Platform governance matters. The failure of platform companies to govern their users has led to disasters ranging from the unwitting culpability of Facebook in the 2017 genocide of the Rohingya people, to the spread of fraud and disinformation exacerbating the COVID-19 crisis, and to the subversion of free and fair elections across the world. The Introduction to The Networked Leviathan frames the problem of platform governance and its similarity to some of the problems confronted for centuries by political states and recommends that policymakers and scholars of the internet turn to older forms of political organization for inspiration.

We discuss how three social science disciplines, economics, sociology, and political science approach history and we contrast them to history as practiced by historians. We find that the drive to identify broadly generalizable causal effects, driven by the desire to predict and shape the future (the “Delphi syndrome”), frequently prompts social scientists to use history in a way that neglects the historians’ valuable insights. At the same time, the recent methodological developments in econometric techniques that have spread through the three disciplines place enormous, often unrealistic, historical demands on social scientists. We illustrate these issues by discussing several examples and we conclude by arguing that a way ahead consists in approaching the relation between idiographic and nomothetic research principles as one that approximates a continuum rather than a dichotomy.

This book explores the relationship between history and a range of disciplines in the humanities and social sciences. Specifically, it examines the role of historical study in eight distinct subject areas: economics, political science, political theory, international relations, sociology, philosophy, law, literature and anthropology. The relevance of historical approaches withing these disciplines has shifted over the centuries. Many of them, like law and economics, originally depended on self-consciously historical procedures. These included the marshalling of evidence from past experience, philological techniques and source criticism. Between the late nineteenth and the middle of the twentieth century, this dependence was reduced under the influence of new methods of research, many indebted to models favoured by the natural sciences. Statistical, analytical and scientistic approaches secured an expanding intellectual authority while the hegemony of historical methods declined in relative terms. Functionalism, structuralism, logical positivism, formalist criticism, behaviourism and economic formalism challenged context-specific forms of inquiry. In the aftermath of this change, the essays collected in History in the Humanities and Social Sciences reflect from a variety of angles on the relevance of historical concerns to representative disciplines as they are configured today.

I argue that feminism develops a historicist critique of philosophy from within philosophy. Feminist thinkers bring to bear both history and historicist sensibilities to reveal concepts as constructs of power rather than given in nature, and reason as fractured, weaponised, and thickly situated in political structures. They thereby take aim at both philosophy and – relatedly – patriarchy. But feminists are not immune from the lure of conceptual analysis, from wanting to fix, to get right, the terms of their campaign – nor indeed from wanting themselves to claim a transcendent vantage point of truth. This chapter is about the gulf between history and philosophy, and the feminist bridge between them.

Process tracing is a familiar analytical tool in a number of sciences. Successful process tracing pulls together what is already known, believed or assumed and the various events, activities and entities in a case study in order to construct a narrative of the case. Several chapters in this volume offer accounts of narrative science that are explored through process tracing. These examples are analysed to reveal how various aspects of process tracing inform narrative and how narrative, in turn, aids process tracing in an iterative process of interpretation and reinterpretation of evidence, testing, development and revision of hypotheses, and the explanation of singular events.

Political science (PSCI) is housed in the social sciences, which together “examine what it means to be a social being, ranging from the minutiae of human behavior … to large scale social movements, demographics, economics and politics” (European Science Foundation, 2016). Undergraduate research (UR) in PSCI, whether using quantitative, qualitative or mixed methods, helps students develop critical thinking skills and tools, whereby they can apply what they learn in class to the real world, rather than just memorizing facts and figures that are forgotten after they take each semester exam.

Political institutions are currently seen in very different lights. In one version they are assimilated to institutions that dispense criteria for appropriate conduct and attributions of meanings. In a different perspective they are analysed as bulwarks of individual rights and protection from government in a theoretical framework that refers to modern liberal democracies and their defence of liberties. An additional image sees political institutions as regulators of individuals’ and groups’ egotistic drives in view of achieving self-enforcing equilibria that foster cooperation and help to overcome social dilemmas. In yet another framework they are identified with the organisational forms of political society. In this light, they are often viewed as forms of organisational symbolism, as ritual and ceremonial components that outweigh other dimensions to the point of swallowing any other type of institutional return. Finally, they are regarded as forms of government, as instruments of sharing or concentrating the coercive power of the political. It is likely these different views ask too much of political institutions. It is also likely that such widely diverging frameworks result from the application to political institutions of the properties of other kinds of institutions.

Just as the relationship between labor and antitrust is often misunderstood, this chapter argues that the relationship between antitrust and trade policy is frequently misunderstood or misrepresented, and it has important implications for labor. Above all, they are seen as operating in distinct spheres, with antitrust as a domestic policy and trade as an international one. In light of this, I first outline several common conceptual frameworks used to understand the relationship between the two policy areas, drawing on work from economics, political science, and law. Second, I contrast different views on the changes to industrial organization, globalization, and trade that have made this distinction obsolete. I argue that the problems at the intersection of domestic antitrust and labor regulation – workplace fissuring, subcontracting, franchising etc. – are in fact that same set of problems associated with power imbalances in international supply chains emphasized by scholars of globalization. I finish with a case of 20th-century trade and antitrust policy showing that many of the domestic regulatory changes to antitrust and labor were motivated by a desire to protect American industry from international trade competition. While different perspectives either frame globalization as an external driver of domestic re-regulation or as irrelevant to it, globalization as currently experienced is in part constituted by these domestic reforms.

This introductory chapter outlines the problem of social order and the main argument of the book: that the question of what holds complex and diverse societies together has become – and has remained – a philosophical puzzle in modern political science, a presupposition that has been built into our concepts, theories, and normative commitments. Having outlined the argument, the contents and the structure of the book, the chapter then provides a short background for the problem of social order in political science. The chapter recalls how this problem emerged as such in modern social and political discourse in the evolution of the modern concepts of state, nation, and society and discusses how the relations among these concepts provided nineteenth-century political thought with a solution to the problem of social order predicated on a fusion of nationality and statehood.