8.1.1 Modes of Stabilization

To explain stability in a world of process, we need to theorize the modes of stabilization that underwrite persistence and continuity. I want to highlight just a few modes of stabilization: social groups, anchoring practices, and what I call complementarities. First, stability can be underwritten by social groups that carry and reproduce relatively stable ideas. Consider the role of scientists, experts, and professionals. These groups carry and reproduce professional values, scientific models, and epistemic tools. Powerful processes of technical and professional socialization can impart similar representations, beliefs, values, ethoses, and desires. But even individuals shaped by coherent groups may drift apart unless their socialization is reinforced by anchoring practices. Anchoring practices are “repeated interactional patterns” that pull individuals to deploy the same actions and meanings.Footnote ¹¹ In professions and expert groups, anchoring practices are usually premised upon an epistemic tool, such as clinical diagnostics for medical professionals or cost–benefit analyses for management consultants. These practices draw actors into similar contexts where they reproduce similar values, models, and desires over time.

Reaching for a general mechanism here, we might say that stability can be achieved by forging complementarities between ideas and practical, social, institutional, and political contexts.Footnote ¹² Complementarities are alignments between ideas and contexts, such that the elements reinforce one another. Complementarities are forged by creative actors around the key purposes or anchoring practices of groups and organizations. They operate when ideas and practices lead actors to move back and forth within a set of categories, actions, and values.

For example, officials in the World Bank have disbursed loans on the basis of financing gap models.Footnote ¹³ These models serve as an anchoring practice to help staff solve the epistemic and political problems that arise in their work. But those models also have to be aligned with the social norms and institutional rules that help officials execute their tasks in a complex organization. Beyond the Bank, financing gap models were legitimated and reinforced by academic growth theory. Growth theory was complementary to financing gap models, desired increases in national income, and institutional rules that promoted large loans. The complementarities across these elements helped stabilize each element. Nonetheless, the drawing together of disparate elements always forms a dynamic nexus that is shifting and evolving, even if it exhibits continuities.

Complementarities are not preexisting or functional entities. They are forged by creative actors that seek to align ideas and contexts. Creative actors must yoke together practices, rules, and beliefs, forging the connections that underwrite stability. There is play and contingency in the process of alignment. The form and content of social life emerges from the coming together of elements that each have their own contingent history.

The forging of complementarities is essential to the challenges of political mobilization. In a processual perspective, politics is about moving people.Footnote ¹⁴ Moving people requires ideas, but also opportunity, resources, and organization. It requires creative work to align ideas with the necessary contextual factors. Constructing a stable, politically potent worldview is precisely this kind of creative act. But this local creativity is always suffused by multiple and intersecting structural processes that operate in similar – which is not to say the same – ways across space and time. Agency is always possible but never omnipotent. Creative agents must work with and against the cosmological and institutional resources at hand.

8.1.2 Worldviews in World Politics

In order to see how powerful worldviews are forged in world politics, consider the emergence of economic worldviews in the twentieth century. Recall that worldviews draw on cosmological elements such as ontological categories and epistemic claims about good knowledge. Since the late nineteenth century, the ontological categories of Western politics have been dominated by representations of epistemic objects like society, public health, labor, the economy, human rights, and the climate. These objects were constituted as distinct entities by scientists, experts, and professionals who defined, measured, and codified them. But they were not merely “constructions”: they reflected, and constituted, changes in practice.Footnote ¹⁵ New practices, transactions, and flows brought together individuals into fields of action that could be demarcated from others.Footnote ¹⁶ Thinkers and practitioners forged complementarities between the philosophical distinction between subjects and objects and a new set of epistemic tools for representing and intervening in objects.

Objects depend on both the modes of stabilization introduced earlier. Objects are stabilized by social groups of experts and professionals. Economists, for example, help produce and naturalize the economy. Objects are stable to the extent that they are embedded in practical, social, institutional, and political contexts. As Daston puts it, “scientific objects … grow more richly real as they become entangled in webs of cultural significance, material practices, and theoretical derivations.”Footnote ¹⁷ In the terms of this volume, embedding economic objects in worldviews gives them a place in the political projects of actors. From there, elements of worldviews are institutionalized in policy statements, organizational procedures, rules governing exchange, capital investments of firms, and so on. The economy is made rather than imagined.

