Antecedents of generative thinking in analytical sociology: the contribution of Tom Fararo

Abstract

The paper excavates Thomas Fararo’s works and argues that Fararo should be considered among the fathers of contemporary analytical sociology. He is a major thinker of “generativity,” a notion that he contributed to elaborate and that represents a landmark and unifying principle of his entire scientific production. Thus, the paper first documents that Fararo actually forged the idea of “generativity” in the early sixties by proposing, and explicitly defining, the concepts of “generating process” and “generating models”; It then shows the channel through which these notions traveled to contemporary analytical sociology; finally, the paper demonstrates that Fararo saw, earlier than others, the importance of discrete object-oriented simulations for the theoretical study of “generating models”.