Understanding Society

The philosophy of Epicurus wielded great influence, both in the ancient world and in the early modern world (as Steven Greenblatt shows in T...

(1958-59 class of Fellows at Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences; link ) Sometimes the rubric "behavioral science...

Steven Greenblatt's recent book, The Swerve: How the World Became Modern , is an ambitious widening of Greenblatt's intellectual p...

The social world is not like the natural world. Nature is composed of things, forces, and geometries that have strong determining regular...

What is the good of social science knowledge? In the natural sciences the answer is often pretty simple and pragmatic: natural science ...

Several readers of the recent  post on Raymond Aron asked about other surveys of the history of sociology that are sometimes considered hel...

A key premise of complexity theory is that a population of units has "emergent" properties that result from the interactions...

In Great American City: Chicago and the Enduring Neighborhood Effect Robert Sampson provides a very different perspective on the ...

How can we best tell the story of the development of sociology as an empirical social science? Raymond Aron undertook to do so in M...

Almost the first words of Bruno Latour's Reassembling the Social: An Introduction to Actor-Network-Theory include this intriguing st...