On Society

Anthony Elliott, Bryan S. Turner, Bryan S. Turner

• Publisher: Polity
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9780745648422, 9780745648415
• eBook ISBN: 9780745660561
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

'Society' is one of the most frequently used words in public life; it is also a foundational term in the social sciences. In our own time, however, the idea has never been so much in dispute and so little understood. For some critics, society is simply too consensual for a world of intensive discord. For others, the idea of 'society' is oppressive - the very notion, so some argue, is dismissive of the infinite social differences that shape global realities.

In this erudite and original book, two of the world's leading social theorists focus on unravelling the different meanings of society as a way of introducing the reader to contemporary debates in social theory. The authors argue provocatively that all ideas of society can be assigned to one of three analytical categories, or some combination of these - structure, solidarity or creation - and develop a fresh characterization of the nature of the social as a means of understanding global transformations.

By integrating abstract problems of social theory with empirical examples and political analysis, On Society provides lucid interpretations of classical and contemporary social theory. The book also critiques recent social theories that simply equate the demise of society with globalization, the communications revolution or multiculturalism, and in so doing provides an original insight into today's world.

1

Society as Structure

Sociology is born as a discourse of social order, norms and structure. Anyone who considers the history of European social theory must be struck by the intriguingly high priority assigned by it to issues concerning the primacy of society over the individual. In its most influential formulation in French social thought by Émile Durkheim, the reciprocity intrinsic to modern social solidarity produces a basis of social order. For Karl Marx, the increasing instrumentalization of both nature and humanity under capitalism is the upshot of an imposed universal, abstract law – compressing all social relations to the dictates of the capitalist division of labour. German sociologist Max Weber downgraded the question of social order in favour of individual action and meaning, but nevertheless spent a lifetime pondering how the two spheres intersect. Weber, while promising to rid sociology of collective concepts, constantly analysed structures of power, authority and exchange. For Ferdinand Tönnies, in a contrasting fashion, modern society is portrayed as superficial and fragile – because it is not grounded in lasting values and durable structures. In modern social theory, from the German philosopher and sociologist Theodor Adorno’s formulation of the ‘totally administered society’ to Talcott Parsons’s emphasis on the social cohesion of modern societies, the terms structure, order and norms are granted theoretical privilege. In the current debates on globalization, cosmopolitanism and culture, structure would also appear to remain an important category for the analysis and critique of transnational spaces.

To assert the centrality of structure to the general theory of society in sociology might seem, at first glance, too unqualified a gesture. We do not suggest, however, that classical social theory was fully held in thrall to the concept of structure to the exclusion of other ways of conceiving of the social. The truth is that various other theoretical concepts and political doctrines were mobilized throughout the history of sociology to capture the complexities of societies in quite specific ways. In the course of this book, we chart the adventures not only of structure, but also solidarity and creation, in the discourse of the social. It would also be foolish to suppose, even where the language of structure has reigned supreme in social theory, that an emphasis on social order and moral norms fits neatly into a conservative political tradition. For again the truth is more complex. Certainly in what follows we seek to map a combination of social and historical factors to develop the argument that the discourse of society as structure has been informed by many political traditions – especially the doctrines of liberalism, conservatism and socialism.

Notwithstanding these qualifications, however, sociological conceptions of society as structure arose – generally speaking – against a background of disorderly behaviour and disruptive events in European cities and urban spaces. From the French Revolution of 1789 to the outbreak of the First World War in 1914, Europe had been subject to profound revolutionary changes in the transition from the ancien regime to the emergence of modern industrialism, and as such social theory became primarily concerned to understand social order and the social conditions that produced normative order. We shall see a little later, especially in the work of Durkheim, how such a detour through problems associated with the disruption of social norms brought about by urbanization and rapid social change was politically necessary in the intellectual context of French society during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Yet this intellectual response to the disorientation of values and beliefs in modern society was not the only distinguishing trope of classical sociology. For in a striking theoretical move, classical sociology was also founded upon the quest to define and differentiate ‘the social’ from ‘the natural’. Critical of attempts to understand social phenomena in terms of the natural endowments of human beings, sociology substituted ‘institutions’ for ‘instincts’. Sociology came to insist on the reality of the social world, but it also sought to distinguish itself from economic, political, and even cultural perspectives.

