Collective Intentionality, Individualism, and the Place of Children in Social Theorizing

In Nonideal Social Ontology: The Power View , Åsa Burman argues that leading theories in social ontology fail to capture important aspects of our social world when they characterize it as paradigmatically cooperative and develops her power view to capture the centrality of power and conflict in our social lives. While Burman’s view is timely and compelling, I suggest that her arguments against the leading theories’ claim that collective intentionality is a constitutive element of our social reality drive her own view toward individualism, and that this, in turn, can lead to the continued exclusion of children from our social theorizing.