Monday, April 30, 2012

Dewey on habits



In the tradition of deliberative rationality, the idea of will is central. The agent deliberates about ends and means and chooses (wills) a means that will bring about her ends. So the will is the fundamental element of action. But in fact, Dewey argues that the idea of "will" itself can be understood as a compound of habits, rather than a self-originating deliberation about ends and means.
Dewey's discussion of habit and action is particularly sensitive to the relationship between the constraints and practices of the body and human patterns of action. He uses an extended example of "standing straight", and points out that "good posture" is a complex characteristic involving the environment, the body, and the will. But crucially, the unadorned will ("I will henceforth stand straight") cannot in fact determine subsequent behavior. In fact, he argues that the idea of standing straight can only come to us once we are bodily capable of good posture:

Given a bad habit and the " will " or mental direction to get a good result, and the actual happening is a reverse or looking-glass manifestation of the usual fault-a compensatory twist in the opposite direction. Refusal to recognize this fact only leads to a separation of mind from body, and to supposing that mental or " psychical" mechanisms are different in kind from those of bodily operations and independent of them. (Kindle Locations 312-314)
This is a point made elsewhere in the blog in the context of the idea of methodological localism: the individual takes shape through the persistent fact of existing social practices and norms. Here is a representative example of Dewey's ideas about the social construction of the individual.
Moreover, individual habits in turn contribute to social patterns:
And habits are the foundation of ethical ideas as well:
So the fact of habit in action is in fact a very fundamental part of Dewey's view of the social world and the individual actor's role in that world. And it is a role that suggests that Dewey differs very fundamentally from the Aristotelian view of deliberative rationality in action, where the actor identifies a set of ends, arrives at a set of beliefs, and reasons to a conclusion about what action to choose. (It seems to have more in common with another aspect of Aristotle's theory of action, the role that virtue plays in ordinary conduct.) Dewey doesn't say that there is nothing deliberative about action; but he appears to believe that habit is more common and more fundamental; further, he seems to believe that many examples of the exercise of will are in fact examples of the influence of nested sets of habits. Dewey seems to accept this implication about the subordinacy of reasoning to habit:

This component of a theory of action seems valid with respect to a range of human behaviors and interactions, but it seems to seriously undervalue the fact of conscious deliberation in action. It cannot be denied that human actors do sometimes approach problems of action -- what to do? -- in a conscious and deliberative way.  This is the kernel that underlies rational choice theory, and it seems to be a plain and undeniable part of human problem solving and choice.  Dewey's understanding of action as the result of an ensemble of socially instilled habits seems in the end to be unsatisfactory as a full theory of action.

Wednesday, April 25, 2012

Actor-centered sociology













Sunday, April 22, 2012

Recent historiography of China

The field of China history evolved rapidly after the McCarthy attacks on the field in the 1950s. The most significant developments, in my view, are these. First, there developed in the 1960s and 1970s what Paul Cohen refers to as a “China-centered” approach to the study of the history of China (Discovering History in China: American Historical Writing on the Recent Chinese Past; 1984). The central notion here is the idea that historians of China need to analyze China’s history making use of concepts and hypotheses specific to its own experience. Cohen puts the point this way: “The main identifying feature of the new approach is that it begins with Chinese problems set in a Chinese context. . . . [These] are Chinese problems, in the double sense that they are experienced in China by Chinese and that the measure of their historical importance is a Chinese, rather than a Western, measure” (Cohen 1984, p. 154). Rather than asking whether China experienced “sprouts of capitalism” in the Ming Dynasty, we need to consider the distinctive features of China’s economic development. Rather than considering whether China was a “feudal” society, we need to identify and conceptualize the specific features of political and economic relations that linked elites and the common people.

The point here is not that China’s history is unique and sui generis, but rather that one should not presume that the categories of politics, social structure, and historical process that emerged as central in the unfolding of early modern Europe will find natural application in the historical experience of China. The concept of feudalism is not a trans-historical category which should be expected to have application in every process of historical development. Bin Wong pushes this view further in his China Transformed: Historical Change and the Limits of European Experience.

Second, there has emerged a substantial emphasis on material culture in the China field: social and economic circumstances, the technology of agriculture, marketing hierarchies, and the circumstances of life of ordinary Chinese people. Features of local material culture find prominent expression: population processes, local politics, agricultural technique, land tenure arrangements, patron-client relations, banditry, and environmental change. And since historical China is an agrarian society, this means that agrarian histories have been particularly important in the China field. (Here is a post on China's agricultural history; link.)