This centrality of the social, as opposed to some raw explanations in terms of nature, lies at the root of the critique of culture launched by classical sociology. However classical sociology involved not only the quest to define the social as a field of distinct intellectual endeavour, but also to grasp the social as a moral phenomenon distinct from individualism – especially the form of individualism that emerged primarily in British social theory. In fact we can read much of (continental) social theory in the late nineteenth century as a critique of British liberalism in politics and utilitarianism in economic thought. The key figure here was the English philosopher and sociologist Herbert Spencer whose doctrine of state and individual was the object of much of Durkheim’s critical attack through the notion of solidarity. British political economy from the Scottish social philosopher Adam Smith onwards had argued that the market, the division of labour and competition through international trade would result in the benefit of all. Spencer and the utilitarians of the nineteenth century inherited from the English jurist and philosopher Jeremy Bentham the idea that progress could be measured in simple quantitative terms as the happiness of the individual. The role of government was to remove the hurdles to general happiness. European sociology had a much darker vision of society and history with Weber famously predicting a night of icy darkness rather than utilitarian felicity. Continental social theory has been throughout critical of the ‘Manchester School’ as both naive and utopian. For Durkheim at least, a set of countervailing forces was necessary to offset the destructive force of economic individualism.

If the character of sovereignty defines the political, the social is defined by trust. Trust is the social dimension that underpins social relations, especially contractual relations in the social sphere. Just as money is the medium of exchange in the economy, trust is the medium of reciprocity in the social field. Classical sociology, or at least those versions that render society as structure, was the study of the institutionalization of relations of trust, respect and hierarchy – in the family, religion, the law, customs and so forth. This emphasis on the orderliness of society has often led to the view that writers like Durkheim were inevitably conservative but such is not the case. Durkheim argued for example that the state had a moral function to play in steering society out of the crisis of anomic values. As a result his emphasis on the state over the individual was socialist not conservative.

It is important to note in this context that there were various levels of analysis in the classical tradition. Because the debate with economics as a science was central to much of nineteenth-century social thought, it is hardly surprising that Marx and Weber approached their task of analysing capitalist society in terms of a model of economic action. The economic model involved the idea of rational actors satisfying their wants in a competitive market. Social action was modelled on a similar set of notions, but sociologists sought to study social collectivities (such as social classes), questioned the rationality of economic behaviour (by including notions such as ideology and the non-rational), and questioned the idea of needs and wants (by demonstrating their cultural relativity). Whereas economics involved the study of the rational selection of means and ends in conditions of scarcity, sociology emerged as the study of the conditions of trust that underpinned social institutions, and they saw these social bonds as underpinning economic contracts. In economics, money provides a measure of the distribution of rational choices, whereas trust is only an indirect or proximate measure of social solidarity. In short, sociology – in contrast to classical economics – developed much richer or thicker notions of behaviour and action, but at the cost of precision, measurement and predictability. And yet it is precision and predictability that sociologies of structured society most prize. As we will shortly see, the emergence of anxieties about an increase in the disorientation of values and beliefs are consequences of a decline in trust in modern societies. Low trust is viewed as signalling the erosion of social order in various sociologies of society as structure. The general response to such developments across the expensive, polished cities of the West from this sociological orientation has been one of alarm.

The dynamic, exhilarating project of society as structure represents, from one angle, a long political tragedy – one marked by the unspeakable sufferings of women and men subjected to various ‘civilizing forces’, from capitalism to colonialism. Indeed, modernity’s drive for order, control and predictability represents at once a very particular kind of global history – roughly speaking, the West – and its absolute negation. Such a paradoxical conception of society rests on a radical split between descriptive and normative senses of the social. Society as structure has nourished and destroyed simultaneously. The development of bureaucracy in modern societies was for both sociologists and philosophers of the nineteenth century the process par excellence that defined order and predictability. Weber thought it was inevitable and associated its growth with the triumph through Germany and then Europe of Prussian values and institutions. Military discipline and military bureaucracy became the basis of military success as warfare became industrialized. Japan, in its rush to modernize, absorbed German military organization and technology with devastating success, as the Japanese demonstrated in the war with Russia in 1905.

