Is morality a social factor?

Is morality a concrete sociological factor that has social consequences? Or is it simply a theoretical construction by philosophers and other moral theorists and advocates?

Human beings act, and their actions are often influenced or even determined by their moral values. This seems to be an empirical fact. (They also act out of self-interest, out of cruelty, out of disregard for others, out of impulse, and in a variety of other ways in which ethics plays no part.) An adequate theory of human deliberation and agency appears to require an account of how values and moral commitments figure into ordinary decision-making and agency. This fact, in turn, seems to provide the beginnings of a basis for a "yes" to the question of whether morality is socially real. Ethical values and norms are a behavioral reality; and this fact about individuals also has aggregative consequences for group behavior (in politics and in ordinary life).

But now shift the focus a bit and consider "philosophical ethics" -- the writing and thinking about ethical principles by philosophers (Mill, Sidgwick, Kant, Aristotle, Rawls, for example). Philosophical ethics is mostly about debates concerning ethical theories. Is the principle of utility the foundation of moral truth? Is the categorical imperative rather the foundation? Are there rational grounds for choosing Kant's moral system over Bentham's? What does the principle of utility require -- maximizing average utility or total utility? Should utility consequences of an action be assessed through the consequence of this particular action or general rules of action that might govern this particular act? Do philosophy and logic have a basis in rationality to allow confident judgment about fundamental questions of ethics? These are abstract, theoretical debates. And it is hard to see how they could have direct behavioral effects. So we might say, "philosophical ethics is not a social factor."

So far, then, we have "morality in social behavior" and "ethics in philosophy". Is there a connection between the two realms? One possible connection is this: Our theory of human decision-making might incorporate a rational faculty of deliberation; so when people act "morally", a part of their deliberation is a consideration of reasons for and against a certain conduct. This is an empirical question. If we pursue this avenue, then ordinary actors are also moral philosophers; they are probing for reasons and facts that would tip the scales of judgment.

On the other hand, our theory of moral psychology might go in the direction of habit and inculcation rather than rational deliberation. We might hypothesize that individuals absorb a set of values and prohibitions, analogous to food preferences and aversions, and that these values are beyond rational deliberation and judgment. (Can one reason herself out of an aversion to eating dog?) On this approach, there is no connection between rationality and moral behavior, and philosophy and real social behavior do not intersect.

From a sociological point of view, it seems we need theories at several levels. We need a theory of the ways that individuals think, reason, and deliberate when they act (an empirical theory of practical agency). We need a theory of the social mechanisms and institutions through which individuals come to have the parameters and content of their deliberative systems set in particular ways. We need empirical descriptions of the real content of human moral deliberation in various groups and cultures.

Of particular importance for a sociology of morality is the question of the social mechanisms through which moral values and commitments are transmitted -- analogous to the question of how languages and practical skills are transmitted. How are value systems and styles of moral reasoning transmitted from one generation of individuals to another? That is, we need a theory of the "micro-foundations" of moral psychology and social development. And we ought to have an account of how it is that the psychological capacity for moral thinking has emerged through human evolution; are there "moral emotions" that support the efficacy of moral thinking in action? (Allan Gibbard provides some very interesting discussion on these issues in Wise Choices, Apt Feelings: A Theory of Normative Judgment.)

The perspective I favor is one in which we understand the individual as a deliberative reasoner, subject to non-rational as well as rational factors. The individual has a spectrum of choice; he or she can consider the nature of the action being contemplated, its fit with other values he adheres to, and the consequences of the action for others. Actions are not causally determined by an antecedent set of likings and aversions. So the individual has the capacity for functioning as his own philosophical consultant. On this perspective, the philosophical concepts of "deliberation" and "reflective equilibrium" are useful and illuminating about real human reasoners. So philosophy can contribute to our understanding of social cognition and decision-making.

At the same time, it strikes me that professional philosophers can contribute best to ethical deliberation and moral development when they refrain from foundational assertions and simply provide good illustrations of how deliberation and consideration of circumstances and consequences can most thoughtfully proceed. Philosophers should consider themselves as "deliberative consultants" rather than "deductive inference engines" when it comes to ethical reasoning.

This perspective allows for morality to play a role in social causation that is analogous to the role of rationality in economics and political science. Descriptive moral sociology can function in a way that is logically similar to rational choice theory, in that it represents a hypothesis about the nature of agency: when agents deliberate in such-and-so a way, within the framework of such-and-so moral commitments and such-and-so interests and goals, they are likely to behave in such-and-so a way.

