Simeon J. Newman

Simeon J. Newman is a political and comparative-historical sociologist with broad interests across social theory, political economy, and the philosophy of the social sciences. He completed his B.A. in Sociology and History at the University of California-Berkeley, his M.A. and Ph.D. in Sociology at the University of Michigan, and a postdoc at the Max-Weber-Institut für Soziologie, Universität Heidelberg before starting as an Assistant Professor of Sociology at the University of Toronto. His research represents an effort to revise theories of political domination in light of a keen sensitivity to change over time. He addresses questions of social processes and historical methodologies in his conceptual and epistemic work, and examines specific forms of subordination and autonomization in his empirical work. In his current book project, he shows that the unprecedented wave of urban population growth and the proliferation of squatter settlements in 20th-century Mexico City shaped politics in a non-linear pattern, initially helping to bolster the Institutional Revolutionary Party (which ruled the country for decades) and then helping to undermine it. In addition to teaching contemporary theory, he teaches courses on capitalism and on revolutions.

Recent Publications

“Social Theory and the Sociology of Clientelism: Groundwork for a Gramscian Alternative.” Sociologica 19(3):207-41, 2025.

“Aníbal Quijano’s Critical Sociology: From Dependency Theory to Coloniality” (introduction to symposium on an edited volume of Quijano’s work). Sociology of Race and Ethnicity, 10(4):566-571, 2024.

“Falsificationism Redux: In Search of Explanatory Rationality in Historical Sociology.” Journal of Critical Realism 23(5):545-64, 2024.

“Four Temporalities: Toward a Typology of Narrative Forms.” Sociological Theory 42(4):283-306, 2024.

“How Not to Lie with Comparative-Historical Sociology: A Realist Balance Sheet.” Pp. 238-60 in After Positivism: New Approaches to Comparison in Historical Sociology, edited by Nicholas Hoover Wilson and Damon Maryl (New York: Columbia University Press, 2024).

For a full list of publications, see Professor Newman’s CV or Google Scholar page.