Framework
Each author is admitted for the work it does, not as decoration. The rule for every category in the book: it stays only if it is definable by its function in the chain.
Being is what cannot be amended; knowledge is what can. Social objects exist because they are inscribed: Object = inscribed act. From the trace to the document, the register is what turns the unamendable circumstance into durable social objects.
Society is a material system with four subsystems — biological, economic, political, cultural — each with relative autonomy. An ideology is a tuple with a hard core defended against the friction of the real; nationalism is a micro-ideology and a social pseudo-technology.
Natality, plurality, mortality, the Earth and the metabolism with nature are the circumstance no one chooses. Forgiveness and promise are what keep a plural political system alive; the victory of the animal laborans and the rule of nobody are its collapse.
Three planes of the relation with the other — axiological, praxeological, epistemic — and the difference between sacrifice and massacre. Democracy’s enemies are intimate: they grow from its own values pushed beyond measure, ultraliberalism among them.
Social actions and institutions bind generations that never meet. A constitution is a transgenerational object; its endurance is the measure of a commitment that outlives its authors.
The nation is a limited, sovereign, imagined community, made possible by print-capitalism and reproduced by modular piracy across the world.
There is a system in itself that resists, and there is no unique level at which it must be described: every model is fit for a purpose. The digital re-ontologises the world from mechanism to network.
Emergent levels show novelty, autonomy and partial dependence on their base, with downward causation. The consistent problems of existence — finitude, irreversibility, unpredictability — are answered by contingent, emergent responses.
Also at work, integrated rather than separate: Ortega (circumstance and technique), De Botton (the ritual-affective layer of belonging), Pegoraro and Sacco (comparative method; the cryptotype), Elkins and Ginsburg (the Comparative Constitutions Project).