Manuel DeLanda: A New Philosophy of Society: Assemblage Theory and Social Complexity (2006)

Manuel DeLanda is a distinguished writer, artist and philosopher. In his new book, he offers a fascinating look at how the contemporary world is characterized by an extraordinary social complexity. Since most social entitles, from small communities to large nation-states, would disappear altogether if human minds ceased to exist, Delanda proposes a novel approach to social ontology that asserts the autonomy of social entities from the conceptions we have of them. This highly original and important book takes the reader on a journey that starts with personal relations and climbs up one scale at a time all the way to territorial states and beyond. Only by experiencing this upward movement can we get a sense of the irreducible social complexity that characterizes the contemporary world.

Publisher Continuum International Publishing Group, 2006
ISBN 0826491693, 9780826491695
142 pages

Keywords and phrases
deterritorialization, Gilles Deleuze, Fernand Braudel, Manuel DeLanda, Thousand Plateaus, Felix Guattari, Anthony Giddens, Charles Tilly, causal, Max Weber, Ian Hacking, emergent properties, Pierre Bourdieu, nation-states, assemblage theory, economies of agglomeration, interac, phase space, linguistic, Michel Foucault

review (Steven Shaviro)
commentary from DeLanda reading group: Introduction (Levi Bryant); Chapter I (Levi Bryant); Chapter II (Alex Reid); Chapter III (Michael~); Chapter IV, part 1 & part 2 (Mark Edward); Chapter V

wikipedia
google books

PDF (no OCR; updated on 2012-7-17)