(Thomas Nagel's The Possibility of Altruism is a particularly interesting and provocative work bringing together ethical theory and theories of real practical reasoning.)

Who has a "social identity"?

Think about the multiple ways that "identity" comes into social life. We think we know what someone means when he says he is African-American, Southern, gen-X, and professional. But of course the reality is much more complex, both within the person and across the group. Each identity label brings with it a cluster of values and attitudes that hang together across a population of people. These clusters are cross-cutting: it may be that there are values shared by many Southerners, both white and black, that differentiate them from Northerners and constitute a dimension of social identity; likewise there is a cluster of values and attitudes shared by African-Americans in both South and North; and so on for youth culture and work culture. (This is sometimes referred to as "intersectionality" and the politics of intersectionality.)

One question we can ask is how these various identities co-exist in one person. How does the individual's psychological system incorporate and process features of identity? How does political and social cognition work at the level of the individual? What determines whether one identity is more salient than another in a given context for a given person? How do the various identity configurations interact within the person; how do behavior and preference result from the several identity configurations? Is there a problem of coherence among the identities? Can one be conflicted over the dictates and affects of the several identities he or she possesses? (Is this illustrated by religious conservative gay politicians?)

Another challenging question is how these identity configurations vary across a population of people who can be said to possess the identity. It is clear that identities are not uniform across a population; it is not the case that there is one profile of "American Baptist" that fits all Baptists. So we need to have some way of conceptualizing how a given identity is instantiated in different ways across individuals within a given group.

We also need a theory of the mechanisms of transmission and maintenance that serve to proliferate an identity across generations and through a population. What are the processes through which individuals and groups acquire their identities? There are some obvious mechanisms--personality development within the family, exposure to values and identities in schools and faith institutions, exposure to identity commitments through the media and the internet. But it would be very useful to have more focused and detailed studies of the ways in which identities are transmitted at the level of the developing individual.

Each of these questions -- the individual-level question and the group-level question -- has implications for political choice and behavior. A political movement requires mobilization of a group of people who are willing to act together for an outcome. And mobilization often depends on the ability of the political organization to amplify some elements of identity within a population and damp down other elements. In India, for example, it is possible to track the efforts of Hindu nationalist parties like the BJP aimed at making religious identity more salient than other civic or economic identities. Contrast this strategy with the strategy of parties like the CPM of West Bengal, which bases its political mobilization on an identity of class.

(Atul Kohli's Democracy and Discontent: India's Growing Crisis of Governability is an excellent discussion of some of these features of identity politics in India.)

Generalizations about cluster items

What is the basis of classification of items into groups? And how do classifications fit into scientific inquiry and theory? First, what different types of classification are there?

Essential: The items may share a common defining characteristic (e.g. "liquid", "metal")
-- Etiological: The items may share a common cause (e.g. "viral illness")
-- Structural: The items may share a common underlying structure (e.g. "protein", "elm")
-- Functional: The items may share a common function (e.g. "weapon", "school")

Non-essential: The items may lack necessary and sufficient conditions but share some overlapping characteristics.
-- Symptomatic: The items may share a set of observable characteristics or symtoms (e.g. "pneumonia", "schizophrenia")
-- Cluster: the items may share some among a list of characteristics (e.g. "game", "leader")

(It is a bit curious to observe that this amounts to a classification of systems of classification.)

Now let's consider some social science terms and see where they fall in this scheme: riot, civil war, bicameral legislature, ethnic group, democracy, charismatic leader, financial city, working class organization.

Several of these concepts are symtom or cluster concepts: riot, democracy. Several others are etiological or structural: civil war, bicameral legislature, financial city. One combines structural with functional criteria: bicameral legislature.

Now suppose we have identified a set of things as being "democracies". They share some among a set of features that are associated with democracy, and there is no set of features shared by all instances. What kinds of social science inquiry can we do? First, we can do comparisons within the group of democracies we have identified; we can look for similarities and differences across the group. And second, we can ask whether membership in this group is associated with membership in some other group beyond what chance would predict. In other words, we can consider whether there are true statements like "all democracies are X" or "most democracies are Y."

It is not the case that "all pneumonias respond to penicillin"--for the reason that there are two causal and structural kinds of pneumonia, and only one of these involves organisms treatable with penicillin. The causal heterogeneity of this group means that strong generalizations are difficult or impossible here.

