ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses final pair of sociological explanatory variables: ecologism and technologism. These variables refer to both living and nonliving things: animal, vegetable, and mineral; solids, liquids, and gases; space-time; the strong, weak, electromagnetic, and gravitational interactions. Gary T. Marx and Frederick Engels are undoubtedly the most outstanding classical proponents of technologism, alloyed, of course, with materialism, social structuralism, cultural structuralism, and instinctivism. A technologistic variable of wide explanatory importance is shelter, housing, the humanly built environment. The chapter concludes that survey of explanatory variables in sociological analysis by focusing on variables that stress the causal power of nonhuman things external to the social participants themselves–in two words, "habitat," and "tools." Ecologistic variables refer to habitat and encompass its living as well as its nonliving components, while technologistic variables refer to tools and similarly encompass their living and nonliving components.
