A morphogenetic-relational account of social emergence: processes and forms

Global society is often regarded as disrupting identities and blurring boundaries, one which entails giving up ideas of structure and fixity. Globalization supposedly introduces a “liquid” era of fluidity where everything is possible, and anything goes. Nevertheless, its current dynamics are developing into a harder reality: wars, economic crisis, the haunting risk of pandemics, the ever worsening food supply crisis, and the environmental challenge. These social facts call for a dramatic shift in the optimistic cosmopolitan mood and the thought that we can build and rebuild ourselves and our world as we please, at least for the most developed countries. The challenges we face produce new forms of social life and individual experience. They also require us to develop new frameworks to analyze emergent contexts, institutional complexes and morphogenetic fields, and new ways to understand human agency and the meaning of emancipation. In all of this, the challenge is to engage with this “new world” in a meaningful way, a task for which a realist mind set is badly needed. Critical realism provides a strong theoretical framework that can meet the challenge, and the book explores its contribution to making sense of, and coming to terms with, this historical formation. The concept of “engagement” is taken not only as a generic keyword, but also as a symbol of a particular attitude within the social sciences. The term alludes to and can take on different meanings: (a) an epistemological attitude: against language theories and postmodernity, reasserting reality, with which we have to engage; furthermore, relational observation means there is a relationship “engaging” the observer with the object observed. Overall, it means we want to turn towards social reality and move away from approaches that end up dismissing as nonsense all the problems and phenomena which happen to be of growing significance to most people, mostly everywhere. (b) The term in question also serves as symbol of the mediation between actors and systems/society/institutions/structures. Engagement is therefore used as a way to reflect upon agency and socialization, institutions and their emergence, and historical formations as resulting from complex emergent effects of actions. The book falls into three parts. The first, “Social Ontology and a New Historical Formation”, deals with mainly social ontological issues, insofar as they are connected to social scientific and public issues in the emerging society of the XXI century. The second, “Being human and the adventure of agency”, is concerned with the way human beings adapts to the “new world” of “our times”, and comes up with innovative models of agency and socialization. The third, “The constitutionalization of the new world”, explores critical realist perspectives, as compared to system-theoretical ones, on the issue of global order and justice.