Complementary holism is a social theory or conceptual framework proposed by Michael Albert and Robin Hahnel, that sees all societies as consisting of a Human Center and Institutional Boundaries, and all social relations in the political, economic, community/cultural and kinship "spheres" as mutually interacting to define our social experiences. Complementary holism does not rest on an a priori assumption that a particular sphere is the base and all else is superstructure, as historical materialism does, but rather that we must take an empirical look at society's development and assess how it has been shaped by all social forces. Complementary holists agree with Marxists that economics is important to human and social development, just as they do with anarchists in regard to the State or with feminists in regard to gender inequality, but they assert that Marxists see economics, or class conflict, as the sole factor, and they don't believe that economics is always the most important factor. In Liberating Theory, Michael Albert, Robin Hahnel et al. write that: Just as Marx and Engels paid strict attention to "state of the art" science in their time, we should keep up with contemporary developments. Ironically, however, though most contemporary Marxists pride themselves on being "scientific," few bother to notice that "state of the art" science has changed dramatically in the last hundred years. While avoiding simplistic mimicry and misapplication of scientific principles, we should update our methods by seriously examining contemporary science for new ideas relevant to our theoretical efforts. Modern quantum physics, for example, teaches that reality is not a collection of separate entities but a vast and intricate "unbroken whole." Ilya Prigogine comments, "The new paradigms of science may be expected to develop into the new science of connectedness which means the recognition of unity in diversity." When thinking about phenomena, we inevitably conceptually abstract parts from the whole in which they reside, but they then exist as separate entities only in our perceptions. There are no isolated electrons, for example, only fields of force continually ebbing and flowing in a seamless web of activity which manifests events that we choose to call electrons because it suits our analytic purposes. For the physicist, each electron, quark, or whatever is a "process" and a "network." As a process it has a developmental trajectory--extending through all time. As a network, it is part of an interactive pattern--stretching throughout all space. Every part