In the twentieth century, a number of important groups in the United States and the Soviet Union developed economic worldviews. In the United States, for example, the economy was the basis for Rostow’s worldview, in which American liberalism would establish a world order wherein all societies would modernize into liberal democracies.Footnote ¹⁸ In the Soviet Union, the Communist Party articulated a worldview in which “The New Soviet Man” would embody the modernity of an economic order led by the revolutionary class.Footnote ¹⁹ The expansion of production through economic planning in the Soviet Union would usher in a new communist world modernity.Footnote ²⁰ Thus, the postwar international economic order came to be structured by two competing superpowers, both of which enacted economic worldviews.

These worldviews were premised on cosmological elements. First, they relied on an ontology in which “the economy” is designated as an isolated social object in a field of social objects (alongside politics, society, public health, households, etc.). These worldviews were simply not possible before the 1950s and the 1960s because there was no concept of “the economy” before the 1930s. According to Mitchell, prior to the 1930s, references to “economy” denote the old, eighteenth-century principle of prudent management or frugality.Footnote ²¹ It is only with the advent of a new epistemic tool, national accounting statistics, that the economy became a delimited object. A new concept and a new tool could then be aligned with diverse developments, such as the increase in financial flows, to create a genuinely new social sphere. That is to say, the economy is not merely a social construct, but is the product of the rearrangement of the world. As such, it provides a stable basis for the construction of new values and state practices of intervention.

Second, as Scott argues, both Cold War worldviews were premised on an epistemic basis he calls “high-modernism”: “self-confidence about scientific and technical progress, the expansion of production, the growing satisfaction of human needs, the mastery of nature (including human nature), and, above all, the rational design of social order commensurate with the scientific understanding of natural laws.”Footnote ²² High-modernism is epistemic in the sense that it relies on assumptions about how knowledge can be used. It rests on an ontological depiction of the universe as a law-governed order. And it has a clear relation to values including the desirability of rationality and the imperative to dominate nature. In this way, high-modernism merges cosmological elements and the kinds of specific values that structure worldviews.

So, the contending worldviews of the Cold War were in part built upon a set of common cosmological elements which were creatively combined into different worldviews. What I want to suggest in the next section is that none of this was natural. It did not emerge from a universal process of development, modernization, or rationalization. Instead, it was the product of a more uncertain channeling of cosmological elements from the natural and social sciences into political discourses. Thus, the worldviews that circulate in world politics and social science are products of a particular history of cosmological change.

8.2.1 Rationalization in Weber

Weber’s theory of rationalization is a key part of his overall theory of modernity, which aimed to explain the distinctiveness of the West. Weber placed so much importance on rationalization because he felt it was necessary to account for the emergence of capitalist development in the West.Footnote ²⁵ This, in part, serves as a legitimation of the superiority of the German nation and Protestant value-orientations.Footnote ²⁶ There are now a number of literatures that call into question the distinctiveness of the West and the need for a theory of Western exceptionalism.Footnote ²⁷ Nonetheless, working through Weberian rationalization can help us reconsider the role of scientific ideas in Western worldviews.

Weber uses the term “rationalization” to apply to wide variety of processes: the systematization of religious belief, the increasing precision of military procedures, the legalization of political life, and so on. It refers broadly to the standardization, abstraction, and quantification of behavior in any social sphere. I want to focus on two effects of rationalization processes.Footnote ²⁸ First, substantive rationalization produces value-oriented individuals and systems of ethics. Second, practical and formal rationalization increases instrumental rationality and pure means–ends action. For Weber, the rise of science intensifies the disintegration of ultimate values and the domination of formal means–ends rationality.

In The Sociology of Religion all the major world religions undergo substantive rationalization. Weber argues that the rationalization of religions results in prophets making increased ethical demands upon the gods. Over time, prophets tended to produce more complex and systematic theoretical accounts of the universe that depicted it as a “harmonious and rational order.”Footnote ²⁹ These demands rested on “the increasing scope of a rational comprehension of an enduring and orderly cosmos.”Footnote ³⁰

Furthermore, in salvation religions, prophets draw together the cosmological and the social, infusing everyday life with cosmological strictures and practices. This orients the religious individual to “a unified view of the world derived from a consciously integrated meaningful attitude toward life.”Footnote ³¹ Since salvation depends on “both social and cosmic events,” individuals must pattern their conduct in a meaningful way. That is, systematized religion produces individuals that are oriented to impersonal and universal values. Integrated, rationalized worldviews cultivate a new kind of person oriented “to a cosmos of obligations.”Footnote ³² Such people then act in more predictable or calculable ways – their action is formally rationalized.

