J Levi Martins
Biographic Data
| ID | 908 |
|---|---|
| NAME | J Levi Martins |
| GIVEN NAMES | J Levi |
| FAMILY NAME | Martins |
| SIGNATURE | MARTINS J L |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of Chicago |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-4211-1791 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 82 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 911 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 82 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1941 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2025 |
| H-INDEX | 16 |
Duality, dissimilarity, and diversity
The State and the Emergence of the First American Party System
Prevailing theories about the nature and development of the democratic party system fail to account for the important case of the United States. Using a novel dataset on legislators and roll call votes in the New York State Assembly after the ratification of the U.S. Constitution, we show that, contrary to existing accounts, legislative parties had already formed at this early stage. Yet these parties did not arise from the translation of social …
Persistence and change in structural signatures of tie formation over time
Forum
In a recent issue (Vol. 67, No. 2), we published a new translation, by Matthew Carey, of Claude Lévi-Strauss's seminal but often overlooked essay "The Mathematics of Man," which was originally published in French in 1956. As Susanne Küchler suggested in her introduction to the text, Lévi-Strauss's insistence on seeing mathematics as more than just a means of quantification and statistical analysis should be of enduring inspiration to anthropologi…
How (Not) to Control for Population Size in Ecological Analyses
It is common for social scientists to use formal quantitative methods to compare ecological units such as towns, schools, or nations. In many cases, the size of these units in terms of the number of individuals subsumed in each differs substantially. When the variables in question are counts, there is generally some attempt to neutralize differences in size by turning variables into ratios or by controlling for size. But methods that are appropri…
Cognitive Plausibility and Qualitative Research
Small and Calarco have done the field a great service; we must go further and arm readers with better understandings of when authors have in fact fulfilled Small and Calarco's strictures
Response to Vaisey 1
This article is a response to Stephen Vaisey’s (2021) article, “Welcome to the Real World: Escaping the Sociology of Culture and Cognition.”
Theory at the edge of empire’
Reed’s intervention in theories of political power is considered, critiqued and continued: we may understand chains of authorization as stretching from sovereign to agent and back again, chains whose links may be called into question and repaired only via Goffmanian performance
The structure of cultural experience
On the Other Side of Interests
Measuring Mohr social capital
Some Methods for the Analysis of Event Sequence Data from Multiple Respondents
The analysis of sequence data poses a great challenge; existing methods for the comparison of sequences take what theoretical grounding they have from other fields (most importantly, genetics). We argue that set theory provides a way of establishing the relations between sequences that has a natural application to the case in which the sequences are orderings of a set of events, all compatible with an underlying partial order shared by multiple r…
Introduction. Reconfiguring nature
The central aim of this special issue is to explore the role of expert knowledge in shaping the way countries have sought to ensure a continuing supply of natural resources in order to feed and fuel processes of industrialisation. These case studies illustrate the way in which the competition for resources not only profoundly affects those countries in the Global North which are the beneficiaries of the resources but also the populations of the c…
Authoritarian Personality
The Authoritarian Personality was a generative, though methodologically flawed, approach in political psychology to explain political attitudes by pathologizing political opponents. Current work that connects partisanship or ideology to psychological or biological considerations is more promising but may suffer from similar blind spots
Relating social and symbolic relations in quantitative text analysis. A study of parliamentary discourse in the Weimar Republic
On the Other Side of Values
The concept of values is currently enjoying renewed interest in sociology; indeed, many claim that it must be treated as central to any theory of action. As introduced to American sociology from Europe by Parsons, it was transformed from a condition of possibility into an intrinsic element of the action system that could link abstract cultural imperatives to patterns of concrete behavior. When Parsons's system dissolved, the notion of values frac…
Local Network Regressions
The authors propose and illustrate an exploratory technique to shed light on the degree to which bivariate relations between individual-level variables themselves vary over a network. The authors discuss limitations and possible extensions
