The social sciences have contributed significantly to humanity’s remarkable pro-gress over the past two centuries, but the multidimensional crises confronting the world today reflect the need to rapidly move beyond the limitations imposed by the compartmentalization of social science disciplines and the absence of common unifying principles equivalent to those in the natural sciences. Unification of apparently disparate phenomena is a central characteristic of advancing knowledge. Pressing global challenges compel the search for greater knowledge of the unity underlying the diverse fields of social activity, the objective and subjective dimensions of human experience, the role of the collective and individual in social evolution, the action of conscious and unconscious social processes, and the influence of the future on the present.
