Welcome!

Welcome to my research and teaching web-site, which provides information about my past, present, and future activities as a social scientist and social theorist.  This web-site will be updated periodically, regarding the importance and contributions of theoretical sociology and social theory as they illuminate to a greater or lesser extent the proliferating changes modern societies, and the human species, are facing as we move further into the twenty-first century.  Issues and challenges that social theorists have addressed and examined since the late seventeenth century have proven to remain relevant, and the answers and strategies they proposed continue to enable us to face proliferating and newly emerging dilemmas, paradoxes, and contradictions in constructive ways.  Yet, individual, collective and institutional inertia stand in the way of re-conceiving our distinctive role as the most powerful species on, as well as our responsibility for, planet Earth.  In order to facilitate qualitative change, such re-conceiving must need to resonate with the norms and values according to which we claim to (want to) live, exist, and co-exist with each other and other species.  Yet, it appears that reorienting ourselves to a past we should strive to prevent from recurring has increasing appeal to a continuously growing number of individuals, social groups, and social movements.  What would it take, then, to turn again towards the future with a constructive attitude — as the quintessential human challenge — to face impending problems in ways that will require that we “jump over the shadow” that concrete socio-historical conditions are casting on all of us?  Evidently, it would be necessary to imagine entirely new constellations of facts and norms, of business, labor, and government, of the past, present, and future, rather than submitting and assimilating ourselves and each other to heteronomous forces we barely are able to identify and grasp, and whose vanishing point appears to be beyond human concerns, aspirations, and considerations.  Providing indications for access roads to such “jumping over our own shadows” is the purpose of the content of this site.