See It with Figures
Bourdieu’s Unlikely Contribution to the Human Sciences
Chapter abstract The author of this chapter proposes that we consider Bourdieu’s work neither on its own terms, nor in the terms of the postwar French academic field, but in terms of the general problems that it solved. When we do so, we find that Bourdieu developed lines of thinking that had stalled in Germany and the United States. The former was the field theoretic tradition associated with Gestalt psychology and empirical phenomenology; the s…
Status and Career Mobility in Organizational Fields
Using a set of user-generated data, we examine patterns in the careers of professional chefs. We argue that this is one of many cases in which careers must be understood as shaped by dual structures—the typical occupational structure within a firm, and the organization of firms in a larger field. We then demonstrate how career trajectories may be formalized as movement through a two-dimensional space defined by status in these structures. Buildin…
Protest Movements and Citizen Discontent
Why do citizens indicate support for protest movements such as the Tea Party and Occupy Wall Street? There have been two general sets of explanations. One set emphasizes that support comes from those for whom the existing party system, and the ideological differentiation that corresponds to party divisions, are irrelevant. The second set takes the opposite tack, and emphasizes that the only thing that supporters of protests movements find lacking…
Doorway to the dharma of duality
A formal approach to meaning
Getting off the Cartesian Clothesline
Most attempts to examine the relation between networks and events begin with what we should question-that it invariably helps us to imagine that our units fall neatly into 'events' that occupy distinct points in Cartesian time. I show that the core insights that inspired contemporary network analysis come from a structuralist conception which is both far more theoretically generative than the Cartesian vision and does less violence to the nature …
The Structure of Node and Edge Generation in a Delusional Social Network
A rare set of data on a changing social network of personalities, drawn by a sufferer of Multiple Personality Disorder are investigated using random graph theory. The key features guiding the patient’s production of these wholly delusional networks, features which define her “schema” of social network, are derived by fitting a family of nested distributions. From this, we can derive a tentative hypothesis of how the laity may understand the logic…
The Explanation of Social Action
The social sciences have increasingly placed all their bets on a notion of explanation that turns on linking abstractions through causal relations. This explanatory vocabulary is, if analysts deem it necessary, set against that developed by actors, and we justify this by pointing to everyday people's limited abilities to survive destructive interrogation of their motives. We are wronger than they; it is possible to produce a rigorous social scien…
Power, Authority, and the Constraint of Belief Systems
This article proposes an approach to studying the formal properties of the belief systems of groups. Belief systems may be quantified in terms of their degree of consensus (the degree to which all group members agree) and their degree of “tightness” (the degree to which holding some belief implies holding or not holding other beliefs). Two theoretical claims link the production of tightness and consensus to formal properties of social structure. …
Life's a beach but you're an ant, and other unwelcome news for the sociology of culture
Political Position and Social Knowledge
The nature of social cognition—how we “know about” the social world—is one of the most deceptively obvious problems for sociology. Because we know what we know, we often think that we know how or why we know it. Here, we investigate one particular aspect of social cognition, namely, what we will call “political ideology”—that is, people’s self-placement on a dimension on which persons can be arrayed from left to right. We focus on that understand…
The Authoritarian Personality, 50 Years Later
Adorno, Frenkel-Brunswik, Levinson, and Sanford's The Authoritarian Personality is probably the most deeply flawed work of prominence in political psychology. The methodological, procedural, and substantive errors of this study are well known, but they are frequently simply attributed to poor methodological judgments, issues of scaling (such as response set), or Freudian theories that legitimated circular interpretations. But a more fundamental b…
Theories of Sexual Stratification
The American tradition of action theory failed to produce a useful theory of the possible existence of trans-individual consistencies in sexual desirability. Instead, most sociological theorists have relied on market metaphors to account for the logic of sexual action. Through a critical survey of sociological attempts to explain the social organization of sexual desiring, this article demonstrates that the market approach is inadequate, and that…