The concepts of riot, revolution, and democracy are similarly heterogeneous, both causally and structurally. So we should expect only weak generalizations across this group and other social charactistics. On the other hand, the tools of social comparison are most valuable here. We can discover through additional comparative work within the category, whether there are similar structural and causal processes at work among instances of this concept.

Sociology as a social science discipline

Sociology is one of the core disciplines of the social sciences, along with political science, economics and anthropology. So one might imagine that it is a coherent, unified, and comprehensive science with a well-defined subject matter and a clear set of methods. But as most practitioners will agree, this is not the case. And that is a good thing, because the social world is not a unified system that can be reduced to a small number of theoretical premises.

Since its founding (or emergence?) in the nineteenth century, sociology has taken on a somewhat meandering set of topics for study: classification of whole societies, analysis of large social factors (race, crime, urbanization), study of the behavior of groups, provision of tools for social policy design, and study of particular institutions, social movements, globalization, and the organization of businesses. In 2007 the American Sociological Association includes 44 sections devoted to particular topics and methods. The methods of inquiry and the models of explanation are equally varied, including quantitative analysis of large data sets, small-N comparisons, micro-sociological investigation, process-tracing, Marxism, functionalism, structuralism, and feminism.

What does this diversity of topic, method, and theory imply about the discipline of sociology today? Is it a unified discipline, or a patch-work melange of many topics and approaches, unified only by the fact that the subjects of investigation have to do with social processes and social behavior? One possible interpretation is that the vast range of potential research subjects for sociology are covered by this patchwork structure. Another possibility is that the current range of sub-disciplines is itself the product of many "random walks" down particular research approaches, with heavy coverage of some areas of potential research, sporadic coverage of some problems and no attention at all to other problems. The latter possibility suggests in turn that there is ample room for future development of sociological research, in the formulation of new empirical problems and new theoretical approaches. The discipline of sociology can continue to evolve and grow -- possibly in ways that lead to significant innovation in approach and explanatory strategy.

An earlier posting on "Racial Inequalities" illustrates this point well. There is no single methodology or theory that is uniquely suited to attempting to understand the racial outcomes that we observe in American society. Instead, we need to combine the insights of many fields and approaches, in order to have a basis for explaining the patterns of segregation and inequality that we observe.

The diversity and multi-dimensional aspects of contemporary sociology is in fact a scientific advantage, in my view. This aspect of the discipline permits researchers to seek innovative approaches and innovative explanations of the social phenomena that they consider. In fact, it is the occasional impulse towards trying to make the discipline "more scientific" by enforcing a paradigm of research and theory on junior researchers that is most debilitating to the progress of knowledge -- whether it is the rational choice paradigm in political science, Marxism in Chinese social science, or the quantitative methods paradigm in sociology. Methodological and theoretical pluralism is an intellectual advantage. Sociological researchers who are receptive to analyzing the multiple aspects of a social problem from several different points of view are more likely to arrive at truly illuminating analysis. Not all these approaches will be equally fruitful; but a mixed "portfolio" of research strategies and theoretical models is more likely to be adequate to the messy reality of a changing social world.

Racial inequalities as a social science research topic

W. E. B. Dubois described the problem of the twentieth century as the problem of the color line. He was right -- except in his expectation that the problem would be resolved within the century. It has not been resolved. American cities from east to west show the encrusted social residues of racism, racial discrimination, and racial disadvantage for African Americans. The most basic statistics and geographical patterns of most old American cities bear this out. Patterns of extreme residential and economic segregation persist in Chicago, Detroit, New York, Cleveland, and Peoria. And these patterns of residential segregation are overlain by patterns of significant inequality in the most important dimensions of human welfare. African American families suffer greater incidence of illness, lower income, lower educational attainment, and lower levels of wealth ownership. The color lines in American cities are all too legible, and what they demarcate are major differences in social wellbeing across black and white communities. (Thomas Sugrue's book, The Origins of the Urban Crisis: Race and Inequality in Postwar Detroit, offers an eloquent and rigorous description of these geographical outcomes in Detroit.)

There must be social mechanisms that maintain these differences. These are not "natural" outcomes. And the social sciences should help us uncover those mechanisms. But where should we look for explanations and rigorous, honest empirical investigation? What areas of the social and behavioral sciences are most likely to offer satisfactory explanations of these patterns? And what mechanisms, at what social levels, are most likely to prove to have major impact in entrenching these patterns of racial segregation and difference over so many decades?