Third, China studies have moved in the direction of local or regional studies rather than national histories. Issues arising out of consideration of the village rather than the capital city have come to the fore: the village, the marketing hierarchy, and the region have come to define the focus of inquiry. Scholars are suspicious of generalizations about China as a whole; rather, local and regional variations are the focus of research. It is recognized that lineage is more significant in the south of China than the north; that rice cultivation imposes a series of social imperatives in the south that are absent in the north; that regions linked by water transport show an economic and social integration often lacking in administratively defined units (provinces); that millenarian Buddhism is a powerful factor in the political culture of Shandong but not in Sichuan; and the like. Huaiyin Li's Village China Under Socialism and Reform: A Micro-History, 1948-2008 is a good example of this kind of detailed local study.

Finally, the influence of the social sciences in the field of Chinese history has been of great importance. Much (though of course not all) of the most productive historical research on China in the past two decades has made substantial use of the tools of social science to construct explanations of Chinese historical processes. Techniques drawn from historical demography, economic geography, and the study of organizational behavior have substantially increased our understanding of China’s history. Work by James Lee and numerous collaborators on China's demographic history provide good examples of the fruitfulness of this approach; Life under Pressure: Mortality and Living Standards in Europe and Asia, 1700-1900 (Eurasian Population and Family History).

Here are a few topic areas that have proven to be particularly important.

Spatial organization of culture and economy. China studies have been strongly influenced by the insight that there is a critical spatial dimension to processes of social, political, and economic change. In his groundbreaking work on marketing hierarchies and the regionalization of traditional China, G. William Skinner has demonstrated the key role that transport systems, central place hierarchies, and physiography play in China’s history (linklink.) Skinner’s work has been remarkably influential in the China field; among his contributions, two are especially important. First, Skinner undercut the village-oriented perspective of much existing research on peasant China by putting forward an analysis of the central place hierarchy that exists among cities, market towns, villages, and hamlets in traditional China (Skinner, G. William. 1964-65. "Marketing and Social Structure in Rural China." Journal of Asian Studies 24(1-3)). These hierarchies are knit together by transport systems and the circulation of products, traders, craftsmen, martial arts instructors, necromancers, and other itinerant folk. This is an important contribution because it suggests stimulating hypotheses about the mechanisms of popular culture, the transmission of ideas, the movements of peoples, the diffusion of new technologies, and other fundamental aspects of social change. The second signal contribution contained in Skinner’s work is his regionalization of China into nine “macroregions,” each of which is analyzed in terms of a core-periphery structure (The City in Late Imperial China; 1977). This construct incorporates the structure of marketing hierarchies into the analysis and adds the notion that the economic processes implicit in urbanization impose a structure on rural society as well. Urban cores create a demand for resources (firewood, food, raw materials) that extend economic influence into peripheral areas.

These ideas have a number of important implications for agrarian studies more generally. First, the spatial organization of settlements--villages, towns, and cities, and the transport and marketing networks that connect them--has important consequences for diverse aspects of rural life. Ideas, political movements, and knowledge are diffused through marketing system channels. Itinerant merchants, artisans, letter writers, necromancers, fortune-tellers, or martial-arts instructors travel the circuits defined by the marketing hierarchies; and through these travelers results movement of ideas, products, rumors, skills, and innovations.

Environmental history. There are numerous examples of recent works that give central focus to environmental and ecological issues in China’s history. Environmental issues come in a number of forms in Chinese history, including especially water management, land reclamation, and deforestation. As Skinner points out, there is a strongly spatial orientation to each of these sets of issues: water systems constitute one of the lineaments determining patterns of settlement; land reclamation and deforestation follow population density (and therefore tend to correspond to a core-periphery structure, with a transfer of fertility from periphery to core). 

An important treatment of the human impact on the Chinese environment is Peter Perdue’s study, Exhausting the Earth: State and Peasant in Hunan (Perdue 1987). Perdue’s study focuses on Hunan, 1500-1850, and places primary emphasis on the processes of agricultural change, land reclamation, and water control through which the landscape of Hunan was dramatically altered throughout this period. The struggle between the state and local interests over such issues as taxation, land reclamation, dike building, and land property rights is highlighted.  What is most original about the book is Perdue's success in identifying the consequences for ecology and land and water management of the political and economic processes involved in Hunan’s substantial growth during this period. Perdue documents the slow process through which land reclamation efforts and dike-building nibbled away at Dongting Lake (now China’s second largest lake). The state played an important role in stimulating this process in the Ming dynasty; in the Qing, Perdue indicates that the private interests of local elites and landowners were the driving force for continuing encroachment on wetland and lake margins.

