HUMAN BEING AND SOCIAL ENTITY IN CONTEMPORARY SOCIALR TRADITION

A COMPARATIVE FRAMEWORK

Abstract

Abstract
Understanding the existential relation between human being and social
entity has been a major theme in human sciences. Such an intellectual
enquiry is not only important for theoretical purposes, but also of highly
relevant for practical life. Within the Western contemporary social sciences,
two distinct approaches have recently been attracting wide attention, namely
the critical realism and the actor-network theory. The critical realism seeks
to explore the interaction mechanism between human subjective individual
and its surrounding objective social structure by ascribing independent
existential status to each of them, i.e., the subjective existence and the
objective existence. In opposite to this, the actor-network theory denies the
independent existence of the subject and the object altogether. For actornetwork
theory, the question of existence should be answer by tracing the
relations that are performed, or enacted, by human individual agents. In
other words, existence is relational and performative. Within the Islamic
traditions, the works of Ibn Khaldun have been highly respected as a major
contribution in the understanding of human being and social behavior and
structure. In his Muqaddimah, Ibn Khaldun asserts that human being is
inherently political, and human individuals cooperation is fundamental to
their collective existence. The aim of the paper is to present a conceptual
framework in which the above-described theoretical works could be put
side-by-side in such a way as to gain a theoretical synthesis. In this way,
we hope that the paper could contribute to the theme of Islamic human
sciences by way of dialog between Western and Islamic traditions.