Making The Social World

I've recently become a big fan of John's work, and this book is perhaps even my favorite so far. It's nice to get some clarifications and some new terms to describe the concepts you are probably already getting familiar with if you've read his other work.The way John ties intentionality in with language and with institutional reality connected a ton of dots for me, even though I'm already pretty familiar with the ontological subjectivity talked about in the book. It's kind of amazing how much you can go over the same topic and get so much new information out of it.My only hesitation is with the last chapters where the explanation of how government fits into social reality is given. He rightly points out how it's a monopoly on violence, and pointed out other logical problems with it, but did not make what seemed to me the obvious conclusion: the state is an ancient and evil institution which does not serve people in the same sense that institutional reality general does / is supposed to.

everything great

In this work on the philosophy of society, John Searle updates his previous book on the subject (The Construction of Social Reality). He makes a series of distinctions (eg between epistemic and ontological objectivity) that I found useful and intriguing, but I am still wondering how useful they are. I think the book would have been much improved if the author had engaged with, rather than ignored, a large body of relevant sociological literature.

Great book, developed from Searle's The Construction of Social Reality.In fact so brilliantly constructed that I bought the hard cover issue to replace the the paperback version that didn't last long.