Several areas of social and behavioral research seem particularly relevant: the social psychology of bias and discrimination; the study of the politics and finances of urban public schooling; the study of the dynamics of public health outcomes (asthma, diabetes, heart disease); the empirical sociology of employment and employment opportunities; the politics and logistics of urban transportation systems; the culture and economics of nutrition; the sociology of the family; and, of course, the histories of American cities. It is likely that the facts of racial difference that persist are the results of a complex and interconnected set of social causes; we will need many areas of social science research and theory to allow us to sort these out.

Parallel to the question of social causation is the question of public policy: what policy choices exist for governments and other organizations to intervene in ways that begin to reduce these forms of racial disadvantage? What policy tools are efficacious in improving inner city schools, the nutrition and health of poor people, and the educational attainment of inner city youth? What policies of banking and employment can help to address the persistent inequalities of opportunity that exist with regard to borrowing and hiring? How can public policies reverse the pattern of segregation and inequality of opportunity and outcome for black and white families?

Some pressing questions--

* Are there any examples of American cities or states that have demonstrated success in redressing these patterns of racial inequality?

* How do these facts compare to the situation of other sizable minority populations in other countries--for example, France or Germany?

* When will political leaders place this persistent fact of racial inequality and diminished opportunity at the center of the political agenda for change?

What kind of thing is a religion?

The idea of a religion is apparently a very familiar one. It is a set of beliefs about the sacred shared by a group of people. It embodies some fundamental norms that guide and constrain believers' conduct. It is a potent social force that can determine the outcomes of presidential elections.

But notice the many complexities that these statements conceal. There is the question of the individual's psychology and mental life; how are religious beliefs and values embodied and acquired, and how do they function in the person's deliberative and affective schemes?

Second is the question of the group's religious characteristics. An individualist would say that the group's religious identity is simply the sum of the religious characteristics of the individuals who compose it, and that there is normally a distribution of variants around each dimension or element of the religious identity. (In other words, the members of thexgroup are not homogeneous in their beliefs and behavior.)

Third, we could dwell quite a while on the problem of formulating a theory of the core content of the religion, including beliefs, norms, and practices. The differences mentioned above imply that formulation of "core" beliefs is likely to be deeply controversial--witness the violence connected with schisms within religious traditions.

Finally, we need to consider the concrete social institutions and organizations through which religious groups and movements do their work: promulgate their religious commitments and knowledge to the young and converts, mobilize the followers to collective action, and function as a community of belief and action.

Notice the variety of disciplines that are invoked here in this still-brief account of the social efficacy of religion: personality psychology, social psychology, interpretative anthropology, political science, social movements theory, sociology, and the humanistic disciplines of philosophy, criticism, and hermeneutics.

We find, then, that religion is not one single thing, and it exercises causal powers in very diverse ways. "It" is many psychological, semiotic, organizational things, loosely held together by the idea of a group of co-believers. And causal-sociological stories pass through this station in many directions and on many levels. The causal efficacy of religion refers sometimes to the power that ideas and values have over individual believers. Sometimes it refers to the power a group of believers wields over other members of the group. And sometimes it refers to the power that religious organizations have over other persons through their sources of influence and threat -- a very secular exercise of power.

This comes down to several forms of efficacy -- the ability to
influence behavior through the grip of ideas, the ability to mobilize supporters, and the ability to marshall other more secular forms of power and influence.

Is globalization unjust?

Globalization has many aspects. But consider this narrow definition: extension of international economic interdependence through unfettered international trade and investment. This process leads to a shifting of centers of economic activity as investors and entrepreneurs seek out favorable locations for business activity--mining, manufacturing, financial services, transportation and logistics, etc. Businesses will seek out low-cost environments for doing business activities. Among other factors, labor costs, environmental costs, and resource availability will drive patterns of investment. The process results in economic growth -- that is, an absolute increase in the wealth and income created by the system as a whole. The resulting patterns will have consequences for incomes, environmental effects, and the flows of wealth among places on the planet.

Neo-liberal trade theory asserts that this international trading system will be welfare-enhancing overall: the gains to winners will exceed the losses to losers. The theory also disaggregates: a poor country will make better use of its resources and will be better off than before globalization. Let's take these points as true for the sake of argument -- though many critics of neo-liberal economic theory would dispute the assumptions that this assessment makes.

So, once again, is this process just, or does it simply perpetuate the debilitating effects of past injustice?

