ABSTRACT
The social is undoubtedly a strange part of reality. Dahrendorf once captured this when he referred to “the vexatious fact of society”. It was vexing before hewrote and has remained intransigently so ever since. I once expressed the oddity of its constitution in the following riddle (Archer 1995, 165):
What is it that depends on human intentionality but never conforms to anyone’s intentions?
