Tom Pepinsky

Category: Politics

  • The Sinosphere and Southeast Asia

    On Language Log, an interesting discussion about what the term “Sinosphere” means. Southeast Asia figures prominently here, of course, but not in a way which conveys any confidence that the contributors know anything at all about the region. For example, silly snippets like “I was Singapore there was widespread evidence of Chinese characters on store fronts (I presume it’s the same in the Philippines and Indonesia).” Right, good luck with that. I was recently in Freiburg and heard a lot of English (I presume it’s the same in Albania).

    But what really catches my attention is the comment attributed to Matt Anderson: “I refer to the Chinese and Indian areas of linguistic / cultural influence in Southeast Asia as the ‘Sinosphere’ and the ‘Indosphere’.” A bunch of related discussion follows.

    This view is common. It is of course true that the languages in the region took their syllabaries from Indic or Chinese origins, and that religions and state forms and things came through such channels too. But Sinosphere and Indosphere are commonly used to mean something much more than that. Among Western scholars, it reflects the belief that Southeast Asia is somehow a diminished or reduced thing, which can only be understood in relation to the Great Nations of China and India that have High Cultures and Important Traditions. Among Chinese and Indians, it reflects something of a global ambition for a modern sphere of influence which is somehow rooted in historical fact.

    Bah, I say. I will talk about Southeast Asia as part of the Sinosphere or the Indosphere as soon as we start talking about China and India as part of the Mongolsphere, and I am being absolutely serious.

  • Methodological Individualism and Microfoundations

    A recent post at Understanding Society gives a very nice introduction to methodological individualism (MI) in the social sciences (see also this introduction at the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, also linked in the post). The heart of the argument is about what sorts of causal arguments and explanations MI does and does not preclude:

    …to concede that x’s are composed of y’s does not entail the need for any kind of reductionism from x to y. And this extends to the idea of explanatory reduction as well. So methodological individualism does not create valid limits on the structure of social explanations, and meso-level explanations are not excluded.

    This point has broader implications for political science. To say that social entities are composed of individuals, and that political outcomes are the results of individual actions, does not entail that we must to look for individual-level evidence or explanations for these outcomes. This is related to some comments I’ve made here on  Microfoundations for Political Science, which brings a skeptical perspective to the quest for microfoundations for every political science research topic, as if the research topics can never be properly understood unless we gin up some microfoundations (or microdata, or whatever) to test them.

    One somewhat related observation. When I introduce MI to graduate students as a framework for doing comparative politics, I go back to Jeremy Bentham’s An Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation:

    The interest of the community is one of the most general expressions that can occur in the phraseology of morals: no wonder that the meaning of it is often lost. When it has a meaning, it is this. The community is a fictitious body, composed of the individual persons who are considered as constituting as it were its members. The interest of the community then is, what?—the sum of the interests of the several members who compose it.

    This is not methodological individualism as Weber meant it. But the links should be apparent. It introduces the ontological position on collectives which is so critical for MI; it also reveals the link between MI and the various traditions that are lumped together as “rational choice theory.”