Before we can even begin to answer the question, we have to decide what we mean by "justice" in a global economic setting. Is a just system one in which everyone gets what he or she deserves? Or one in which everyone's outcome corresponds to his or her contribution to the product? Or one in which everyone's outcome is sufficient to permit him or her to satisfy basic needs for human development? Might we say that a just system is one that treats all parties fairly? And where does "fair equality of opportunity" come into the formula -- would we want to say that an outcome is just whenever it has resulted from a non-coercive, rule-governed process in which conditions of fair equality of opportunity have been assured for all participants? And, of course, what do each of these formulas come down to in practical terms?

One reason why problems of justice are so difficult to think about in the context of global development, is the fact of the extreme inequalities that existed, and continue to exist, internationally -- both before and during the processes of globalization. Many of these
inequalities were manifestly unjust -- because they derived from coercive and unfair relations between countries of very unequal power (colonialism and conquest, for example). So what would be a just pathway of transition, from an unjust prior distribution of wealth and
power, to a later more just distribution of wealth and power?

We might also say that the situation of global justice is a bit similar to the situation of bargaining among parties with grossly unequal prior assets. Some people would judge that an unforced agreement between two parties is guaranteed to be fair by the fact of consent; the fact of consent implies that each party judges that he/she is better off with the agreement than without it -- so each has improved his/her welfare. (This is what underlies the theory of Pareto-optimality.) But if the bargaining situations of the parties are significantly unequal, then it is easy enough to see how the stronger party can "take advantage" of the weaker party (the central result of bargaining theory). The division of the benefits of cooperation will be tilted towards the more well-off party; so is this a fair division of the fruits of cooperation?

So consider three different answers to the question, is globalization unjust?

* No, globalization is not unjust in the ideal circumstance in which every country and region can make free choices about the use of its resources and the agreements it makes with other parties. Each country will strive to make the choices that maximize the creation of
wealth and income it produces within the global system. What would make globalization unjust is if the process depends on coercion, corruption, and fraud.

* Yes, globalization is unjust, because the benefits of global cooperation are enormously biased to favor the interests of the rich and powerful. And even if the rules of international cooperation are unbiased (a claim that is often disputed), the superior bargaining situation of the wealthy nations guarantees a division of the benefits of cooperation that favors the wealthy over the poor.

* It is too early to say either way. The answer depends on what the outcomes are in fifty years. If international trade theory turns out to be true; if every region is able to develop its resources and human talent; if every region experiences significant economic growth and improvement of human development -- then we may judge that globalization was a just process. If inequalities and human deprivation are even greater in some parts of the world in fifty years, then the process has proven to be unjust.

A new philosophy of history?

Why would we want a philosophy of history? And what is wrong with the one we've got?

First, why? Philosophers want to know how good the claims are for "knowledge" in various fields. So we have philosophy of science, philosophy of mathematics, philosophy of logic, and so on. This is one reason for pursuing a philosophy of history: what is the status of specialists' knowledge of the past? What methods exist for arriving at knowledge about the past? How broad or narrow is the range of uncertainty about different kinds of historical claims?

In a similar vein, philosophers are interested in exploring and resolving some of the difficult conceptual problems and assumptions that arise in various areas of thought. There are many such puzzles in historical claims to knowledge: What are "contingency" and "necessity"? Are historical beliefs "objective" or "biased"? What is the relation between history and memory? Are there "periods" and "epochs" in history? Are ther civilizations and peoples?

Some philosophers have also pursued questions about the content ofhistory itself. Does history have direction or meaning? Does history shape a people? Is history an integrated fabric with common processes, or is it an amalgam of distinct and unrelated events? Is there such a thing as "the Russian Revolution" or "the Great Wall of China"?

So there is a reasonable subject matter for the discipline; but what is wrong with the philosophy of history we currently possess? First, writings on this subject don't really add up to a coherent and reasonably comprehensive set of ideas. Certain topics have grabbed the stage--Are there laws in history? What is a narrative? Is history teleological?--and have refused to give the spotlight to the other characters. So we might say, we need fresh thinking by talented philosophers who can re-identify a leading set of topics for discussion.

But second, and more fundamentally, philosophers have engaged "history" at too great a distance from great historians. Read any really excellent piece of historical writing today--Spence, Schama, Darnton, Bloch--and you will be struck by a raft of interesting philosophical and conceptual issues. And a new philosophy of history needs to incorporate as much of this range of working historical reasoners as possible.

Finally, why does it matter? It matters because history matters. At any point in time we are created, influenced and formed by our histories. And philosophy reasonably should shed some light on this fact.

(See The Philosophy of History in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy for more on this subject.)

Methodological localism

How do social causes work?

