Marco Crosa

The concept of pluriculturalism is a relatively novel one that has yet to be fully explored. It is based on the principles of plurilingualism, which focuses on the individual's capacity to acquire multiple abilities and competencies in terms of cultural and linguistic engagements. From a theoretical perspective, the concept emerged at the advent of the pragmatist turn in language, as well as from socio-linguistic studies. It reflects the breakdown of the one-culture man at the juncture and intersection of identities in the context of the global outbreak. The individual’s concealed modularity and capacity to prioritize an identity within a cluster of affiliations revealed an emerging activity at the base of inter-social reality. As a result, a more finely tuned description of sociocul- tural phenomena enables pluriculturalism to transcend the limitations of multiculturalism, which is perceived as a more static picture. While multiculturalism sought to identify the foundation for a mutual dialogue at societal contacts, pluriculturalism demonstrates the potential for such a dialogue as individual repertoires. A crucial difference can be observed in terms of political management. While multiculturalism is oriented towards the institutional preservation and integration of a guest culture within a host country, pluriculturalism allows for a move towards an emergent planning. The latter is based on constraint-driven strategies that aim to facilitate individual abilities to engage in self-generating phenomena. This approach encourages the formation of living systems or networks.

While proceeding toward the end of War and Peace a reader can find itself startling and struggling to understand what kind of work is actually dealing with. The fictional narration is not yet concluded when L. Tolstoy (1828–1910) starts to lose himself in philosophical discussions regarding the nature of history as a science. Suddenly words such as god, heroes and men start to fill the pages recalling in the mind the language of a philosopher with at his back a history of long oblivion, the Italian G. Vico (1668–1744). The common terminology is only the triggering point for approaching a possible comparison between two authors that are so distant for time, context, interests, life and styles. A deep reading of their works however reveals some points of contact especially in a critique of their contemporary historicism, in their common interests on history as an objective science, on the analyses of events recollection and invention of tradition, in their overlapping instances of heterogeneity of ends and their reference to divine providence. A specific and different investigation might be necessary in order to understand whether those concepts somehow traveled along about one century and half from one to the other or whether they are just floating ideas of historical discourse. Nevertheless, starting from their commonalities the paper offers a clue on their inevitable divergences and a possible development of some of their central concepts. Being Tolstoy a writer of the ungraspable and indeterminate, concepts related to complex thinking will emerge during the reading.

After two centuries, the Diltheyan idea of the incommensurability of the natural and social sciences remains hegemonic. Alternative visions have since been overlooked; in this regard, the Baden neo-Kantian school showed that any divergence concerns implied method and not the phenomenal object of studies. W. Windelband coined the terms “nomological” and “idiographic” to underline how each discipline can be explained as a science of both law and events. To begin, I will show how complex thinking can expand and institute a general integrative frame that overcomes the assumed incommensurability. By “complex,” I mean an anti-reductionist approach to understanding and a consequent ability to reveal the phenomenal world in terms of nested self-organized systems. Social and natural systems are persistent coalescences of individual entities showing series of interduality such as unicity and multiplicity, top-down conservation and bottom-up inno- vation, constraint of law and freedom of agencies. The two instances are maintained together by the rejection of abstracted and isolated concepts and the embrace of a general principle of indeterminacy resolving the apparent contradiction within the parallelization of the extremes as two different moments of analyses rooted in the social and natural classical methods. This paper considers both a) the Positivist attempt in the XIX century to approach the study of social phenomena in terms of law and b) the emergence of a general social science embracing the principle of acasuality, adapted from the study of the subatomic phenomenal world in quantum theory. Finally, this paper sketches how complex methodology can address historical and social studies with system theory in order to overcome classical dualities such as determinism vs. freedom, social vs. individual, and top down conservation vs. bottom up innovation in the form of an integrative parallelization.