HoPE

Holistic social science and pacification of existence (HoPE) is a book project with two interrelated tasks. The first task is to create a program for a genuinely interdisciplinary social science able to go over the disciplinary borders of the “basic” social sciences of economics, sociology and political science but also the border between the “two cultures” of arts and humanities, on the one hand, and the “hard” STEM sciences (science, technology, engineering and mathematics), on the other hand. The second task is to combine to this holistic social science (the Ho part in the acronym) an ambitious ethical-political program for “pacification of existence” (the PE part). In the tradition of critical theory, the first task was outlined by Max Horkheimer and the second one by Herbert Marcuse. To bring their dreams to this century, however, it is necessary to draw from versatile new sources such as Michael Mann’s neoweberian historical sociology in the Ho part and, in the PE part, many approaches to environmental, social and personal security such as “sustainable development”, the “capability approach” and reinterpretations of classical liberalism by John Rawls and others.