A New Social Philosophy: The Clustering Theory and Social Complexity

Manuel De Landa, a Mexican philosopher and artist, and one of the original thinkers of our time, and a representative of new materialism, develops a groundbreaking social ontology in "A New Philosophy of Society."

This new ontology does not consider social processes in terms of reified generalities such as "individual" and "society," and similarly overturns the idea that they occur on two fixed levels, micro and macro. The realistic social ontology defined in the book treats social entities, ranging from individuals to massive nation-states, as assemblages constructed through historical processes. Although it draws upon French thinker Gilles Deleuze's theory of assemblage, this approach contains the fundamental ideas and concepts of a "new theory of assemblage" that expands upon his approach by examining its difficulties and shortcomings, taking it a step further, and allowing for the elimination of the flaws in social realism. In addition to Deleuze, thinkers such as Max Weber, Fernand Braudel, Michel Foucault, Pierre Bourdieu, and Erving Goffman are also featured in this book.

"A New Philosophy of Society" is an original as well as a profound analysis of modern society; most importantly, it is a radical opposition to reductionism, essentialism, and reification.