In effect, Weber historicizes the basis of action itself. He provides an account of how people come to orient their action to a set of values that are not present or inherent in everyday life. Thus, the degree to which individuals pursue a cosmologically oriented life within a “meaningful, ordered totality” is itself the product of rationalization processes.Footnote ³³

This is the basis of Weber’s explanation for the differences between the West, which produces capitalism, and other societies, which do not.Footnote ³⁴ Weber’s argument is that only Protestantism produced the right combination of theocentrism (orientation to a transcendent god), ascetism (control of self as the path to salvation), and this-worldliness (desire to realize God’s will in this world):

This revision of the argument of the Protestant Ethic represents the culmination of Weber’s work from 1905 to 1920.

In short, rationalization produces individuals who are meaningfully oriented to values. Moreover, those values fulfilled what Weber saw as the highest ideals of Western civilization: “autonomous yet compassionate and community-oriented individuals” that lived their lives in the pursuit of meaningful values.Footnote ³⁶

The rise of science enters the story here as one of a variety of sources that threaten values. In the Vocation lectures, Weber argues that scientific rationalization has profound effects on worldviews. Science teaches us that “we are not ruled by mysterious, unpredictable forces, but that, on the contrary, we can in principle control everything by means of calculation.”Footnote ³⁷ This knowledge leads to “the disenchantment of the world,” culminating in the withdrawal of “the ultimate and most sublime values” from public life.Footnote ³⁸ Science, for Weber, cannot replace those values because it cannot answer Tolstoy’s questions: “What should we do? How shall we live?”Footnote ³⁹

The consequences of this, for Weber, are widespread and significant. The disintegration of ethical worldviews threatens the sociological basis of Western civilization. As Kalberg concludes:

This led Weber to advocate a form of German nationalism in which moral obligation to the Volk would replace the passive instrumental rationality of the people.Footnote ⁴¹

8.2.2 History

In this reading, Weber’s account of rationalization is not grounded in a careful history of how ideas produced rationalizing elements. Rather, it is situated in Weber’s attempt to make sense of Western distinctiveness in a world of difference.Footnote ⁴² The result is a totalizing and abstract image of rationalization as a universal and inevitable process. However, as Joas points out, we should not treat all the phenomena Weber identifies together under the umbrella of a single, universal process.Footnote ⁴³

Instead, we can unbundle modernity into a set of ideational and practical shifts linked together through contingent yet powerful complementarities. This may allow us to retain some sense of the overarching narrative of rationalization, in which the ground of action is transformed by long-term historical processes, without positing the necessity and unavoidability of disenchantment. My approach to this unbundling is to show how cosmological elements from the scientific tradition were incorporated into European and American political traditions. On this account, rationalization is the folding of cosmological elements (materialism and object-orientation) into social and political discourses where they formed the basis of worldviews based on control.

Starting in the sixteenth century, early modern natural philosophy in Europe was dominated by a materialist and mechanist ontology.Footnote ⁴⁴ A materialist ontology posits that the fundamental building blocks of the universe are physical entities. A mechanist ontology posits a world that is governed by formal and efficient causes.Footnote ⁴⁵ Forged together in a system of discursive complementarities, early modern materialism and mechanism offered a vision of the universe as lifeless matter in motion.

Materialist and mechanist ontological claims developed in opposition to a variety of vitalist and organicist views. Vitalist writers depicted a pluralist world of living entities in which nature operated as an agent.Footnote ⁴⁶ Organicist thought emphasized not the power of interacting corpuscles, but the holistic representation of nature and the world as living entities. A pluralist world of living organic wholes was far messier and less predictable than the rationally legible world of mechanically interacting matter. Perhaps this explains why Calvin himself, who was so central to Weber’s story of rationalization, joined natural philosophers in opposing the “filthy dog Lucretius” and other vitalists.Footnote ⁴⁷ Calvin admired the “exact diligence” of the astronomers because it revealed the “cunning workmanship” of God’s providence.Footnote ⁴⁸

Other religious scholars attacked mechanism on the basis that it restricted God’s will and depended itself on a form of vitalism. Henry More, a seventeenth-century Cambridge philosopher, argued that mechanists implied that matter had “freedom of will” and the “knowledge and perception” necessary to act.Footnote ⁴⁹ Instead, More suggested, “an Immaterial Being” was responsible for making matter move. Along these and other lines of contestation, materialism and mechanism were disputed ontological claims through the seventeenth century and into the eighteenth century. As such, materialism and mechanism did not fully displace existing traditions of thought and practice. They had to be worked into creative networks of complementarities alongside existing discourses and practices.

