History of the Social Sciences

Between Conservatism and Fascism in Troubled Times: Der Fall Bernhard

by guest contributor Steven McClellan The historian Fritz K. Ringer claimed that for one to see the potency of ideas from great thinkers and to properly situate their importance in their particular social and intellectual milieu, the historian had to… Continue Reading →

2017/05/17 1

Evolution Made Easy: Henry Balfour, Pitt Rivers, and the Evolution of Art

by guest contributor Laurel Waycott In 1893, Henry Balfour, curator of the Pitt Rivers Museum in Oxford, UK, conducted an experiment. He traced a drawing of a snail crawling over a twig, and passed it to another person, whom he… Continue Reading →

2017/04/26 1

Towards an Intellectual History of Modern Poverty

by guest contributor Tejas Parasher In Chapter 3 of The History Manifesto, David Armitage and Jo Guldi support historians’ increasing willingness to engage with topics generally left to economists. Whereas the almost total dominance of game-theoretic modelling in economics… Continue Reading →

2017/04/10 2

Jared Sparks’ American Archives

by guest contributor Derek O’Leary Jared Sparks—editor, historian, Harvard president—deposited a bundle of primary documents at Boston’s Massachusetts Historical Society (MHS) in the fall of 1838. It held a dozen or so political tracts, pamphlets, and newspapers from the middle… Continue Reading →

2017/01/23 0

Croce between Hughes & White

by contributing editor Eric Brandom The AHA met in Denver this past weekend. What follows is not a conference report, although there was much worthy of that. It is, rather, a response of sorts to two of the events I… Continue Reading →

2017/01/12 2

Malthus Redivivus/Malthus Revisited

by guest contributor E.G. Gallwey In the history of ideas, the rate of population growth or decline has carried strong associations with the trajectories of societies and states. The eighteenth-century writer Thomas Robert Malthus’s principle of population has set the… Continue Reading →

2016/07/04 0

Max Weber and Carl Schmitt: Crossroads of Crisis

by guest contributor Pedro T. Magalhães Ideas have unintended consequences. Max Weber, the founding father of German sociology, must have been keenly aware of this. In The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism (1904/05), he put forward the bold… Continue Reading →

2016/05/09 2

Opinion Polls in International Perspective: The Case of West Germany

by guest contributor Sonja Ostrow One can hardly open a newspaper without being inundated by graphs and charts offering up the latest poll numbers on presidential candidates. Almost as prominent are poll results covering attitudes toward everything from religion to… Continue Reading →

2016/03/23 4

Wilhelm Reich: A Disappointed Utopian

by guest contributor Zachary Levine What should we do when brilliant thinkers push their ideas in strange directions? Should we try to interpret their later work in the context of their earlier work, or vice versa? Should we reject their… Continue Reading →

2016/01/11 3

Asking the Social Question

by guest contributor Steven McClellan What’s in a name? When I began thinking about writing a dissertation on the history of the Verein für Sozialpolitik (Association for Social Policy), I assumed that the largest problem would be related to the… Continue Reading →

2015/12/21 0

« Older posts

The Journal of the History of Ideas Blog

Tag

History of the Social Sciences

Latest posts