Making the Social World

The book offers a profound understanding of how we create a social reality—a reality of money, property, governments, marriages, stock markets and cocktail parties. The paradox addressed is that these facts only exist because we think they exist and yet they have an objective existence. Continuing a line of investigation begun in his earlier book The Construction of Social Reality, the author identifies the precise role of language in the creation of all “institutional facts.” His aim is to show how mind, language and civilization are natural products of the basic facts of the physical world described by physics, chemistry and biology. The author explains how a single linguistic operation, repeated over and…