Finite Continuance, Social Structures, Modernity, and Future Agency

This book develops a systematic account of social structure, modernity, globalization, and future agency through the philosophy of Finite Continuance. It places Anthony Giddens’s theory of structuration and his analyses of reflexivity and globalization in dialogue with a framework concerned with erosion, reconfiguration, capacity, meta-capacity, thresholds of sufficiency, capacity debt, and the preservation of future possibilities. Drawing on Morteza Niami’s related works on the ontology of importance, entitlement, consumption, and deferred life, the book distinguishes organizational persistence from ethical legitimacy. It defines central concepts through application criteria and counterexamples, examines the limits of adaptive capacity through cases of institutional domination and constrained choice, and proposes a research design for empirical application. The central claim is that social arrangements should be evaluated partly by whether they preserve the effective ability of people and institutions to learn, recover, contest decisions, and revise their futures. The framework is presented as a developing philosophical programme, with explicit attention to conceptual limits, rival explanations, and the need for source verification in future scholarly work. Keywords: Finite Continuance; social structure; Anthony Giddens; structuration; modernity; globalization; reflexivity; reconfigurative capacity; erosion; future agency; modal compression; capacity debt; ethics of sufficiency; political economy; intergenerational justice