[MGH: Noting the popularity of yesterday’s exhibit ‘What is Society?’ I think a short series on ‘Society’ is desirable. Contributors will include at least one of our own loyal subscribers to Social Science Files (a great expert on ‘society’). I will benefit from this. Yesterday Frisby & Sayer indicated the field/question is wide open, and my ambition is to ‘re-theorize society’ in a way even Weber could approve of. Today we have William Outhwaite, who was Professor of Sociology at University of Sussex. In the foreword he writes, “I presented versions of this argument at the University of Sussex”.]
William Outhwaite wrote:
Preface
This book is not a work of futurology, and in particular it is not about the prospect that human beings might cease to live in a social way. Such a prospect is inconceivable. The question is rather about the nature of our social relations, and whether these relations continue and will continue to be shaped by processes and ideas centered on what people came to call society or societies. This use of the term “society” dates from around the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries in Europe; it has a beginning, and therefore might also have an end.
Since around the last third of the twentieth century there has been a growing sense that the concept of society is in danger of obsolescence; some would say it is already obsolete. It has always been a problematic term, and in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries it has been exposed to a new wave of critical attacks … Margaret Thatcher famously claimed in 1987 that “There is no such thing as society. There are individual men and women, and there are families”. Postmodern theorists, notably Jean Baudrillard, have announced the dissolution of society into vaguer notions of “the masses,” and theorists of globalization such as John Urry have argued the concept of society cannot survive the eclipse of the nation-state which was its implicit basis. Evolutionary psychology and evolutionary sociology have suggested the replacement of the human model of society with conceptions more continuous with the social patterns of other animal species. Finally, more judicious commentators have traced the rise and fall of “society” as a concept in the social sciences or its “forgetting”, and others have explored ways of avoiding it or reformulating it. The concept of society, and perhaps society itself, are … “under siege.” Paradoxically, however, we have seen at the same time a revival of uncritical notions of “the” economy, community, the polity, governance, democracy, and so on.
Chapter 1
The Origins of “Society”
How did people come to use terms like “society,” and how did they think about what we now call society? …
… A … secular and abstract conception of society and, with it, the state, comes into existence in Europe at the time of the Renaissance and, more substantially, in the “long” Enlightenment of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. “State,” “état” or “stato” come to mean something more than a state of affairs, a distinction still marked in the German language, which was consolidated only at this time, in that between “Staat” and “Zustand” – a condition or state of affairs. “Society,” similarly, congeals from a vague notion of association, as in “the society of one’s fellows,” into a more structured conception of what is sometimes called civil society, existing in some variously conceptualized relation to the emergent state. …
… The tension over the issue of whether society and the political … should be seen as natural or an artificial construction is worked out in part initially through the historical thought experiment of social contract theory. As David Frisby and Derek Sayer showed in their excellent book on the concept of society, this tension runs through the work of thinkers such as Hobbes in the mid-seventeenth century and Rousseau (who famously wrote about a state of nature which, he said, probably never existed) and Montesquieu in the mid-eighteenth. By the end of this period, however, Montesquieu believed that the argument was largely won, though people might need to be “reminded” that they lived in a society and were “confined” by law to their mutual obligations. …
… Marx and Engels tend to speak of “social relations” rather than “society” – a conception which they see as too imprecise. As Marx put it, in an important methodological fragment of 1857, “To regard society as one single subject [Subjekt] is . . . to look at it wrongly, speculatively.” He goes on to elucidate this in a discussion of “The Method of Political Economy”:
The economists of the seventeenth century . . . always begin with the living whole, with population, nation, state, several states etc.; but they always conclude by discovering through analysis a small number of determinant, abstract, general relations such as division of labour, money, value etc. As soon as these individual moments had been more or less firmly established and abstracted, there began the economic systems, which ascended from the simple relations, such as labour, division of labour, need, exchange value, to the level of the state, exchange between nations and the world market. The latter is obviously the scientifically correct method. The concrete is concrete because it is the concentration of many determinations, hence unity of the diverse.
But Marx also emphasizes the importance of society as a frame of reference for more specific investigations. A little later in the same text, he writes:
In the succession of the economic categories, as in any other historical, social science, it must not be forgotten that the subject, – here, modern bourgeois society – is always what is given, in the head as well as in reality, and that these categories therefore express the forms of being, the characteristics of existence, and often only individual sides of this specific society, this subject [Subjekt].
… The formative years of sociology as an academic specialism were the decades just before and after the end of the nineteenth century. … We should look first at Emile Durkheim (1858–1917), the most explicitly sociological and society-focused of this generation … He wrote a charter for the subject: the famous Rules of Sociological Method (1895), followed by a pioneering study of Suicide … Suicide was … like other forms of deviant behavior, a normal feature of a society or social species operating, like an organism, within certain parameters.
Durkheim had earlier used similar terminology in differentiating between normal and abnormal forms of the division of labor in society. “Undoubtedly society is a being, a person,” he had written in 1885… and if his language later became a little more cautious and precise, he stuck to this original intuition. Suicide, crime, the division of labor, industrial conflict, and so on are all products of a certain state of society. Even religion turns out neither to be a simple illusion, since it is too substantial for that, nor to be about supernatural entities (assuming they do not exist), but rather about society – the form in which societies conceptualize, celebrate and reinforce their solidarity. A society, for Durkheim, is not exactly an organism, but it is very like one in having emergent properties not reducible to those of its component parts, in its forms of integration, its operating parameters which map out its normal and pathological states, and so on.