More recently Mark Elvin’s The Retreat of the Elephants: An Environmental History of China provides a broad treatment of China’s environmental history over a longer and broader scope (link). 

State-society relations. State-society relations play an important role in many contemporary studies: to what extent, and through what mechanisms, is the state in a pre-modern society able to effect its will on its population? This question is particularly salient in the case of China because of the somewhat paradoxical role that the Imperial state plays in Chinese history. The Imperial system is often portrayed as weak and ineffectual; at the same time, it is the embodiment of a refined and sophisticated administrative apparatus. To what extent was the Chinese state able to carry out its essential functions--the extraction of taxes, the preservation of order, the suppression of social unrest, the maintenance of large-scale water projects, and the administration of central grain policies? These issues impact on agrarian histories in diverse ways: mobilization of peasant unrest is affected by the extractive behavior of the state, on the one hand, and the effectiveness of the state’s coercive apparatus, on the other.

In Rebellion and its Enemies in Late Imperial China: Militarization and Social Structure, 1796-1864 Philip Kuhn emphasizes the limitations of the grasp of the imperial state in his analysis of the local and regional responses to the Taiping Rebellion. “Local militarization posed acute problems for the imperial state; for if irregular military force could not be regularized and brought under control, if the widespread militarization of local communities could not be brought into a predictable relationship to the state, then the security of the state itself might soon be shaken” (Kuhn 1980, p. 9). There was a logic to the process of the state’s diminishing capacity to effect its will in response to rebellion. “The Ch'ing military establishment lent momentum to the downward spiral of dynastic decline: the worse the troops, the longer it took them to quell an uprising; the longer it took them, the greater the cost; the more impoverished the government, the lower the quality of imperial administration and the greater the frequency of revolt” (126). On Kuhn’s interpretation, the local militarization that occurred in response to the Taiping Rebellion had a permanent effect on the balance of power between center and periphery in Chinese politics.

In his study of state-society relations in North China, Culture, Power, and the State: Rural North China, 1900-1942 (1988), Prasenjit Duara emphasizes the “state-making” processes that were underway in the late Qing. Duara’s analysis focuses on the end of the Qing dynasty and the turn of the twentieth century in North China; Duara attempts to comprehend the variety of institutions, elites, and influences through which political power was wielded at the village level. The state was earnest in its efforts to penetrate rural society to the village level, and Duara examines the efforts made to extend the administrative structures of the state into the system of lineage and local power relations which had traditionally dominated village society.

Intermediate between studies of the Imperial state and local agrarian histories is the effort to discern the “patterns of dominance” exercised by Chinese local elites (Esherick and Rankin, eds., Chinese Local Elites and Patterns of Dominance, 1990). Studies by Keith Schoppa, Mary Rankin, Phillip Kuhn, and William Rowe provide instances of in-depth efforts to identify the historical identities of Chinese elites, rural and urban, and some of the mechanisms through which these elites endeavored to influence local society.

The core-periphery analysis mentioned above has been found fruitful as well in analysis of banditry, rebellion, and smuggling. The grasp of the state tends to be weakest in peripheral areas with difficult terrain (mountains, deserts, marshes), sparse settlement, and poor transport networks; and consequently anti-state activities find natural refuge in such areas.

Vivienne Shue's The Reach of the State: Sketches of the Chinese Body Politic is an important contribution to this topic.

Other topics.  Most recently the China field has been interested in the “involution” debate, culminating in Huang (The Peasant Family and Rural Development in the Yangzi Delta, 1350-1988), Pomeranz (The Great Divergence: China, Europe, and the Making of the Modern World Economy.), and Wong and Rosenthal (Before and Beyond Divergence: The Politics of Economic Change in China and Europe) (link, link, link). And, of course, there is a very large historiography of the Chinese Revolution and the Cultural Revolution.  Several earlier posts provide discussion of post-1960s treatments of the Chinese Revolution; link, link.

These topics are certainly not exhaustive.  I've said nothing here about cultural and identity studies; studies of ethnic minorities in China; popular culture; and much else.  But the field is large, and it is worthwhile for the non-specialist to have at least a rough map of some of the large pathways explored in the past forty years as historians have sought to make better sense of China's history.