The broad acceptance of Newton’s view of the universe finally achieved in the eighteenth century can largely be explained by the fact that it was compatible with and could be drawn into religious worldviews.Footnote ⁵⁰ Newton’s image of a rational, law-governed cosmos was consistent with the Christian belief in an omnipotent God that had created an ordered universe. Moreover, Newton, consistent with his own theological impulses, left room for God in the mysterious operations of gravity. This was consistent with More’s immaterial mover. It was also the reason Newton was denounced for relying on “occult forces.”Footnote ⁵¹ The Newtonian view of the universe was not disenchanted. And it was stabilized through its relation to Christian ritual and political power.

Although strict materialism has been contested since its emergence, it has dominated scientific views of nature for centuries. A sure sign of its power is that even those, such as Newton, Kant, and Weber, who argued against materialism had to adopt the dichotomous division of the world into material and ideational forces.

The material–ideational division played an important role in the development of the colonial social sciences in the nineteenth century.Footnote ⁵² In the shadow of Darwin, social anthropologists in Britain and elsewhere grounded their understanding of the new object “society” in a biological conception of humanity. Famously, Darwinism contributed to the rise of scientific racism in late colonial Europe. However, in British colonialism, scientific racism was less influential than social anthropology. Early anthropologists such as John Lubbock and Edward Burnett Tylor espoused a theory of sociocultural evolution on which peoples, conceived as distinct entities, developed along a linear sequence from savagery to civilization.Footnote ⁵³ This formed the basis of the British Colonial Office’s position that colonialism was necessary to shepherd primitive societies through the process of development. Scientific racism was unsuitable for this doctrine because it suggested that inferior races could never attain civilization. Instead, British colonial officials believed in their own racial superiority and that their native charges could progress toward civilization.Footnote ⁵⁴

Malinowski and his students later came to dominate British anthropology and played a central role in British colonial policy.Footnote ⁵⁵ Such connections to colonial practice were not incidental, but an integral part of the network of complementarities that stabilized and supported Malinowski’s work. Malinowski’s “functionalist” anthropology posited a system of basic institutions that served to fulfill basic human needs.Footnote ⁵⁶ The task of the anthropologist was to understand what function otherwise mysterious behaviors served. So Malinowski and other functionalists advocated for anthropologists to deeply immerse themselves within the social fabric to discern the true meaning and purpose of basic institutions, rituals, and beliefs.

The sociocultural and functionalist conceptions of society were not materialist in a reductive sense. Anthropologists in Malinowski’s tradition did not posit that race or biology was destiny. But it was materialist, and disenchanted, in a different sense. On the functionalist view, the basis of society is an aggregate of material bodies, and the only forces legible to social science are ones that register for those bodies. To be sure, societies are formed by bringing together individual bodies in a set of institutions, bound together by ideas and practices. But, as Malinowski and the functionalists made clear, the ideas were not really considered to be constitutive of peoples.

In colonial anthropology and imperial practice, ideas had only a functional relation to peoples: they help groups solve practical problems. Culture was a means of satisfying “basic individual biopsychological needs,” and was merely a generalization of kinship relations and economic structures, not a “systemic milieu” in which relationships were constituted.Footnote ⁵⁷ Thus, any set of ideas which resolves the material problems of existence or Darwinian survival are just as good as any other. Hence, the normative value of colonialism and assimilation: they provide a better set of ideas to meet material needs in superior ways. In an ontological sense, this theory separated cultures from peoples. Doing so justified colonialism as a system for guiding peoples to better, more functional sets of beliefs. We can see here how colonial worldviews could draw sustenance from scientific cosmological elements.

