On the Origins of Civil Rights Law
Applying exousiology to historical analysis
A major fruit of exousiology should be scientific history, or, in other words, a scientifically supported historical method. Such a method should be based on knowledge of who had what power at any given time and which factors explained variance in agent motivation (genes, environment, information, etc). This knowledge, to whatever extent it is held with certainty, provides enough information for a historian to state who was responsible for what changes in the social state (who had the power to do it) and why (how did motivational factors change through time such that this agent or set of agents were produced?). Exousiology has now developed to the point where we can begin our first attempt at a scientific account of history: through credit theory, political agency theory, and our emerging knowledge of alpha, we can begin to shed light on the who question, and through our variance component model and our emerging knowledge of memetics, we can begin to articulate why.
Like the manuscript, this should be considered a “beta” article. In fact, it will probably be appended to the beta 1.2 edition of the manuscript, where it will be updated in subsequent editions. The purpose of writing this article now is twofold: first, exousiology is already advanced enough to shed some much needed light on recent history. Second, despite whatever shortcomings it may have, this exercise will help theoretical exousiology develop in useful directions, as it will help identify gaps in knowledge and modeling that are relevant to applying exousiology to historical methodology.
The first event to analyze, the 1954 Brown vs. Board, has been chosen for its discreteness, its relevance to the present day, and its huge importance at the time. These factors lend themselves to easy analysis, because it means that there is no lack of sources from the time in question through to the present day discussing and analyzing the causes and consequences of this event.
In this article, we will sketch out a chain of events leading up to the passage of the Act, while providing novel insight from exousiology where applicable. We will [probably] be left with many questions, and these will drive future articles on the topic, updates to this article in subsequent editions of the manuscript, and future research in exousiology.