This book proposes a new approach to the human sciences, one that encompasses levels, disciplines, and subdisciplines which are usually kept rigidly separate. Why change the game of the normal science that is practiced in the disciplines and subdisciplines when most researchers are happy with it? Because it does not appear to be a winning game. The procedures of normal science can provide a mopping up operation after a breakthrough has occurred. Why has no breakthrough occurred in the human sciences?

The approach outlined in these chapters, part/whole morphology, suggests a way of approaching a crucial problem for the human sciences: how can we observe ourselves and our societies objectively, when our very lives are constituted by the very structures and processes that we need to study? This is not a simple problem. Alas, even making it explicit is a taxing maneuver.

In every society there is an “attitude of everyday life,” a life world, which most of its members assume, indeed, take for granted, most of the time. This world goes without saying to the point that it is invisible under most conditions. Elias and Bordieu referred to it when they spoke of the habitus, our second nature, the mass of conventions, beliefs and attitudes which each member of a society shares with every other member. The habitus is not the whole culture, but that part which is so taken for granted as to be virtually invisible to its members.