On the one hand, the modernist dream for certitude, nowhere fully realized but long sought after, would seem a key source of social, cultural and political inspiration from industrialization to imperialism. On the other hand, modernist transformations of ideology have functioned to generate a sense of society that is itself lacking any particularity or specificity. The scientific revolution of the early modern period decentred the social in a dramatic fashion, producing a set of values or criteria universalistic in scope and thus which served to inform ways of knowing any authentic way of social life whatsoever. In the realm of social theory, such a connection between the concrete and universal is part and parcel of what we term the discourse of society as structure. Structured society is the worldview of organized social relations, involving cultural codes and social scripts objectifying prescriptions, prohibitions and performativities. In this vision of the social as organized and organizing, society is at one with universal rights and responsibilities, and more often than not social imperatives are conceived in terms of law and order.

Society, or the political state, or community, is viewed in this frame of reference as a supra-collective foundation, exercising legislative authority and making juridical pronouncements in the name of universal humanity. At its best, society as structure expresses a realist bent, anchored as it is in social context and security, and concerned above all with economic prosperity or social order. At its worst, society as structure is conformist, utilitarian, shallow and passionless. Weber’s notion of society as an iron cage captures this sense of standardization and rationalization at its most bleak and pessimistic moment. Capitalism expanded the market but at a substantial cost to human happiness. In fact from Weber’s perspective, happiness could not be of any concern to sociologists but only to utopian reformers of industrial society. Weber was particularly critical of romanticism and of those utopian thinkers who felt they could oppose the march of modernization, complaining in particular about the young disciples around the German poet Stefan George who imagined they could defy the progress of rationalization. Their poetic protests were merely ineffectual waves smashing on the stubborn resistance of rocks.

If society originally means organized social relations, it suggests both regulation and continuity. The social is what encourages choice, change and the construction of personal identity, but the ground from which it does so needs to be consistent, structured and sanctioned, which in turn leads to an ongoing preoccupation with obedience, control and the collective. ‘Society’ here can be traced to a certain type of discourse which belonged to the general spirit of Enlightenment, with its vision of linear, progressive self-development ‘without history’, an ideology that from the German philosopher Immanuel Kant onwards was dubiously established at the very heart of historical society itself. Society as structure, in its grand narrative of universal humanity, is written in capital letters: Progress, Property, Science, Freedom and the Family. These ideals governing the discourse of society appear neither removed nor wholly at one with the actual texture of daily social life. Rather, like the Freudian superego inflicting harsh rebukes upon the conscious self, the cultural ideals of society as structure imply a radical split between the subject who speaks and lays claim to the organized and organizing rules of social order, and the Other denied access to instituting rules and thus deprived of the status of subject. This is, in short, the core of the Ethnocentrism of society, which is given its political axes and force through a series of dichotomies: civilized/savage, self/other, normal/mad, man/woman, adult/child. From this angle alone, society as structure represents an adventure story that continues fully into the present day, profoundly shaping some of the key global political conflicts of our age. Indeed, society as structure is a worldview arguably pivotal to those forms of politics conceived in the mould of the West versus the rest.

Of course, generalizations are always dangerous, especially when dealing with the Enlightenment. One of its leading figures was the Swiss philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau, who endlessly complained about the destructive impact of society – by which he meant the rapidly urbanizing and commercial world of Paris – on the innocence of the child and, in Émile, created many of our contemporary ideas about protecting the emotional world of the sensitive child from the adult world of competition around status and wealth. Rousseau was especially critical of the rise of the modern theatre which was a site for competitive displays of wealth. Rousseau thought that the good citizens of Geneva would be corrupted by the world of Parisian capitalism. But there is no simple way to interpret Rousseau, who also defended the idea that we can find freedom in Parsons’s appreciation of the significance of the psychological internalization of the general will. Liberals such as the British social and political thinker Isaiah Berlin have condemned Rousseau as an enemy of freedom. However, Rousseau’s argument was to reject the notion that the selfish actions of individuals can produce a common good and proposed that the general will can never be a simple aggregate of individual selfish desires. One further point about Rousseau is that he believed that freedom and virtue of the individual were much more difficult to secure in large than in small societies. In short, the emerging idea of society as structure had a good deal to do with the growth of population and the rise of large cities like Paris, London and Berlin.

