Understanding Society

Here is a very interesting short piece by Pierre Bourdieu on the topic of biography, "L'Illusion biographique," that is v...

A biography is a narrative of a person's life. The biographer wants to tell the story of how the subject made it from childhood to a...

image: scenes from Mumbai, April 2016 Inequalities of wealth and income throughout the world have generated a great deal of attenti...

The Kerner Commission released its report in 1968, following months of intensive study of the series of major race riots and rebellions ...

I've frequently found Richard Hofstadter to be a particularly compelling historian of American politics and ideas. He is one of t...

Richard Hofstadter opened his 1963 Herbert Spencer Lecture at Oxford with these prescient words: Although American political life has ...

I have expressed a lot of reservation about the feasibility of prediction of large, important outcomes in the social world ( link , link...

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 ...