Immanent Idealism

ABSTRACT This article introduces immanent idealism as an alternative path in social ontology and theory. It argues for a distinction between three basic ontological dimensions, the ideational, the institutional and the structural. This approach highlights the cognitional priority of worldviews as the core element of the ideational dimension, and it also argues for the immanence, the transhistorical existential priority (over the institutional and the structural dimensions) and the transituational pervasiveness of the ideational dimension. It is argued that this approach is both antirealist and antinaturalist in socio‐theoretical terms, and that it has decisive implications for the emerging subfield of cognitive sociology. These steps lead us to the invocation of a new idealism standing in opposition to new materialist approaches in social theory.