Prime Mover - Social Science Theory

Social Science Theory

  • A hypothetical person that has a significant impact on society and history due to the exercise of their free will, unfettered by external psychological influences or social forces; also the name of the theory that affirms the existence and possibility of such people.
  • Regarding socio-political complexity, the term Prime Mover describes any influence upon a social group that leads to a higher degree of societal complexity.

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Famous quotes containing the words social, science and/or theory:

    No society has been able to abolish human sadness, no political system can deliver us from the pain of living, from our fear of death, our thirst for the absolute. It is the human condition that directs the social condition, not vice versa.
    Eugène Ionesco (b. 1912)

    In our science and philosophy, even, there is commonly no true and absolute account of things. The spirit of sect and bigotry has planted its hoof amid the stars. You have only to discuss the problem, whether the stars are inhabited or not, in order to discover it.
    Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)

    ... the first reason for psychology’s failure to understand what people are and how they act, is that clinicians and psychiatrists, who are generally the theoreticians on these matters, have essentially made up myths without any evidence to support them; the second reason for psychology’s failure is that personality theory has looked for inner traits when it should have been looking for social context.
    Naomi Weisstein (b. 1939)