Multiplitism

“Deploying the work of Badiou and Greimas, Bar-El advances a new approach to the reconciliation of objective and subjective orientations in social scientific enquiry.  This is an important contribution to the resolution of an ongoing problem.”

- Derek Robbins, Emeritus Professor, University of East London, UK and author of The Bourdieu Paradigm (2019).

"Multiplitism is an important intervention into contemporary sociological theory. I see it as contributing to the development of a new paradigm. We will need to see more scholarship in this area -- scholarship that opens sociology up to other perspectives such as this one -- in the coming years if sociology is to remain relevant."
--Duane Rousselle, Professor, School of Advanced Studies, University of Tyumen, Russia
This book presents a set theoretical approach to sociological research. It revisits existing sociological approaches and discusses their limitations, before suggesting an alternative. While the existing canonical approaches of Positivism, Conflictualism, and Pragmatism are based on biology, history, and physics, respectively, the set theoretical approach is based on mathematics. Utilising its philosophical exploration delineated by Alain Badiou, the book further translates his work into the field of social science. The result of this translation is termed Multiplitism, which evades the limiting contradictions of existing approaches. Drawing on the mathematical notion of ‘set’ and relating it to recent sociological turns such as the relational and the ontological, the book proposes a scale-relativity through which the researcher (as subject) and the researched (as object) are integrated. The book will be of interest to social scientists, particularly social theorists and advanced level students.   

Eliran Bar-El is a sociologist of knowledge based at the University of Cambridge where he recently completed his PhD.