ABSTRACT
Social theories as well as ideologies largely fall between the two extreme poles of unconstrained voluntarism and total social-historical inevitabilism; virtually all of them can be located at some point along a continuum from one extreme pole to the other. Social ideologies have in the modern era tended to supplant religions as the most comprehensive worldviews linking the true and the good as existential statements with normative prescriptions purportedly congruent with them. Values are seen by their holders as actually or potentially capable of realization in the conduct of individuals and thus at least to that extent imply some conception of the nature of human nature and of the opportunities and constraints to which it is subject in society. A broad awareness of cultural variability, a far-ranging knowledge of the sheer diversity of values in human societies, may proscribe blindness or insensitivity to allowing one's own values to shape one's view of the world.
