3  Conclusion
This little essay on a Big Idea – actually, a number of enormous ideas – seeks to communicate a general vision of the world that I’ve found useful. This world-concept has informed my empirical historical research and my interpreting of evidence. This vision starts with hypotheses about the social-historical world, those propositions constitute a theory, and the theory constitutes a model of the social construction process. In this social-historical construction manifesto I’ve tried to say just enough about each basic element of the model to suggest that element’s analytical usefulness. The basic elements of the model are: 1) Constructors, 2) Aims, 3) Materials, 4) Means, 5) Time, 6) Space, 7) Acts, 8) Constructs, 9) Relationships, and 10) Modes of Construction.

In taking on so many large issues I’ve dared to generalize in a way that the great sociologist C. Wright Mills mocked as “Grand Theory,” theorizing so abstract, so general, it was useless for understanding specific, historical societies and their pressing issues.[1] But the particular grand theory offered here, I claim, expresses a simple idea whose creative application, can help to illuminate historically particular worlds.

*In summary, then, this theory posits a model of different, changing, historical ways of ordering the human making of the human world. It offers a universal theory of human society as a tool to clarify the historically specific character of particular societies.

*As an instrument for understanding different, historically specific human worlds, it’s also a tool for comparative, transnational and cross-cultural analyses of particular social formations. Comparative social-historical analysis requires a macro model to illuminate differences and similarities between the particular social worlds compared.

*It’s a theory about society as a whole; it posits a world-view, so it’s holistic -- totalizing in aspiration, but not totalitarian. It’s not meant to be recited as dogma, but used creatively as analytical instrument, subject to revision. While we do need deep, detailed, close-up, microscopic studies of particular constructors, their means, acts, and constructs, we also need a clear, macroscopic overview to contextualize their historically specific acts. If two World Wars did not demonstrate our need for a clear world-view, global warming, and the global convulsions of today’s global economy necessitates a clear global vision.[2]

*It’s a structural theory about the changing, historical, institutional arrangements of humans, aims, materials, means, actions, relationships, and action systems. But structures in this theory don’t function, act, or determine apart from the humans placed strategically and acting within them, controlling the use of particular means.[3]

*This model proposes a theory of human action as constructive of historically specific social worlds: those societies are ways of ordering human action.[4]

*This theory of action points to control over means of acting as crucial to the realizing of human aims. It suggests that control over a particular society’s most influential means of construction provides different classes of humans different degrees of power to realize their ends.

*As a theory of means, it’s also a theory of power, a hypothesis that the power of particular individuals and groups derives from their control of particular, historically specific, influential means of action and construction.[5]

*As a theory of power it’s also a theory of the human determining of the social-historical world. It posits that each historical mode of construction, each ordering of humans and means of action, constitutes a different, human-made determinism. Today’ struggle to extend democracy beyond a limited “political” realm to the “economy” is also a struggle to create a society governed by a transparent, democratic, determinism.  

*It’s a theory of human agency that contests our current mystified perception that we are subject to blind, non-human “mechanisms,” “forces” or “powers,” a perception in which the acts of powerful individuals and classes have disappeared.

*As a model of human agency it’s also a humanistic theory. But it’s not a humanism that denies different individuals’ and groups’ specific characters and powers.

*It’s a theory about the simultaneously objective and subjective character of the human-made world. It refers to action in the world external to human actors; it refers to action occurring internally, in the minds and psyches of human actors.

*This theory posits a basic, qualitative difference between the nature-made world and the human-created universe. To the extent that we humans impact the natural world it ceases to be natural, it becomes social. In contrast to human-independent nature, the constructs of the social world are human-dependent -- they cease to exist if we fail to reproduce them.

*It’s a theory that makes claims about the basic character of the social-historical world. And it provides a general conceptual framework, a standard model, for understanding that world.

*Finally, it’s a theory of social and historical continuity and discontinuity, stasis and movement. It suggests that both stability and radical social changes are created by the actions of people making imaginative use of means. So it’s also a theory of politics, and the possibility of creating a freer, more just, equal, democratic socialist  world.

As a conceptual, investigative tool, an “ideal type,” this abstract, schematic model, explicated in a few pages, is not meant to do justice to the messy, changing, infinite complexity of actual, empirical societies. Only the creative application of this model in empirical research will tell if this tool provides revelatory analyses of the social-historical worlds we make.[6]