The Social Ontology of Capitalism: An Introduction

Abstract

This book emerged from the 2015 Symposium for New Directions in Critical Social Theory at Iowa State University, May 11–12. The original idea for the Symposium was proposed at an April 2007 meeting of the Midwest Sociological Society in Chicago and was put into motion the next year as a biennial gathering of a handful of sociologists, Germanists, and philosophers in Ames, Iowa, with the goal of surveying the state of critical social theory in hopes of establishing vectors for future interdisciplinary research. As of June 2016, the Symposium has grown into a larger and more formally structured workshop incorporating several days of sessions devoted to the reinvention of critical social theory and critical sociology. Revised and thematically integrated papers from the 2014 meeting were published in 2016 as Capitalism’s Future: Alienation, Emancipation and Critique, edited by Daniel Krier and Mark P. Worrell, as Volume 85 of the Studies in Critical Social Sciences (Brill). The present volume is dedicated to an exploration of the ontology of capitalist society.