Consciousness and Society

Why should we care about consciousness? Or, perhaps more precisely, why should we as social scientists care about consciousness? While one can—and I do—argue that the social world is uniquely a product of conscious intent (along with a host of other physical stuff too) and so we should take consciousness into account when we think and theorise about the world; it is also a bit like the chemistry that informs our biological nature: it's there, it's important in its own right, but it's also kind of a background condition. We can and do take it for granted because for the most part, it doesn't seem to play a role in our lives as scholars of international relations. Without it we wouldn't exist; but beyond that do we need to think about chemistry—or consciousness—to understand international trade or why we vote the way we do? In fairness, probably not. But that also glides over a pretty big point: consciousness is the background condition necessary for the existence of our social world and so its nature, if you will, must necessarily set the foundational terms upon which those discussions of trade and voting and, well, pretty much anything else we wish to theorise and study in the social world must occur.