Editorial introduction

About the book

Social Differentiation Network Theory advances an account of how society forms and exists through differences that enter concrete relations and consequences. Its central concepts include differentiating units, relational fields, extraction, weight assignment, nodes, relational chains, and write-back. The inquiry follows how differences are handled, transmitted, preserved, and extracted again, changing positions, eligibility, responsibility, risk, and available choices.

The author takes an explicitly anti-communist position. The book rejects the elevation of the class image into social ontology and identifies class theory with Model C: total-image subsumption. Its account of the class image’s limited explanatory power does not grant class the status of a social entity: that power derives from real differentiating units and the processes through which they are extracted, weighted, connected, and compressed. Labor, wages, debt, domination, and inequality retain their real weight.

Family, locality, national community, the private sphere, the body, records, and historical memory enter the argument through their concrete relations and carriers. The differentiation network is a positive theoretical account of social order, not an ordinary list of factors or a replacement total image. The book requires explanations to state their grounds and limits, face counterexamples, and remain open to comparison and revision.

The English reader edition contains the Preface, Introduction, and all 39 chapters. A separate editorial appendix presents 61 resources with descriptions of their uses, consulted scopes, and evidential limits. These references do not imply endorsement of the book or support for every claim.

Edition and attribution

Research Edition A identifies this edition lineage of the book. The Chinese and English texts on this website both belong to Edition A. The label distinguishes editions and does not rank them. Cite the edition label together with release v015.

By Open Inquiry Research Group. Presented under the labels Open Inquiry Network and Open Inquiry Editions. The introduction on this page and the reference appendix are editorial material, separate from the author’s text.

Citing this edition

Open Inquiry Research Group. Social Differentiation Network Theory. Research Edition A · English · v015. Open Inquiry Editions. 2026-10-10. https://open-inquiry-network.pages.dev/en/

For a passage, identify the chapter and section title, and the page in the PDF where useful. Use the edition identifier and the stable chapter or section address when citing the online text.

Subjects

Social Differentiation Network Theory; social ontology; differentiating units; relational fields; weight assignment; relational chains; write-back; class image; total-image subsumption; critique of communism; social explanation