Understanding Society

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

Robert Klitgaard is an insightful expert on the institutional causes of corruption in various social arrangements. His 1988 book, Contr...

There are a lot of opinions about China today in the United States -- authoritarian, farsighted, effective at economic progress, overly ...

Europe faces major challenges today, from the rise of the extreme right to Brexit to the ongoing threat of ISIS terror. But these challenge...

How do the domestic politics of China work, from 1949 to the present? This question covers many issues: Why does the Chinese state act...

This month marks the tenth anniversary of Understanding Society . The blog now includes 1,176 posts on topics in the philosophy of soc...

One of the important reasons that we value scientific knowledge is the possibility that it will allow us to intervene in the world to sol...

Agriculture remains the primary source of income for India's population, and the majority of India's farmers subsist on sma...

What is involved in having a national or racial or sexual identity? What do we mean when we say that a person has a Canadian or a Haitia...

A crucial part of social cohesion is the prospect of social mobility across generations. A social order in which individuals are stuck in t...