ABSTRACT
Having provided an exposition of the opportunities for sociology’s core categories of agency and structure as reconstructed by CA, I address now how shifts in the perception of and invocation of values takes on features of absolutism and fundamentalism. Faced with a resurgence of nationalism and other partitionist defences of identity-politics, I reactivate (drawing also on the conclusions of Chapter 1) critically the notion of the ‘tyranny of values’, a notion that stems from reactionary social theory (Nicolai Hartmann, Carl Schmitt). This is necessary in order to use it diagnostically but also to reconstruct it normatively. I thus use the threat of value-tyranny (‘fundamentalism’ for Parsons) not as an argument in favour of value-incommensurability or decisionist value-choice, but, rather, via CA, as an index of how capability deprivations of sorts assume a fictional ‘compensation’ in terms of identity-fulfilment under conditions of institutional value-fundamentalisms. An essential aid towards rectifying this problem is Max Scheler’s concept of Ausgleich, which enables us to consider and hopefully transcend the challenges posed to Sen’s idea of identity broadening by posthumanist systems theory (Luhmann).
