The Mediocre Society and Aristotelian Balance Theory

How do people seek the good life, and how do they strive toward it? This book presents Aristotelian Balance Theory (ABT) as a sociological attempt to systematize the question of the good life, human flourishing, and societal governance. ABT is developed here as a heuristic attempt at grand theory that may potentially function as a "federation" for sociological research. Inspired by Aristotles virtue ethics, but using concepts drawn from sociological theory and social-scientific research, ABT places balance at the center as an analytical tool. The human being is understood as a balancing creature, faced with recurring trade-offs between different values, practices, orientations, and forms of governance at the micro, meso, and macro levels. Why is mediocracy so dominant in modernity? ABT is applied to modernity and the present. The result is the concept of the mediocre society, used to describe a social order marked by interacting imbalances across a wide range of balance dimensions. The mediocre society refers to a morally mediocre one: a society that contains real goods, yet at the same time prevents people, institutions, and public spheres from reaching higher forms of balance, judgment, and citizenship. On this basis, the book analyzes, among other things, the public sphere, the economy, work, culture, education, research, ideologies, forms of governance, value and artificial intelligence. ABT is used both as a diagnostic tool and as an attempt to formulate a more integrative language for understanding the social, moral, and political problems of the present.