Understanding Society

In July 1941 a terrible massacre of Jews took place in Jedwabne, a town in eastern Poland. The town consisted of some 3,000 residents, about...

The entrenched rule of the BJP and its leader, Narendra Modi, has led to a truly alarming degradation in India's democratic institutions...

Greetings, readers... This week marks the fourteenth anniversary of Understanding Society . With this post there are 1,412 entries in the bl...

Institutions are "supra-individual", in the sense that they establish a context of identity and mental-framework formation for all...

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...