| Summary/Abstract |
Alexander Wendt’s 2015 Quantum Mind and Social Science is nothing if not true to its aims. Through rigorous argumentation and solid erudition it draws the logical lines from the state-of-the art of quantum theory to social reality. The result is a set of conclusions about the nature of social life that appear both plausible and convincing. And yet the voyage comes at a high price. For in order to reach its goal, Wendt’s reasoning blithely navigates around most traces of meaningful human experience or social relation that do not already hold social scientific currency. It avoids at some pains the deeply spiritual connections that have been made tenable by growing literature connecting Eastern religious thought and theoretical physics. It ignores any and all indices that might point to an explanation of the remaining quantum riddles through a rebooting of our ontological assumptions about quantum theory. Caught in a narrow understanding about question of being as the question of ‘which being’, Quantum Mind and Social Science thus misses the chance for truly insightful discovery about the nature of social relations.
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