All this must be heavily qualified by Durkheim’s equally strong insistence on the importance of what he called collective representations. In his early work on the division of labor, he had referred to the “conscience collective”, the collective conscience or consciousness, in connection with the “mechanical solidarity” of what he considered simpler societies without a developed division of labor. In his subsequent work, this notion mutates into a broader set of concepts variously designated as conscience commune, conscience sociale, and représentations collectives. There is considerable ambiguity in Durkheim’s thinking about just what ontological or causal status these have. At times, notably in his occasional references to Marxist materialism, they seem secondary to structural or morphological social relations. Elsewhere, they seem to be primary. He claimed in Suicide that “social life is entirely made up of representations” and complained in a preface to the second edition of the Rules of Sociological Method, that “Although we have expressly said and repeated in every way that social life was entirely made of representation, we have been accused of eliminating the mental element from sociology.” …
… [W]hatever the make-up of society in Durkheim’s conception, it is clear that he treats it as an independent variable, a material and efficient cause of a whole variety of social processes. It is this which repelled many of his contemporaries and has continued to worry many of his readers. As the British social anthropologist E.E. Evans-Pritchard wrote, in his critique of Durkheim’s theory of religion, “It was Durkheim and not the savage who made society into a god”. …
… Georg Simmel’s conception of society is directly contrary to Durkheim’s. He rejects any notion of society as a substantial entity, focusing instead on forms of interaction and a more abstract principle of sociation (Vergesellschaftung) … In a kind of sociological version of Kant, Simmel answers the Kantian question: “How is society possible?” with reference to the synthesizing activities of members of society themselves. “The consciousness of constituting with others a unity is all there is to that unity”.
Simmel’s version of Nietzschean Kulturkritik takes the form of what he called “the tragedy of culture” – the tendency for cultural innovations to be routinized and to lose their creative character. Max Weber also makes a rather broader concept of culture central to his own thinking. In a fundamental rejection of substantial conceptions of society, Weber avoids the term almost entirely, preferring verbal forms such as sociation (Vergesellschaftung) and community-formation (Vergemeinschaftung). He wrote in a letter to Robert Liefmann: “If I have become a sociologist . . . it is in order to put an end to the use of collective concepts.” For Weber, a sociological (as opposed to legal) concept of, say, the state can only mean the probability that a certain number of individuals typically orient their behavior to such an idea, by obeying laws, paying taxes, joining armies, and so forth. Weber’s sociology is a sociology of action, not society – the polar opposite in theory at least, to Durkheim’s. In our time they would be constantly asked to debate their positions with one another. A hundred years ago, they barely noted each other’s existence.
For Weber, the rejection of holistic models of society and of a “conceptual realism” (Begriffsrealismus) or, as we would now say, “reification,” which he identified with Hegel and Marx and their followers, was a main starting-point in his own methodological reflection, documented in an early critique of the nineteenth-century historical economists, Roscher and Knies. He did not directly criticize his contemporary, Durkheim’s, society-based sociology, though he can hardly have been sympathetic to it. Weber’s approach was, however, greatly influenced by his friend Georg Simmel, whose earlier works … he acknowledges at various points in his own work.
For Simmel,
What palpably exists is indeed only individual human beings and their circumstances and activities: therefore, the task can only be to understand them. Whereas the essence of society, that emerges purely through an ideal synthesis and is never to be grasped, should not form the object of reflection that is directed towards the investigation of reality.
Weber wholeheartedly agreed with this approach, insisting that a sociological, as distinct from a legal conception of a state or a community could only be formulated in terms of the probability that individuals would orient their action in relation to it:
What motives determine and lead the individual members and participants in this . . . community to behave in such a way that the community came into being in the first place and continues to exist?
In contrasting Vergemeinschaftung and Vergesellschaftung, Weber was reworking Tönnies’s classic distinction between “community” (Gemeinschaft) and “society” or, as it is sometimes translated, “association” (Gesellschaft). In Gemeinschaft und Gesellschaft (1887), Tönnies contrasted the small-scale, intimate, face-to-face relations of (typically rural) communities with the large-scale, anonymous, bureaucratized and monetarized relations of the modern city. Here, “society” becomes a conception of a particular type of social interaction. Tönnies was fundamentally ambiguous about his evaluation of these two types. His ostensible aim was to employ them in a neutral or value-free manner as polar types, but his language constantly suggests the kind of critique of modern society which was common on the political right and to some extent also the left, where Tönnies’s own attachments lay.
I have spent some time presenting these classical sociological and related conceptions of society both because they have been influential in their own right and because they illustrate the major conceptual options available to later thinkers in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Holistic conceptions are carried forward in structural functionalist and system theories, notably by Talcott Parsons and Robert Merton in the USA and later by Niklas Luhmann in Germany, individualistic approaches in rational choice theory, most creatively by Jon Elster and Martin Hollis, and a more group-centered conception in action theories such as that of Alain Touraine and his sociology of social movements. Simmel’s influence continues in phenomenological and social constructionist theories which stress the constitution of society by and in our representations of it. As we shall see [in this book], these theoretical approaches all conceptualize society differently.
The Source:
William Outhwaite, The Future of Society, Blackwell 2006
Evolutions of social order from the earliest humans to the present day and future machine age.