S.D. Clark Lecture 2025: Fields, Autonomy, and the State

With his last book, The True, the Good and the Beautiful: On the Rise and Fall and Rise of the Kantian Architectonic of Action, just out, Professor Martin will focus in this lecture on what he hopes is his next book. Tying field theory to the theory of differentiation has proven extremely generative in the social sciences and the humanities. However, we have confused the nature of the field with talk of autonomy. This clarification allows us to see the core of field theory being a new template for understanding self-organization--a template integrally bound up with the slow development of the modern state. Fields, far from being autonomous, are a specific form of state project whereby modern states domesticate areas of social life that resist direct rule.