That separation was related to a broader ontological and epistemic shift: the proliferation of “epistemic objects” after 1830.Footnote ⁵⁸ These objects – society, labor, public health, the economy, and so on – divided the world into distinct spheres of action. The emergence of “society” was important because it made possible the rise of the social sciences generally.Footnote ⁵⁹ It was first conceptualized in the eighteenth century as an “aggregation of human beings that have come together for a certain purpose,” as in a society of engineers. But by the end of the century, it emerged as a third sphere between households (the subject of the moral sciences) and the state (the subject of political economy).Footnote ⁶⁰ Once created, the concept had a profound effect on social practices. An autonomous society could have effects on individuals and institutions, legitimating ideas like the “social welfare state.” The concept also initiated a process of demarcating other spheres and subspheres, proliferating the objects of the social sciences.Footnote ⁶¹

Once demarcated, such spheres could be measured with statistical techniques. In the early decades of the twentieth century, these objects were conceptualized as cybernetic systems governed by law-like mechanisms. The social sciences promised to uncover these mechanisms. This altered the basic terms of government which were now responsible for managing these objects.Footnote ⁶² The proliferation of object-experts enabled government interventions designed to change the dynamics of the objects.

Kusch argues that the roots of this phenomenon lie in the merger of Kantian thinking with technological advances:

Understanding and action are premised upon the separation between the inside of the subject and the outside of the world of objects. And, as we have seen, that outside is defined in material terms as dead matter in motion.

It is this separation that makes Weberian value-orientation possible and natural. As in functional anthropology, we as subjects are separate from the world of ideas and artifacts. We can pick up and use elements of the outside as we choose. This basic frame fuels the valorization and naturalization of reason. Reason could now be conceptualized and defined in means–ends terms as knowledge of the outside for the manipulation of the outside in the service of internal ends. Rationality itself is a value-orientation.

This shift underlies the scientific forms of rationalization identified by Meyer and his coauthors. They argue that on the dominant culture of world society, “salvation lies in rationalized structures grounded in scientific and technical knowledge.”Footnote ⁶⁴ The widespread authority of science underwrites and benefits from a process of rationalization in which all actors are expected to use scientific and technical knowledge to solve problems.Footnote ⁶⁵ But it is important to precisely state the effect of science here: it established a discourse in which the world is populated with material objects that can be defined in scientific terms.

Reason is then the task of gaining understanding and exerting control over these objects through means–ends rationality. The desire to control the world through experiment and action is also not natural. It too emerges from this history in which a materialist world of dead matter is displayed as a series of manipulable entities. The image of the scientific experiment, in which nature is carefully controlled to produce reliable information and outcomes, is part of a broader constellation of ideas that are incorporated into the Newtonian worldviews of the social sciences and the modernist worldviews that shape world politics.

In my retelling, Weber’s idea of rationality itself is a product of history. Kant of course assumed the existence of an a priori reason. But multiple subsequent traditions in social theory have sought to show that the grounds of rationality are themselves embedded in history. This is precisely what defenders of rational worldviews miss.Footnote ⁶⁶ Indeed, Weber himself built a worldview on the concept of rationality. On the one hand, Weber valorized rationality-as-value-orientation under Protestantism. On the other hand, he critiqued rationality-as-disenchantment. His desire to diagnose the distinctiveness of the West led him here.Footnote ⁶⁷

From here, we see that the concept of rationality deployed by Weber is not a natural object but a product of the history of rationalization that he himself identified. The systematization and standardization of action across spheres reflects the emergence of cosmological elements from the natural sciences in political and social discourses. Further, it reflects a long process of forging complementarities between materialism, mechanism, object-orientation, and other ideas. These ideas draw strength from one another to form powerful and persuasive networks of meaning. These networks can then be variously mobilized in specific worldviews.

Moreover, once we conceptualize the process of rationalization at this level of detail we can see why it does not eliminate values or value-orientation amongst individuals by draining discourses of meaning. Scientific rationalization provides a different set of ideational elements through which values can be constructed. Newtonian and Darwinian representations of the cosmos and humanity became the basis of many political worldviews.

In sum, rationalization processes change the conceptual material from which worldviews are made. This constrains and influences worldviews, but does not determine them. This balances the roles of structure and agency as laid out in Section 8.1. Structural processes like the movement of scientific ideas into political discourses have broad effects, but those effects leave room for creative action to forge worldviews and the networks of complementarities necessary to stabilize and mobilize them.

