Abstract

‘Naturalism’ about the ontology of society can most blandly be characterized as the belief that social phenomena are among the class of natural phenomena. Contemporary scholars are apt to regard this thesis as bland because its denial seems quaint at best, if not outright unhinged, after a century and a half of development in the social sciences. There has, however, been a powerful tradition in (at least) Western culture that has understood the ‘artificial’ as a primary contrast class with the ‘natural’, and which has interpreted the social as a creation of human beings that stands over and against the natural realm. Often..