Self-constitution and concentration of activities within the milieux of society may certainly emanate from the stylization of the individual subject. But this interplay between self and society may also be experienced as a force exerted upon the day-to-day lives of citizens by the political centre. In social theory, all modern forms of society have consisted of a plurality of organizations; in particular, the concept of the ‘state’ – as an apparatus of government or power – has special resonance in those versions of social theory that have sought to comprehend society as structure in its origin and nature. For the state to effectively subordinate social systems to their rule, it must socialize its citizens in the proper cultural attributes of a national community and instill particular sorts of expression of cultural identity; and it is this which the state/civil society relation designates in a celebrated tradition from German philosopher Georg Hegel to Marx. In civil society and specifically the bourgeois version of the civil sphere, individuals are viewed as primarily self-seeking and atomistic, driven by their own particular interests; but the state is that political field which facilitates the emergence of a series of defined communities or ethical clusters in which egoistic conflicts and social divisions can be overcome; in short, uppercase Society suppresses diversity (whether gender, race or class) in order to create an imagined community of sameness. Hegel’s dialectic of the universal and particular in Phenomenology – the state is ‘the Universal that has expressed its actual rationality’, representing ‘the identity of the general and particular will’ – anticipated much of the direction that the state/civil society debate was to assume in social thought.¹ For Hegel, the connection between the impersonal power of the political and the civil spheres of society is easy to see: the state actualizes and deepens forms of ‘the universal’ which are lacking in civil society. The state, writes Hegel, is ‘the embodiment of concrete freedom, in which the individual’s particular interests have their complete development, and receive adequate recognition of their rights’. In this tradition of thought, the individual subject adopts a state sanctioned identity by rising above prosaic particularity, through elevating culture over politics, to realize a kind of ‘universal freedom’. The state incarnates reason, not by scooping up civil society but by embodying certain of the universal qualities upon which it is predicated.

In turning Hegel on his head, Karl Marx’s sociological thought involved a sustained reflection of the relation between universal and particular, and in his political writings at least the problem of the social is dramatized in terms which emphasize that the state rests upon civil society. In his ‘Critique of Hegel’s Doctrine of the State’, Marx levels the charge of ‘political formalism’ against Hegel.² Hegel’s political thought, says Marx, conceptualizes how the state is a kind of universal instructor in civility, instilling within the individual self a supreme sense of the abstract equality of individuals. The formalism of this position for Marx is that such a politically harmonious account of the state/society relation can be purchased only at the cost of denying the concrete particularities of, and differences between, individuals. For Marx, Hegel’s doctrine of the state is, in fact, a portrait of bourgeois society, in which a lethal cleavage appears between the subject of civil society in his or her immediate material specificity and the abstract, rights-bearing person of public political life. Marx, in his reflections on the emancipation of the Jews, was critical of the abstract notion of the ‘rights of man’ arguing that without economic emancipation these rights were merely empty promises. By contrast, Marx posits that the state/society relation moves at the uneasy conjuncture of class and culture, society and the symbolic. For Marx the state is linked, not only to class (whose dominant composition it reflects), but to the fundamental structures of ‘social division’. Marx saw that at the root of society lies a certain divisive force between the dominant and the dominated, of which class relations or the relation between state and civil society were symptomatic. Society for Marx is generally ignorant of the fundamental feature of social division, and this he traced to the intoxicating hold of ideology. According to Marx, there is always within society an imperative need to forge representations of unity, to project a kind of...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Halftitle
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Preface
• Introduction
• 1. Society as Structure
• 2. Society as Solidarity
• 3. Society as Creation
• Conclusion
• Notes
• Index