Abstract
This introduction takes up a theme that is present in all nine chapters: Namely, is some degree of enduring stability necessary amidst intensifying social change? Do agents and actors need this in order to plan their own lives and the courses of action they will take in the social order? Many Social Theorists do maintain that (some degree of) morphostatic ‘stability’ must necessarily accompany increasing morphogenesis (the change in society’s form, organization or state). In other words, a fully Morphogenic social formation is inconceivable. This thesis is examined here in empirical terms: what positions, beliefs and practices can be said to have ‘survived the fire’ of rapid social change characterizing the last quarter of a century? The list is found small compared with the elements that were lost and many contributors maintain that searching for enduring morphostatic elements, as sources of stability, is mis-guided. Instead, they argue that morphogenesis generates its own endogenous modes of ‘stabilization’ through the beneficial consequences of changes that are not based upon competition with winners and losers, as in the current market and state. Rather, the generation of common or relational goods proves sufficiently desirable to prompt their own ‘stabilization’ by beneficiaries, concerned to promote them; their advancement itself providing a basis for planning unrelated to morphostasis.
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Notes
- 1.
Leaving aside a tendency to retreat into global ethnographies that is marked worldwide in the tables of contents of Journals.
- 2.
Such theorists would still protest, for example, against torture, but on much the same organic grounds as they oppose cruelty to animals.
- 3.
Just as the previous study, Making our Way through the World (2007) Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, showed the intentional rejection of opportunities for social mobility by some.
- 4.
In Porpora’s words, ‘Competition as an abstract relation [continually] stands behind competition as observable behaviour’ (Chap. 4, p. 78).
- 5.
A verbal statement made by Jimmy Wales at the Plenary meeting of the Pontifical Academy of Social Sciences, 2012.
- 6.
I have previously listed ‘vested interests’ as largely falling victim to the fire (2013).
- 7.
This is a position that Maccarini usefully spells out but does not personally endorse.
- 8.
See for example, the recent British decision that they trump military rights and soldiers may invoke a breach of human rights where the provision of inadequate equipment or transport is concerned.
- 9.
For example, the great plague destabilized fourteenth century feudalism when one third of the European population died, producing a shortage of agricultural labour and a reduction in income for landowners.
- 10.
It remains to be fully established that personal Meta-reflexivity is the most propitious for collective reflexivity valuing ‘relational goods’ most highly, although the tendency works in that direction. See Archer 2012.
- 11.
His argument that ‘As long as social systems could externalize the negative effects, their self-organization was compatible with the enclosure of the commons; now that they are interconnected as they are, the enclosure of the commons is not tenable any more’ (Chap. 6, p. 130) gives some ballast to Lawson’s conclusion (Chap. 2) about the effects of global finitude in denying capitalism a future.
- 12.
Stefano Zamagi (2011), uses the following metaphor to differentiate between the Total Good and the Common Good: ‘The total of an addition remains positive even if some of its entries cancel one another out. Indeed, if the objective is the maximization of the total good, it may be convenient to nullify the good (or welfare) of some, if the gains of others more than offset the losses of the former. In a multiplication, this is clearly not possible because even if only one entry is zero, so is the result of the product.’ ‘The proximate and remotes causes of a crisis foretold: A view from Catholic Social Thought’, in José T. Raga and Mary Ann Glendon (eds.), Crisis in the Global Economy: Re-Planning the Journey, Vatican City, 2011, pp. 322–3.
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Archer, M.S. (2014). Introduction: ‘Stability’ or ‘Stabilization’ – On Which Would Morphogenic Society Depend?. In: Archer, M. (eds) Late Modernity. Social Morphogenesis. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-03266-5_1
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