John A. Smith is a writer and artist. He has taught at Goldsmiths, Lancaster and Greenwich universities. His previous books, co-authored with Professor Chris Jenks, Images of Community (2001), Qualitative Complexity (2006) and Sociology and Human Ecology (2018).

Introduction: Basic Concepts, Content and Structure

Part 1. The Legacy of Critical Rationalism: An Attempted Maturity

1. Kant, Nietzshe: Maturity, Genealogy, and Freedom

2. Weber's 'Suspended' Rationalism, Heidegger's Conservative Turn and Interwar Perspectives in Europe

3. Archaeology, Genealogy, Alterity, Discourse, and Power: The Legacy and Influence of Foucault

4. Postmodernity and Its Discontents: Liquidity and Uncertainty. Castells, Lyotard, and Bauman, on the Landscape of Contested Identity and Performativity

5. Conclusions and Criticisms: The Case for a Complex Topography

Part 2. Alternative Foundations for a Mature Concept of Community

6. Automaticity and the Role of the Adaptive Unconscious

7. The Case for Basic Emotion Theory - Contrasted with Anthropological and Historical Perspectives

8. Towards an Ecology of the Senses

9. Evolutionary Psychology

10. Selective, Serial, and Parallel Processing in Theories of Adaptive Cognition

11. An Ecological Approach to Representation and Language

12. Concluding Remarks to Part 2

Part 3. Constants and Dynamics in Complex Social Expression

13. The Social as a Theatre of the Unconscious, Preconscious, and Conscious Assessment and Deliberation

14. Basic, Developmental, and Constructivist Theories of Affect and Consciousness

15. Auto-exo-reference: Representation and Language in Mediated Relation to an Environment and the Processes of Self-reference

16. Forms of Solidarity: The Topology of Power and Its Affective and Cognitive Consequences

17. The Dynamics of Conservatism and Liberalism: A Contested Common Moral Ground

18. A Post-humanist Epilogue: The Making of Things; The Complex Topography of Agency