Thursday, April 19, 2012

George Herbert Mead on the self




Here is another clear statement about the self and the social:

And here is a nice description of purposive action.


  • "focus on the action rather than the actor", 
  • "action is a flow of improvisational adaptations", and 
  • "action is relational rather than individual" 

Tuesday, April 17, 2012

The market for ethnicity



And from South Africa they describe Contralesa:







Saturday, April 14, 2012

Race, perception, and reality

Several recent themes come together in Ron Jacobs' very interesting 2000 book, Race, Media, and the Crisis of Civil Society: From Watts to Rodney King (Cambridge Cultural Social Studies). There is the recurring theme of racial separation in American society, this time with respect to divergent perceptions of important historical events. There is the role of representation and framing as a component of identity and agency. And there is the question of realism: given the fact of divergence, what sense can we make of the question, what really happened?

Jacobs is a cultural sociologist, within a group of theorists who believe that social imagination, representation, and framing are interesting and appropriate objects of sociological inquiry. Like theorists in the broad field of social mobilization, he believes that an understanding of these "subjective" features are key to understanding mobilization and action. But he also takes very seriously the idea that an individual's (or group's) mental framework is constructed by concrete social processes, including the media. And, finally, he offers a sophisticated framework in terms of which to analyze and dissect the media itself. This is an approach that blends the methods of the social sciences and the humanities in a very constructive way.

His specific goal in this book is to try to identify crucial differences of framework between African-American and white publics in the United States at several important junctures. He studies the African-American and mainstream press in their reporting of the Watts uprising (1965) and the disturbances that followed the Rodney King beating and court findings. The African-American press serves an important "fragmented public", and Jacobs wants to identify in detail the differences in perspective that exist between it and the mainstream press.

The theoretical frame for Jacobs is Habermas's thinking about communication, discourse, and the public sphere. He largely buys into Habermas's notion that a populace constitutes itself as a collective identity through discourse in public spaces. And the media represent some of those spaces. But he diverges from Habermas's views in emphasizing that there are multiple publics and multiple discourses. And this point is particularly important when it comes to race in the United States. The OJ Simpson trial illustrated this point very sharply, with widely divergent opinions about the trial among African-Americans and white Americans.

Jacobs' primary method is narrative analysis. He analyzes several thousand news stories with respect to plot, characters, and genres. And he finds there are substantial and consistent differences between mainstream and African-American press accounts of Watts, Rodney King, and the innocent verdicts for the police assailants of Rodney King.

What Jacobs doesn't assert, and what probably isn't true, is that the perspective found in, say, the Chicago Defender, is a faithful, exact expression of the collective perspective and framing of the black public of Chicago at a point in time. Rather, the Defender is a media publication with an editorial perspective and a small group of writers and editors. They have their own perspectives. As Jacobs points out, the Defender helps to influence black perspective in Chicago, but it isn't identical to the mentality of the black Chicago public or publics. (One might speculate that much of Chicago's black youth took a more radical and less patient view of police harassment than the Defender.) In order to probe these mentalities on the ground, a different kind of research would be needed -- ethnographic rather than documentary.

So this invokes one of the themes of realism we've surfaced in recent posts: what can we say about the truth of the matter when it comes to assertions about social perceptions and representations? And here I'm not thinking of the veridicality of the black teenager's perceptions of the police, but rather the veridicality of the sociologist's representations of that group's perceptual scheme about race and the police. How does critical realism come into the picture when we are discussing intangible, subjective features of imagination and representation by a social group? Can we be realists about mentalities?

I believe that the answer is "yes". There are research methods that permit a degree of confidence in assessing the forms of thinking associated with a given group at a given time. These range from participant-observer methods, to ethnography more broadly, to the kind of historical ethnography practiced by Robert Darnton, to survey methods attempting to measure attitudes and values. These methods generally require interpretive skills and judgments on the part of the investigator -- in this respect the sociologist is also a humanist--but it is reasonable to think that evidence-based inquiry can lead to reasonably confident conclusions about facts of subjectivity.

And this leads to another connection to realism: subjective schemes of interpretation are linked to actions as well. Mentality and action are linked. So the fact that Chicago teenagers in 1968 perhaps shared a narrative of police brutality very plausibly played a causal role in their behaviors in Chicago's uprising. So realism about the causes of contentious politics requires a degree of realism about mentalities as well.

