THE FUTURE OF POST-HUMAN SOCIOLOGY
Two Volume Set

Book Abstract

Is sociology really so revealing that, as Tom Wolfe once claimed, “once I had a little exposure to it [sociology], I said, ‘Hey, here’s the key. Here’s the key to understanding life and all its forms.’” (BQ 2016) This positive view on sociology can be contrasted with the negative one by Richard Russo, who critically pointed out that “even at its most perceptive, sociology deals in abstractions.” (BQ 2016a)

Contrary to these opposing views (and other ones as will be discussed in the book), sociology (in relation to structure and agency—as well as other dichotomies) is neither possible (or impossible) nor desirable (or undesirable) to the extent that the respective ideologues (on different sides) would like us to believe, such that there is no structure without agency (and vice versa), as shown in the principles on both “structure” and “agency” in “existential dialectics” (in Chapter Four).

Needless to say, this challenge to the conventional debate does not mean that sociology is trivial, or that those diverse fields (related to sociology)—such as religion, criminology, jurisprudence, health care, education, science, biology, data analysis, linguistics, philosophy, anthropology, economics, political science, psychology, computing, social studies, history, literary theory, ecology, demography, communication studies, technology studies, and so on—should be rejected. (WK 2016) Of course, neither of these extreme views is reasonable.

Instead, this book offers an alternative (better) way to understand the future of sociology (and related fields) in regard to the dialectic relationship between structure and agency (and those in other dichotomies)—while learning from different approaches in the literature but without favoring any one of them (nor integrating them, since they are not necessarily compatible with each other). More specifically, this book offers a new theory (that is, the post-dichotomous theory of society) to go beyond the existing approaches in a novel way and is organized in four chapters.

This seminal project will change the way that we think about sociology (in relation to the dialectic relationship between structure and agency—as well as those in other dichotomies) from the combined perspectives of the mind, nature, society, and culture, with enormous implications for the human future and what I originally called its “post-human” fate.