Some social theorists have treated social constructs as unified macro-entities with their own causal powers. Structuralist theories maintain things like "capitalism causes people to value consuming more than family time" or "democracy causes social cohesion." Likewise, some theorists have held that moral systems and cultures cause distinctive patterns of behavior--"Confucian societies produce cohesive families." Each of these claims places a large social entity in the role of a causal factor.

Is this a coherent way of talking? Can large structures and value systems exercise causal influence? The problem here is that statements like these look a lot like "action at a distance". We are led to ask: HOW do capitalism, democracy, or Confucianism influence social outcomes? In other words, we want to know something about the lower-level mechanisms through which large social facts impact upon behavior, thereby producing a change in social outcomes. We want to know something about the "microfoundations" of social causation.

One point seems obvious--and yet it is often overlooked or denied. Social behaviors are carried out by individuals, and individuals are influenced only by factors that directly impinge upon them (currently or in the past). Consider a particular voter's process of deciding to support particular candidate. This person experienced a particular history of personality formation--a particular family, a specific city, a work history, an education. So the person's current political identity and values are the product of a sequence of direct influences. And at the moment, this socially-constructed person is now exposed to another set of direct influences about the election race---newspapers, internet, co-workers' comments, attendance at political events, etc. In other words, his or her current political judgments and preferences are caused or influenced by a past and current set of experiences and contexts.

This story brings in social factors at every stage--the family was Catholic, the city was Chicago, the work was a UAW-organized factory. So the individual is socially influenced and formed at every stage. But here is the important point: every bit of that social influence is mediated by locally experienced actions and behaviors of other socially formed individuals. "Catholicism", "Chicago culture", and "union movement" have no independent reality over and above the behaviors and actions of people who embody those social labels.

This perspective is sometimes called methodological individualism. I prefer to call it methodological localism. We never lose the social in this story. But it is always a locally embodied social, conveyed through pathways that directly impinge upon the socially constituted person. It is then a subject of real sociological interest, to discover the pathways and variations through which the large social entities are embodied. And in this way we avoid the error of "reification" of the large social entity.

A world sociology?

Contemporary sociology developed in consideration of western social processes and western ideas about science. Central defining problems included state formation, social solidarity and cohesion, urbanization, and the politics of class. (The experienced reader will recognize the imprint of the classical social theorists here--Weber, Durkheim, and Marx especially.) But it is worth considering that sociology might take a very different course if we placed the problems and processes of the developing world at the center rather than the periphery of sociological inquiry. Would we arrive at the same central concepts? How would the paradigms change?

This question is not purely hypothetical. It is very reasonable for social scientists in developing countries to take a fresh look at the basic problems and concepts that can give future direction to a sociology for the twenty-first century. We ought not assume that existing paradigms will provide the resources necessary to understand and resolve the problems of social behavior and process found in China, Indonesia, or Mexico today. And it is likely enough that the new insights and theories that emerge from this new thinking in Shanghai or Mexico City will in fact provide new ways of looking at Chicago and New York.

One likely result will be that next-generation "world" sociology will be less interested in formulating master theories of large social processes--urbanization, ethnic conflict, demographic transition--and more interested in disaggregating large social processes into smaller component processes. The processes creating mega-cities in Africa, Brazil, or the Philippines have numerous dimensions and tempos. And it seems plausible that the best sociological investigations of urbanization of the future will result from an eclectic effort to discover the multiple social causes that lead to social behavior resulting in rapid urban growth.

So this is a critical time for sociologists and political scientists in the developing world. Will they seize this opportunity to refocus the research agenda and the tools of theory that will give rise to a more adequate sociology for a global world? Or will the paradigms and methods of positivist sociology continue to define the social-science agenda?

A paradigm shift along these lines is already underway--in the field of economic history. A current generation of economic historians of China has argued for a non-eurocentric comparison of Europe and Asia, with the view that both historical experiences have distinctive mixes of institutions and economic imperatives. Historians like Bin Wong and Kenneth Pomeranz argue that both Europe and Asia can be understood better on the basis of a more balanced consideration of the other. (See "Eurasian Comparisons" for some relevant discussion.)

There is also an important precedent for the creaton of a new sociology for a changed world, in the experience of the Chicago School of sociology in the early twentieth century. Chicago school sociologists stepped away from the certainties of classical sociology, in order to formulate theories and methods that worked better for handling the messy, complex realities of a great city. The results were more eclectic, more middle-level, and more open to the idea of innovations in sociology than the master paradigms of classical sociology. Sociologists in Beijing, Manila, and Mexico City can do the same.