Geary's treatment of the late Roman Empire to recommend Samuel Dill...

The relationship between feudalism and the origins of capitalism was of great interest to Marx. Here is one way that Marx puts the idea ...

In the grand historical march postulated by historical materialism, ancient slavery and medieval feudalism preceded capitalism as d...

How does a field of phenomena come into focus as a subject of scientific study? When we want to know about weather, we can identify a re...

Image: Phase diagram of water, Solé.  Phase Transitions , 4 I've proposed to understand the concepts of emergence and generati...

A few days in Bangalore, Kerala, and Mumbai have been very interesting, from a social-change point of view. There is an election cycle...

image: Chernobyl control room Quite a few recent posts have examined the power and flexibility of ABM models as platforms for simulatin...

Brian Epstein has attempted to shake up some of our fundamental assumptions about the social world in the past several years by challengi...

Alex Wendt takes a provocative step in Quantum Mind and Social Science: Unifying Physical and Social Ontology  by proposing that quantum ...