(All of the action in Jacobs' book involves Los Angeles, a city with a very specific racial history. Readers will find the Easy Rawlins novels of Walter Mosley a vivid representation of African-American life in LA in the 1950s -- e.g. A Red Death (Easy Rawlins Mysteries). But even here a question of realism arises: can we gain realistic understanding of a historical moment through a novel? Does Mosley offer a true depiction of race in LA?)

Tuesday, April 10, 2012

Running on empty



Here is a summary from USAToday in 2011 (link):









Saturday, April 7, 2012

Causal realism and historical explanation

Are there plausible intuitions about the ways the world works that stand as credible alternatives to Hempel's covering law model? There are. A particularly strong alternative links explanation to causation, and goes on to understand causation in terms of the real causal powers of various entities and structures. Rom Harre's work explored this approach earliest (Madden and Harre, Causal Powers: Theory of Natural Necessity), and Roy Bhaskar's theories of critical realism push these intuitions further (Critical Realism: Essential Readings (Critical Realism: Interventions)). Bhaskar and Archer's volume Critical Realism: Essential Readings (Critical Realism: Interventions) (Bhaskar, Archer, Collier, Lawson, and Norrie, eds.) is a good exposure to current controversies in this tradition. Paul Lewis's "Realism, Causality, and the Problem of Social Structure" (link) is worth reading as well.

Here the idea is that causation is not to be understood along Humean lines, as no more than constant conjunction. (This is where the insistence on general laws originates.) Instead, the idea of a causal power is taken as a starting point. Things have the capacity to bring about changes of specific circumstances, in virtue of their inner constitution (or what Harre is content to call their essences). (I would put Nancy Cartwright's ideas about causation and general laws in the same general vicinity (How the Laws of Physics Lie, Nature's Capacities and Their Measurements), though she is not a critical realist. But her critique of laws and her preference for capacities is similar.)

This doesn't mean that there is a bright line between causal powers and regularities. If a certain thing X has the power to bring about Y, then it is true that there is some generalization available along the lines of "whenever X, Y occurs." The point here is about ontological primacy: is it the power or the law that is more fundamental? And Harre, Bhaskar, and Cartwright all agree that it is the power that is basic and the thing's powers are dependent upon its real constitution.







Tuesday, April 3, 2012

Rawls and exploitation

image: Karl Marx by David Levine







The answer, it would appear, does not depend on the second principle of justice (the difference principle) but rather the first principle of justice (the liberty principle).  This is Wilkerson's central point: does the liberty principle include protection of economic rights, including the right to own the means of production and the right to buy and sell labor power?

It is possible to read the liberty principle as representing a form of Lockean liberalism, with rights of life, liberty, and property to be protected above all else.  And in fact, Rawls explicitly includes the right to hold (personal) property as a right protected by the liberty principle.  It is only a small step to argue that ownership of property extends to all potential things.  On this interpretation, some form of capitalism follows.  If the first principle permits private ownership of property, including property in the means of production, then it is not inherently unjust to derive income from ownership of property and to hire workers to make one's property "productive". Further, if the first principle entails the right to use one's labor as one chooses, then presumably one has the right to sell one's labor time.  This is the essence of capitalism.  The second principle may moderate the effects of this system; but at best we get welfare capitalism instead of laissez-faire capitalism, and we get exploitation in the technical sense.  A surplus is transferred from the workers who create it to the owners of capital.

But perhaps the liberty principle doesn't in fact support these economic rights after all.  This is Wilkerson's argument, and it is the basis for his claim that Rawls is more radical than we thought.  And it is the view that Sam Freeman explores in greater depth in his book Rawls.  In a nutshell, Freeman gives an extensive argument for concluding that Rawls does not include these economic rights under the liberty principle (the right to own and accumulate capital and the right to buy and sell labor time).  Here is Freeman's position:

If we accept Freeman's argument (and Wilkinson's) -- and I am inclined to -- then the answer to the question posed above is resolved. The two principles of justice are not apriori committed to the justice of the basic institutions of capitalism; and therefore Rawls's system is not forced to judge that exploitation is just.  Or more affirmatively: exploitation is unjust.

What is surprising about this conclusion is the fact that it is surprising, now forty years after the original publication of A Theory of Justice.  The first generation of readers of the theory formed a compelling impression that the book was largely centered on liberal welfare market society -- perhaps something along the lines of Nordic social democracy.  And yet the passages and ideas that Freeman calls out were there all along.  So it is surprising that the radicalism of Rawls's critique was not better recognized in the 1970s.

Sunday, April 1, 2012

Rawls and classical political economy









