“The ontology of this Marxian framework treats society as a complex of social relations among social individuals. This primacy of relations enables Marxian thought to avoid the unreal dichotomy of “the individual” versus “the society.” There are no real individuals standing outside of and prior to the relational nexus: each becomes a specific individual in and through relations to others. Nor is society something standing outside of and above the complex of social relations. Avoiding this double “reification” is an important feature of Marxian ontology.”

The above passage comes form a book called Social Action Systems: Foundation and Synthesis in Sociological Theory, By Thomas J. Fararo.

The book was recommended to me by a Facebook friend, Kyle Humphres, who, like me, thinks highly of Alfred North Whitehead’s work. The author of the book, Fararo, is a sociologist who is also a Whiteheadian and I think he’s right to describe Marx’s ontology the way he does above; the avoidance of the unreal dichotomy of the individual and the society is one major reason I like both Marx’s and Whitehead’s philosophies.

For Whitehead, social relations are fundamental and everything else is derivative. A proton, for instance, that appears to be an independent substance, is actually a pattern of social relations (“actual occasions”) with perhaps a billion such relations occurring in each second. But the cool part is that that proton is not just influenced by the ordered society to which it belongs, it is also influenced a bit by all the other past occasions in the universe. “The whole world conspires to produce a new creation,” as Whitehead says.

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The image above is a re-creation of the image I found on this New Scientist article all about how city road networks tend grow like biological systems. Cool.

Tags:actual occasionsindividualitymarxontologyprocess philosophysocial theorysocietysociologyThomas J. Fararowhitehead