Every event, past, present or future, occurs in the dimensions of time and space. Invoking the future inherently involves invoking the past and the present. We are in space, and space beckons. More than any other time in history, we are now a time of profound discovery of our universe.
What does it mean to know something? How can we know something about the future, when the future is inherently uncertain? How can we infer some things from other things? What is truth in social world? Is there an objective reality or is everyone’s reality different? Or both?
Since the publication of Bacon’s experimental method in 1620, scientific knowledge has exploded and, with it, technological applications of that knowledge to service all aspects of production and consumption. The impacts on society have been wonderful and, according to some, devastatingly destructive.
As technologies are deployed and impact how we live socially, economically and politically and quotidianly, there are people or peoples who benefit from that change and, almost inevitably, people or peoples who suffer a detriment. Not everyone will be happy.
How and why do people act individually, jointly, collectively? How do groups make decisions? And act upon those decisions? How and why do people dissent socially, politically or economically?
Which actions are private and which are public and how do we decide? What is the public sphere and what does participation in it involve. How does it relate to politics and to economics? What is power and how is power used? Who has power and why? Is that distribution of power fair or just?
Because we live socially, institutions pervade all aspects of our lives. We can define them as systems of established and prevalent social rules that structure social interactions. Language, money, law, systems of weights and measures, table manners, and firms (and other organizations) are thus all institutions. (Hodgson, 2006). In Bacon’s terms, they concern the tribe, the marketplace and the theatre, wherever there is social interaction.
Conflict can arise within societies, at governmental level and within states and between different states. Whether one regards the international environment as essentially anarchic (per IR realism) or as a liberal, rules-based order, conflicts will arise and must be resolved, peaceably or otherwise. Within states, conflicts will be resolved through political or legal means.
Market-based, liberal democracy is only three hundred years old, at most. In that time, it has not always worked as well as its advocates might wish. In its most zealous form, laissez-faire market capitalism, contradictions abound; perhaps most significantly that such a state has never existed. The biggest challenge modernity has posed to liberal democracy is certainly the degeneration of Germany’s Weimar Republic resulting in the democratic election of the National Socialist German Workers’ Party (NSDAP)and its leader, Adolf Hitler being named Chancellor in 1933. Thinking critical of liberal market democracy has existed in its mature form at least since Marx published Poverty of Philosophy in Brussels in 1847 as a direct critique, ironically, of proto-anarchist Pierre-Joseph Proudhon’s 1846 book The System of Economic Contradictions, or The Philosophy of Poverty. Marx’s 1987 work offers a foretaste of many of the ideas he subsequently developed 20 years later in Capital.
