World Ordering
A Social Theory of Cognitive Evolution

Taking world ordering as international relations theory's primary challenge, Adler suggests cognitive evolution, a practice-based social theory, to explain it.

Emanuel Adler (Author)

9781108419956, Cambridge University Press

Hardback, published 7 March 2019

394 pages, 1 b/w illus.
23.5 x 15.8 x 2.4 cm, 0.69 kg

'Emanuel Adler has been thinking about cognitive evolution, collective meaning, and social construction for a very long time. This book represents a major statement of his mature views, a kind of theoretical summation of decades of scholarship.' Perspectives on Politics

Drawing on evolutionary epistemology, process ontology, and a social-cognition approach, this book suggests cognitive evolution, an evolutionary-constructivist social and normative theory of change and stability of international social orders. It argues that practices and their background knowledge survive preferentially, communities of practice serve as their vehicle, and social orders evolve. As an evolutionary theory of world ordering, which does not borrow from the natural sciences, it explains why certain configurations of practices organize and govern social orders epistemically and normatively, and why and how these configurations evolve from one social order to another. Suggesting a multiple and overlapping international social orders' approach, the book uses three running cases of contested orders - Europe's contemporary social order, the cyberspace order, and the corporate order - to illustrate the theory. Based on the concepts of common humanity and epistemological security, the author also submits a normative theory of better practices and of bounded progress.

Prologue. The crux of the matter
Part I. Social Constructivism as Cognitive Evolution: 1. Samurai crabs and international social orders
2. Evolutionary ontology: from being to becoming
3. Evolutionary epistemology
4. Practices, background knowledge, communities of practice, social orders
Part II. Cognitive Evolution Theory and International Social Orders: 5. International social orders
6. Cognitive evolution theory: social mechanisms and processes
7. Agential social mechanisms
8. Creative variation
9. Selective retention
10. Better practices and bounded progress
Epilogue: world ordering.

Subject Areas: Geopolitics [JPSL], International relations [JPS], Social theory [JHBA], Social & political philosophy [HPS]