The Ant Trap

Abstract We live in a world of crowds and corporations, legislatures and languages, money and markets. These are all social objects—they are made, at least in part, by people and communities. But what exactly are these things? How are they made, and what is the role of people in making them? This book aims to rewrite our understanding of the nature of the social world and the foundations of the social sciences. The book challenges the three prevailing traditions about how the social world is made. One tradition takes the social world to be built out of people, much as traffic is built out of cars. A second tradition also takes people to be the building blocks of the social world, but focuses on the attitudes we have toward one another. The third tradition takes the social world to be a collective projection onto the physical world. The book shows that these share critical flaws. Most fundamentally, all three traditions overestimate the role of people in building the social world: they are overly anthropocentric. In the place of traditional theories, the book introduces a model based on a new distinction between the grounding and the anchoring of social facts, and illustrates the model with a study of the nature of law. It studies social groups and their constitution, and what it means for groups to take an action or have an intention. Contrary to the overwhelming consensus, these often depend on more than the actions and intentions of group members.