Understanding Society

A central question in the past year or so in Understanding Society is how historians and philosophers should confront the evils of the twen...

Democracy is at risk in the United States. Why do leading political observers like Steven Levitsky and  Daniel Ziblatt ( How Democracies Die...

Some philosophers and others have imagined that human beings are largely fixed in their most fundamental capacities -- their "human nat...

A rapidly rising percentage of the Chinese population is living in high-rise apartment buildings in hundreds of cities around the country. T...

Let's think about the intellectual influences that have shaped philosophers of science over the past one hundred years or so: Vienna Cir...

Nathan Stoltzfus's Hitler's Compromises: Coercion and Consensus in Nazi Germany has a remarkable and startling thesis: though the N...

Vasily Grossman was an important Soviet writer and journalist from the 1930s through his death in 1964. He was a Ukrainian Jew born in 1905,...