Tag: history

  • The temporal ontology of modernity

    I’m currently reading Mike Savage’s The Return of Inequality as I belatedly develop my PhD thesis into a book. His concept of epochal theorising shaped how I approach the work of Anthony Giddens on late modernity which I took as the foil for my thesis. It was encountering thinkers like Bauman, Beck and Giddens which […]

  • “Open, good. Closed, bad. Tattoo it on your forehead”: Placing the technology sector in social and economic history

    I’m currently reading Thomas Frank’s One Market Under God, a remarkably prescient book published in 2000 which has a lot of insight into contemporary cultures of technological evangelism. The book is concerned with what Frank sees as a transition in American life from a form of populism predicated on cultural reaction to one grounded in […]

  • Social Science History Association 2016 CFP

    SSHA CALL FOR PAPERS Macrohistorical Dynamics Network 41st Annual Meeting of the Social Science History Association Chicago IL 17-20 November 2016 Submission Deadline: 20 February 2016 “Knowledge in an Interdisciplinary World” We invite you to take part in Macrohistorical Dynamics (MHD) panels of the 41th annual meeting of the Social Science History Association, November 17-20, […]

  • Subtraction stories and social change

    The closest thing I have to an historiographical principle is to always be suspicious of what Charles Taylor calls ‘subtraction stories’. While he uses the concept to refer to congratulatory stories of rational emancipation in which human beings have gradually dispensed with myths and illusions that served to limit them, it can equally be applied to […]

  • The temporal horizons of sociology

    I just came across a passage by James Meek in which he describes being drawn to, the obscure realm of events that are too fresh for history, but too old for journalism; the murky gap of popular perception that covers the period from two years ago to about twenty-five years back, in which events are […]