Editing Social theory (section)

====Today====
In the past few decades, in response to postmodern critiques,{{Citation needed|date=March 2018}} social theory has begun to stress free will, individual choice, subjective reasoning, and the importance of unpredictable events in place of [[determinism|deterministic necessity]]. [[Rational choice theory]], [[symbolic interactionism]], [[false necessity]] are examples of more recent developments. A view among contemporary sociologists is that there are no great unifying 'laws of history', but rather smaller, more specific, and more complex laws that govern society.{{Citation needed|date=December 2017}}

Philosopher and politician [[Roberto Mangabeira Unger]] recently attempted to revise classical social theory by exploring how things fit together, rather than to provide an all encompassing single explanation of a universal reality. He begins by recognizing the key insight of classical social theory of society as an artifact, and then by discarding the law-like characteristics forcibly attached to it. Unger argues that classical social theory was born proclaiming that society is made and imagined, and not the expression of an underlying natural order, but at the same time its capacity was checked by the equally prevalent ambition to create law-like explanations of history and social development. The [[human sciences]] that developed claimed to identify a small number of possible types of social organization that coexisted or succeeded one another through inescapable developmental tendencies or deep-seated economic organization or psychological constraints. [[Marxism]] is the star example.<ref name="Unger">{{cite book|title=Social Theory: Its situation and its task|url=https://archive.org/details/falsenecessityan0000unge|url-access=registration|last=Unger|first=Roberto Mangabeira|publisher=Cambridge University Press|year=1987|location=Cambridge|isbn=9780521329750 }}</ref>{{rp|1}}

Unger, calling his efforts "super-theory", has thus sought to develop a comprehensive view of history and society. Unger does so without subsuming deep structure analysis under an indivisible and repeatable type of social organization or with recourse to law-like constraints and tendencies.<ref name="Unger" />{{rp|165}} His articulation of such a theory is in ''False Necessity: Anti-Necessitarian Social Theory in the Service of Radical Democracy'', where he uses deep-logic practice to theorize human social activity through anti-necessitarian analysis.

Unger begins by formulating the theory of false necessity, which claims that social worlds are the artifact of human endeavors. There is no pre-set institutional arrangement that societies must adhere to, and there is no necessary historical mold of development that they will follow. We are free to choose and to create the forms and the paths that our societies will take. However, this does not give license to absolute contingency. Unger finds that there are groups of institutional arrangements that work together to bring about certain institutional forms—[[liberal democracy]], for example. These forms are the basis of a social structure, which Unger calls [[formative context]]. In order to explain how we move from one formative context to another without the conventional social theory constraints of historical necessity (e.g. feudalism to capitalism), and to do so while remaining true to the key insight of individual human empowerment and [[anti-necessitarian social thought]], Unger recognized that there are an infinite number of ways of resisting social and institutional constraints, which can lead to an infinite number of outcomes. This variety of forms of resistance and [[empowered democracy|empowerment]] make change possible. Unger calls this empowerment [[negative capability]]. However, Unger adds that these outcomes are always reliant on the forms from which they spring. The new world is built upon the existing one.<ref name="fn 35">{{cite book|title=False Necessity: Anti-Necessitarian Social Theory in the Service of Radical Democracy, Revised Edition|last=Unger|first=Roberto|publisher=Verso|year=2004|isbn=978-1-85984-331-4|location=London|pages=35–36, 164, 169, 278–80, 299–301}}</ref>