International Relations

Guus Duindam is a J.D./Ph.D. student in philosophy at the University of Michigan. His primary areas of interest are Ethics and Kant. Thanks, Guus, for providing this rigorous treatment of Bhaskar's philosophical argument for critical realism. Bhaskar contra Kant: Why Critical Realism is not Transcendental Realism Let me start by thanking Dan Little for inviting me to write this guest-post. I�d like to take the opportunity to examine Roy Bhaskar�s arguments for critical realism, in particular those presented in his A Realist Theory of Science  (RTS). The aim of that work is remarkable: to establish by transcendental argument the mind-independence and structured nature of the objects of science. Bhaskar�s views are explicitly grounded in Kantian arguments. But the rejection of Kantian transcendental idealism is a central feature of Bhaskar�s critical realism. For Bhaskar, critical realism is also transcendental realism, a position he posits as an alternative to both Kantian and (neo...

Each individual has a distinctive personality and orienting set of values. It is intriguing to wonder how these features take shape in the individual's development through the experiences of childhood, adolescence, and early adulthood. But we can also ask whether there are patterns of mentality and orienting values across many or most individuals in a cohort. Are there commonalities in the definition of a good life across a cohort? Is there such a thing as the millennial generation or the sixties generation, in possession of distinctive and broadly shared sets of values, frameworks, and dispositions? These are questions that sociologists have attempted to probe using a range of tools of inquiry. It is possible to use survey methodology to observe shifts in attitudes over time, thereby pinpointing some important cohort differences. But qualitative tools seem the most appropriate for this question, and in fact sociologists have conducted extensive interviews with a selected group of ...

To explain something is to provide a true account of the causes and circumstances that brought it about. There is of course more to say on the subject, but this is the essential part of the story. And this normative account of explanation should work as well for investigations created within the framework of critical realism as any other scientific framework. Moreover, CR is well equipped with intellectual resources to produce explanations of social outcomes based on this understanding. In particular, CR emphasizes the reality of causal mechanisms in the social world. To explain a social outcome, then -- perhaps the rise of Trumpism -- we are instructed to identify the causal mechanisms and conditions that were in play such that a novice from reality television would gain the support of millions of voters and win the presidency. So far, so good. But a good explanation of an outcome is not just a story about mechanisms that might have produced the outcome; instead, we need a true stor...

Take a typical day in a major city -- a busy street with a subway stop, a park, a coffee bar, and a large consumer financial office. There are several thousand people in view, mostly in ones and twos. Some people are rushing to an appointment with a doctor, a job interview, a drug dealer in the park. A group of young men and women are beginning to chant in a demonstration in the park against a particularly egregious announcement of government policy on contraception. There is a blooming, buzzing confusion to the scene. And yet there are overlapping forms of order -- pedestrians crossing streets at the crosswalks, surges of suits and ties at certain times of day, snatch and grab artists looking for an unguarded cell phone. The brokers in the financial office are more coordinated in their actions, tasked to generate sales with customers who walk in for service. The demonstrators have assembled from many parts of the city, arriving by subway in the previous hour. Their presence is, of cou...

  I've posed the question of organizational learning several times in recent months: are there forces that push organizations towards changes leading to improvements in performance over time? Is there a process of organizational evolution in the social world?  So where do we stand on this question? There are only two general theories that would lead us to conclude affirmatively. One is a selection theory. According to this approach, organizations undergo random changes over time, and the environment of action favors those organizations whose changes are functional with respect to performance. The selection theory itself has two variants, depending on how we think about the unit of selection. It might be hypothesized that the firm itself is the unit of selection, so firms survive or fail based on their own fitness. Over time the average level of performance rises through the extinction of low-performance organizations. Or it might be maintained that the unit is at a lower level...

Historians pay a lot of attention to important periods of social change -- the emergence of new political movements, the development of a great city, the end of Jim Crow segregation. There is an inclination to give a lot of weight to the importance of leaders, visionaries, and change-makers in driving these processes to successful outcomes. And, indeed, history correctly records the impact of charismatic and visionary leaders. But consider the larger question: are large social changes amenable to design by a small number of actors? My inclination is to think that the capacity of calculated design for large, complex social changes is very much more limited than we often imagine. Instead, change more often emerges from the independent strategies and actions of numerous actors, only loosely coordinated with others, and proceeding from their own interests and framing assumptions. The large outcome -- the emergence of Chicago as the major metropolis of the Midwest, the forging of the EU and...