What do animals do all day
Coding, counting and cultural cartography
The relation of aggregate statistics on beliefs to culture and cognition
On the Other Side of Values
The concept of values is currently enjoying renewed interest in sociology; indeed, many claim that it must be treated as central to any theory of action. As introduced to American sociology from Europe by Parsons, it was transformed from a condition of possibility into an intrinsic element of the action system that could link abstract cultural imperatives to patterns of concrete behavior. When Parsons's system dissolved, the notion of values frac…
The Use of the Conceptual Category of Race in American Sociology, 1937-99
We examine how mainstream sociology has used race as an explanatory factor by examining papers in the American Sociological Review between 1937 and 1999. We find a dramatic increase in the likelihood that sociologists will take race into account, and we suggest that methodological innovations are largely responsible for creating an environment in which it is taken for granted that analysts in many fields will "control for race." This pattern of u…
Political Action and Party Formation in the United States Constitutional Convention
Using data on state voting patterns, we examine the positions taken by state delegations on questions that arose over the course of the United States Constitutional Convention of 1787. Whereas existing accounts tend to assume that this type of collective decision making can be understood by linking fixed interests-either material or ideological-to specific, decontextualized propositions, we argue that the meaning of any one issue was dependent up…
The Looking Glass Self
We test the hypothesis inspired by Mead and Cooley that one's self-perceptions are an internalization of the perceptions of the views of others, using a large set of network data from 56 naturally occurring communities. The results are compatible with an internalization model, whereby self-conceptions are instilled through interaction with high-status alters. Yet it does not seem that personality is simply an impression made in a malleable mind b…
Doorway to the dharma of duality
Formation and Stabilization of Vertical Hierarchies among Adolescents
Social psychological investigations of hierarchy formation have been almost entirely confined to the case of task-oriented groups and hence have produced theories that turn on the existence of such a task. But other forms of vertical hierarchy may emerge in non-task groups. One form, orderings of dominance, has been studied among animals using systematic behavioral observations, but almost never among humans, despite many discussions of such stru…
Relating social and symbolic relations in quantitative text analysis. A study of parliamentary discourse in the Weimar Republic
Algebraic Representations of Beliefs and Attitudes
A partial order of discrete beliefs based on a generalization of item order in Guttman scaling generates a nonunidimensional collection of latent belief states that can be represented by a distributive lattice. By incorporating misclassification errors under local independence assumptions, the lattice structure is transformed into a latent class model for observed response states. We apply this model to survey responses dealing with government we…
Entropic Measures of Belief System Constraint
What is ideology
Political ideology has been a confusing topic for social analysts, and those who attempted to eschew judgmental reductions of others’ conceptions and develop a non-polemical political psychology found ideology behaving in ways that defeated their theories of political reasoning. I argue that political ideology can best be understood as actors’ theorization of their own position, and available strategies, in a political field
Is Power Sexy
Using a set of network data from a large number of naturally occurring groups, this study seeks to determine whether powerful people are more likely to be seen as sexy by others than are persons without power. In particular, this study disentangles two aspects of power that are often confused, namely power as a dyadic relationship and power as an individual characteristic or position (which the author calls “status”). Most sociological theories t…
Consensus, Polarization, and Alignment in the Economics Profession
Scholars interested in the political influence of the economics profession debate whether the discipline is unified by policy consensus or divided among competing schools or factions. We address this question by reanalyzing a unique recent survey of elite economists. We present a theoretical framework based on a formal sociological approach to the structure of belief systems and propose alignment, rather than consensus or polarization, as a model…
Authoritarian Personality
