International Relations

Scientific fields are shaped by many apparently contingent and capricious facts. This is one of the key insights of science and technology studies. And yet eventually it seems that scientific communities succeed in going beyond the limitations of these somewhat arbitrary starting points. The human sciences are especially vulnerable to this kind of arbitrariness, and facts about race, gender, and sexuality have been seen to have created arbitrary starting points in various fields of the social and human sciences. A case in point is the discipline of social psychology. Social psychology studies how individual human beings are shaped in their behavior by the social arrangements in which they mature and live. And yet all too often it has emerged that researchers in this discipline have brought with them a lot of baggage in the form of their own social assumptions which have distorted the theories and methods they have developed. Rob Sellers is an accomplished social psychologist at the Uni...

David Sanger's very interesting recent book, The Perfect Weapon: War, Sabotage, and Fear in the Cyber Age , is a timely read this month, following the indictments of twelve Russian intelligence officers for hacking the DNC in 2015. Sanger is a national security writer for the New York Times , and has covered cyber security issues for a number of years. He and William Broad and John Markoff were among the first journalists to piece together the story behind the Stuxnet attack on Iran's nuclear fuel program (the secret program called Olympic Games), and the book also offers some intriguing hints about the possibility of "left of launch" intrusions by US agencies into the North Korean missile program. This is a book that everyone should read. It greatly broadens the scope of what most of us think about under the category of "hacking". We tend to think of invasions of privacy and identity theft when we think of nefarious uses of the internet; but Sanger makes it...

I've argued for the idea that social phenomena are generated by the actions, thoughts, and mental frameworks of myriad actors ( link ). This expresses the idea of ontological individualism. But I also believe that social arrangements -- structures, ideologies, institutions -- have genuine effects on the actions of individual actors and populations of actors and on intermediate-level social structures. There is real downward and lateral causation in the social world. Are these two views compatible? I believe they are compatible. The negative view holds that what appears to be downward causation is really just the workings of the lower-level components through their aggregation dynamics -- the lower struts of Coleman's boat ( link ). So when we say "the ideology of nationalism causes the rise of ultraconservative political leaders", this is just a shorthand for "many voters share the values of nationalism and elect candidates who propose radical solutions to issue...

Stephen Greenblatt is a literary critic and historian whose insights into philosophy and the contemporary world are genuinely and consistently profound. His most recent book returns to his primary expertise, the corpus of Shakespeare's plays. But it is -- by intention or otherwise -- an  important reflection on the presidency of Donald Trump as well. The book is  Tyrant: Shakespeare on Politics , and it traces in fascinating detail the evolution and fates of tyrants through Shakespeare's plays. Richard III gets a great deal of attention, as do Lear and Macbeth. Greenblatt makes it clear that Shakespeare was interested both in the institutions of governance within which tyrants seized power, and the psychology of the tyrant. The parallels with the behavior and psychology of the current US President are striking. Here is how Greenblatt frames his book. �A king rules over willing subjects,� wrote the influential sixteenth-century Scottish scholar George Buchanan, �a tyrant over u...

The idea of generativity in the realm of the social world expresses the notion that social phenomena are generated by the actions and thoughts of the individuals who constitute them, and nothing else ( link , link ). More specifically, the principle of generativity postulates that the properties and dynamic characteristics of social entities like structures, ideologies, knowledge systems, institutions, and economic systems are produced by the actions, thoughts, and dispositions of the set of individuals who make them up. There is no other kind of influence that contributes to the causal and dynamic properties of social entities. Begin with a population of individuals with such-and-so mental and behavioral characteristics; allow them to interact with each other over time; and the structures we observe emerge as a determinate consequence of these interactions. This view of the social world lends great ontological support to the methods associated with agent-based models ( link ). Here is...

According to David Halberstam in his outstanding history of the war in Vietnam, The Best and the Brightest , a prime cause of disastrous decision-making by Presidents Kennedy and Johnson was an institutional imperative in the Defense Department to come up with a set of facts that conformed to what the President wanted to hear. Robert McNamara and McGeorge Bundy were among the highest-level miscreants in Halberstam's account; they were determined to craft an assessment of the situation on the ground in Vietnam that conformed best with their strategic advice to the President. Ironically, a very similar dynamic led to one of modern China's greatest disasters, the Great Leap Forward famine in 1959. The Great Helmsman was certain that collective agriculture would be vastly more productive than private agriculture; and following the collectivization of agriculture, party officials in many provinces obliged this assumption by reporting inflated grain statistics throughout 1958 and 195...

When we think of the issues of health and safety that exist in a modern complex economy, it is impossible to imagine that these social goods will be produced in sufficient quantity and quality by market forces alone. Safety and health hazards are typically regarded as "externalities" by private companies -- if they can be "dumped" on the public without cost, this is good for the profitability of the company. And state regulation is the appropriate remedy for this tendency of a market-based economy to chronically produce hazards and harms, whether in the form of environmental pollution, unsafe foods and drugs, or unsafe industrial processes. David Moss and John Cisternino's New Perspectives on Regulation provides some genuinely important perspectives on the role and effectiveness of government regulation in an epoch which has been shaped by virulent efforts to reduce or eliminate regulations on private activity. This volume is a report from the Tobin Project. It...