How are core social phenomena to be understood as modes of being? This book offers an
alternative approach to social ontology. Recent interest in social ontology on the part of
mainstream philosophy and the social sciences presupposes from the outset that the human being
can be cast as a conscious subject whose intentionality can be collective. By contrast the
present study insistently poses the crucial question of who the human being is and how they
sociate as whos. Such whoness is a clean-cut departure from the venerable tradition of
questioning whatness (quidditas essence) in philosophical thinking. Casting human being
hermeneutically as whoness opens up new insights into how human beings sociate in interplays of
mutual estimation that are simultaneously social power plays. Hitherto the ontology of social
power in all its various guises has only ever been implicit. This book makes it explicit. The
kind of social power prevalent in capitalist societies is that of the reified value embodied in
commodities money capital &c. Reified value itself is constituted through an interplay of
mutual estimation among things that reflects back on the power interplay among whos. In this
way a new critique of capitalism becomes possible.