The Authoritarian Personality was a generative, though methodologically flawed, approach in political psychology to explain political attitudes by pathologizing political opponents. Current work that connects partisanship or ideology to psychological or biological considerations is more promising but may suffer from similar blind spots
On the Limits of Sociological Theory
Sociological Theory is an attempt to make sense of an intuited level of order transcending the level on which we as individuals live and think. This implies a dual explanatory task: on one hand, to provide a substantively meaningful third-person framework for the formation of theoretical statements, and, on the other, to provide an intuitively accessible answer to the question of why social order exists in the first place. A coherent linkage betw…
Algebraic Representations of Beliefs and Attitudes II
It may often be the case that the beliefs about which survey researchers query respondents are composed of discrete components, such that holding all of the components is necessary to give a “yes” response. Simple logical relations, which some researchers have proposed may structure belief data, may obtain between these components, and not between the beliefs that are actually measured. This paper demonstrates that an algebraic inversion of a dat…
The myth of the consumption-oriented economy and the rise of the desiring subject
El Alferez Real
Don Bonifacio
El alférez real
Spanish Review Grammar
Easy Spanish American Reader
Inter-Departmental Cooperation
a corollary to this it follows that the length of the duration of the action is not the important thing but the perspective with which one regards it. A state or an action that lasted for five minutes may be and often is expressed by the imperfect, whereas another state that lasted for one or many centuries may be expressed in the preterite. If we regard the action of five minutes as it was in progress we have the imperfect, whereas a thousand ye…
A Teacher of Spanish Looks at Italian
A Guatemalan Man of Letters in Italy
El hombre de oro
The Cuentos of Adel López Gómez
Mastering Spanish
Hojas literarias
Peldanos, Steps
Behavioral and psychosocial factors in Aids
Chance and Causality
I welcome the attention to the importance of in sociological theory in the recent paper by Jerome Manis and Bernard Meltzer (1994), and their attempt to sketch alternatives to the causal determinism assumed by many sociologists, but I believe that they have not correctly specified the challenges and possibilities in sociological explanation. Manis and Meltzer argue that there exists a class of events which possess the following overlapping featur…
Structuring the sexual revolution
Structures of power in naturally occurring communities
Authoritative Knowledge and Heteronomy in Classical Sociological Theory
This article traces the impact of philosophical questions regarding the grounds of moral autonomy and heteronomy (rule-from-another as opposed to rule-from-oneself) on classical sociological theory, arguing that both Weber and Durkheim understood sociology to have a contribution to make in the debate with Kant over the grounds of ethical action. Both insisted that the only possible ethical action was one within the bounds of rational knowledge th…
Algebraic Representations of Beliefs and Attitudes
A partial order of discrete beliefs based on a generalization of item order in Guttman scaling generates a nonunidimensional collection of latent belief states that can be represented by a distributive lattice. By incorporating misclassification errors under local independence assumptions, the lattice structure is transformed into a latent class model for observed response states. We apply this model to survey responses dealing with government we…
The myth of the consumption-oriented economy and the rise of the desiring subject
Entropic Measures of Belief System Constraint
Algebraic Representations of Beliefs and Attitudes II
It may often be the case that the beliefs about which survey researchers query respondents are composed of discrete components, such that holding all of the components is necessary to give a “yes” response. Simple logical relations, which some researchers have proposed may structure belief data, may obtain between these components, and not between the beliefs that are actually measured. This paper demonstrates that an algebraic inversion of a dat…
The relation of aggregate statistics on beliefs to culture and cognition
What do animals do all day
On the Limits of Sociological Theory
Sociological Theory is an attempt to make sense of an intuited level of order transcending the level on which we as individuals live and think. This implies a dual explanatory task: on one hand, to provide a substantively meaningful third-person framework for the formation of theoretical statements, and, on the other, to provide an intuitively accessible answer to the question of why social order exists in the first place. A coherent linkage betw…
Sociology (49 works) · Epistemology (34 works) · Computer Science (31 works) · Psychology (31 works) · Philosophy (29 works) · Political science (26 works) · Mathematics (21 works) · Social and Cultural Dynamics (21 works) · Law (16 works) · Social Psychology (16 works)