Social Theory and Encountering Indeterminacy in the Flux of Cosmopolitanization

Abbas Jong

ISBN 978-3-8325-5934-2
300 pages, year of publication: 2025
price: 43.00 €

This book confronts the epistemic paralysis of social theory in the face of a cosmopolitanized world characterized by ontological fluidity, multi-scalar crises, and contested knowledge regimes. By tracing the epistemological and methodological foundations of modern social sciences, it exposes how determinacy, closure, and categorical stability became epistemic imperatives—imperatives that, from the inception of social sciences, systematically sought to suspend indeterminacy in favor of fixed, stable, and bounded frameworks.

These imperatives now obstruct the analysis of indeterminacy, relationality, and emergent social configurations, rendering dominant epistemologies increasingly incapable of engaging with the fluid and contingent character of contemporary social life. Through critical engagements with dominant epistemic and methodological assumptions, the book dismantles the cognitive architecture of methodological nationalism and inherited dichotomies in social analyses, advancing a post-foundationalist turn grounded in Configurational Analysis.

It introduces Social Configuration and Configurational Field Analysis (CFA)—methodological tools tracing historically contingent, relational constellations that emerge, mutate, and dissolve within the flux of global social life. Bridging theoretical critique and epistemological reconstruction, this work reimagines social analysis for an era in which indeterminacy is not an epistemic failure, but a constitutive condition of social being.