8.2.3 Rationalization in the Social Sciences

Katzenstein’s opening to this volume argues that we social scientists are stuck within Newtonian worldviews.Footnote ⁶⁸ This section develops a related theme: materialism and object-orientation are part of the broader cosmological inheritance that enframes the social sciences today.Footnote ⁶⁹ Further, building on Shilliam, I want to argue that the social sciences rest on rationalized, disenchanted discourses. The disenchantment of social science, which Weber himself struggled with, makes it harder to represent nonmaterialist elements and to take seriously the power of religion and cosmology.Footnote ⁷⁰ From here, we can see how the coloniality of the social sciences in its functionalist, object-oriented mode separates peoples from cosmology at a basic level.

In Shilliam’s retelling, the story of the Haitian revolution usually notes two events in the build-up to the insurrection on August 22, 1791. On August 14, there was the “properly-political” meeting of slaves and workers at the Lenormand de Mézy estate. Ostensibly it was here that the revolution was born as creoles, drawing inspiration from the French Revolution, plotted anticolonial rebellion.Footnote ⁷¹ On August 21, after two estates were prematurely set ablaze, there was a hastily arranged meeting of chiefs at Bwa Kayiman. There, Dutty Boukman, an early leader of the revolution, presided over a ritual with Cécile Fatiman, a Vodou priestess. The next day, the revolution began, and 184 sugar plantations were destroyed in the ensuing weeks. This second meeting is generally considered to be “merely a religious Vodou ceremony” that provided a signal to initiate the rebellion.Footnote ⁷²

Shilliam argues that the colonial nature of social science excludes the possibility that the meeting at Bwa Kayiman exerted a real effect on the revolution itself. To do so, he highlights the importance of what he calls “African retentions” in Haiti. In 1791, half of the 500,000 slaves in Saint Domingue had arrived in the previous five years, and two-thirds had been born in Africa.Footnote ⁷³ These people carried with them diverse cosmological traditions from the African continent. Thus, the meeting at Bwa Kayiman reflected African cosmologies, political hierarchies, and national groupings.Footnote ⁷⁴ Shilliam describes how the meeting brought together chiefs of African nations with lwa (spiritual agents).

At Bwa Kayiman, Cécile Fatiman “is ridden by the lwa Ezili Kawuolo,” the patron of secret societies.Footnote ⁷⁵ The Vodou conception of the self is radically relational and not reducible to conceptions of a closed subject. In Vodou, a person’s “seat of agency” can be “mounted” by a lwa. Via this mediation, a lwa can become an agent in the world, serving as a channel for cosmic forces. One of these forces is justice. In the context of a slave colony, mediation with the lwa is a means of bringing justice into the profane world:

In this account, Shilliam presents the lwa as agents of the revolution: “If the lwa were not gathered at Bwa Kayiman with the chiefs, then there would have been no revolution.”Footnote ⁷⁷ Shilliam asks, what moved the people? “If the people did not know that the lwa were riding (with) them to burn down the plantations, then they would not have moved their feet.”Footnote ⁷⁸

The problem is not only that social science cannot capture the power of the lwa. That is certainly the case: the secular terms of colonial social science must declare the lwa “supernatural” and thereby render them inert and absurd.Footnote ⁷⁹ But regardless of whether or not one is willing to entertain the possibility of lwa agency, Shilliam’s argument makes an important point: the colonial bias of social science makes the analyst privilege the causal significance of (white) legal-juridical acts over (black) cosmological ones.

Moreover, Shilliam’s argument shows us what is at stake in the social scientific representation of ideas as separate from peoples. As Shilliam puts it, “colonial science seeks to segregate peoples from their lands, their pasts, their ancestors, spirits and agencies.”Footnote ⁸⁰ That is, by denigrating cosmological ideas as “super-natural” and “super-stitious,” social science denies the constitutive element that ideas and spirits play in the formation of peoples.

This may seem like a counterintuitive critique of constructivists and ideational theorists a century removed from Malinowski. After all, cultural theorists argue that ideas make a “people” distinct from a set of biological individuals. But in colonial science ideas form peoples only in a shallow sense. The functionalism of materialist colonial science posits that a people is merely a set of biological bodies appended to a set of ideas. Those ideas fulfill functional, practical purposes. But functionally equivalent ideas are all interchangeable. There is no regard given to the specific cosmological heritage of peoples. Such ideas, and therefore peoples, have no specific ontological status as unique, or culturally valuable, entities in and of themselves. Diversity and pluralism refer not to the products of specific complex histories which form distinct cosmological-geographical-biological entities. Rather, diversity and pluralism are mere numerical terms, referring to the proliferation of traditions, each with the same status within social science.