Browsing by Subject "Social Science"

How did Georges Sorel's philosophy of violence emerge from the moderate, reformist, and liberal philosophy of the French Third Republic? This dissertation answers the question through a contextual intellectual history of Sorel's writings from the 1880s until 1908. Drawing on a variety of archives and printed sources, this dissertation situates Sorel in terms of the intellectual field of the early Third Republic. I locate the roots of Sorel's problematic at once in a broadly European late 19th century philosophy of science and in the liberal values and the political culture of the French 1870s. Sorel's engagement with Karl Marx, but also Émile Durkheim, Giambattista Vico, and other social theorists, is traced in order to explain why, despite his Marxism, Sorel confronted the twin fin-de-siècle crises of the Dreyfus Affair and Revisionism as a political liberal. I show how his syndicalism became radical, scissionistic, and anti-Statist in the post-Dreyfus context of anticlericalism leading up to the separation of Church and State in 1905. Sorel drew on figures such as Alexis de Tocqueville and Benedetto Croce to elaborate his Reflections on Violence in 1906-1908, finally transforming his political theory of institutions into an ethics of myth and individual engagement.

Sorel has been best known as an icon of radicalism as such--in shorthand, an inspiration for both Lenin and Mussolini. This political polarization has occluded Sorel's profound engagement with the foundational thinkers of the Third Republic. Against the backdrop of a systematic misunderstanding of the philosophical issues at stake, Sorel's political ideas and interventions have also been misunderstood. Not only his insights about the limits and potentials of the intellectual framework of the French Third Republic, but also their most significant contemporary resonances, have been lost. I show how and why this has been so by studying the reception of Sorel's work in the Anglophone world from the immediate postwar years until the early 1970s. Finally, I investigate resonances between Sorel's work as I have reconstructed it, and some currents in contemporary post-Marxist political thought.

Sorel is a revelatory figure in the entangled history of late 19th century liberalism and republicanism. He was profoundly engaged in the intellectual life of the French Third Republic and this, as much as his Marxism although less overtly, has shaped the meaning of his work. To return him to this context gives us a new understanding of the stakes of the philosophy of the period and the limits of its liberalism.

I argue that ethical convictions are crucial to the maintenance and transformation of social institutions. Moreover, since ethical convictions are sometimes corrigible and open to persuasive transformation, ethical persuasion can be a powerful source of social change. However, I observe that the dominant analytic techniques of the social sciences are ill equipped to understand the nature and import of ethical convictions, and even less well equipped to inform ethical persuasion. I argue this, in part, explains why social science research has often proved of little value in trying to address prominent social concerns.

This diagnosis raises a puzzle and a challenge. The puzzle is why some social scientists would wholly commit themselves to methods that cannot adequately deal with important dimensions of social structure. I show this is due to a misguided conception of science, one which seeks an "absolute perspective" that requires reducing or explaining away ethical convictions.

The challenge, once this vision of science is rejected in favor of a more pragmatic one, is 1) to understand the systematic limits of different methodological approaches and 2) to see how an account of ethics, rightly understood, can complement social scientific knowledge in service of better social outcomes.

I evaluate three dominant methodological approaches in the social sciences, namely, statistical modeling, formal modeling, and biological-behavioral research. Although all are useful within certain domains, I show that each has systematic limits relating to the dynamism of ethical convictions. I demonstrate how these methods can fail on their own terms and can blind researchers to important resources for social change, such as possibilities for persuasion.

Finally, I develop an account of the relationship between ethics, rationality, and persuasion drawing on the work of Hans-Georg Gadamer, Alasdair MacIntyre, and Charles Taylor. This account rejects prominent "scientific" attempts to explain ethical allegiances as biologically hardwired or structurally determined, and it further challenges accounts of ethical naturalism and pluralistic neutrality.

I conclude by illustrating the constructive role that ethical persuasion has played in a number of development projects, which help demonstrate my thesis that debates about visions of "the good" matter profoundly for human flourishing.

This thesis explores the intersection of social science and judicial decision making. It examines to what extent, and in what contexts, judges utilize social science in reaching and bolstering their rulings. The thesis delves into three areas of law that are typically not grouped together--integration, gay rights, and capital punishment--in order to see the similarities and differences in the use of empirical findings. Analyzing the language in judicial opinions from family courts, district courts, circuit courts, and the United States Supreme Court enabled the emergence of trends. The opinions revealed that inconsistency in the use of social science may stem from how a given issue is framed, the tide of public opinion on an issue, and whether social science in that realm is settled or not. Application of these principles to the gay rights context suggests that if the Supreme Court were to hear a case on gay marriage, a national consensus on the issue would be more outcome-determinative than settled social science.