SOCIETY

A union of individuals, particularly of human beings, among whom a specific type of order or organization exists, although not all are agreed on its formal constitutive. This article first analyzes the nature of society from the viewpoint of Catholic social philosophy and then outlines theories of society that are proposed in the science of sociology.

Philosophical Analysis

Society may be defined as the permanent union of men who are united by modes of behavior that are demanded by some common end, value, or interest. Analyzed semantically, the term denotes a union of one kind or another. Its notion differs from that of community in that community is a form of society in which men are more intimately bound by specific ends and natural forces. Society itself is not possible, however, unless based upon some common moral and legal understanding with social laws and controls to sustain it; hence some characteristics of the community are found also in society.

Nature. Guided by experience, and thus by the findings of the social sciences, the social philosopher regards it as empirically established that man can attain the full development of his nature only in association with others. Human nature therefore constitutes the ontological ground for society; it manifests this through its biological, psychological, and teleological tendencies. Biologically, man's nature is ordered to marriage and the family. Psychologically, the impulse to be a member of a social group and to be appreciated as such is characteristically human. Teleologically, man seeks both happiness and conformity with the natural law; both of these, in turn, urge him to establish an order of social life guaranteeing freedom and common utility as conditions for the achievement of a fully human existence. In consequence, viewed ontologically, human nature needs social supplementation for its integration; again, since different potentialities are found in individual humans, human nature is capable of bringing about such supplementation. Hence man is by nature a social animal (ζ[symbol omitted]ον πολιτικόν for aristotle; ens sociale for St. thomas aquinas).

Since this is the design of the Creator, it is in human nature itself that one can recognize the will of the Creator with regard to the fundamental ordering of society. The fact that one can philosophically ascertain the will of the Creator in "the nature of things" needs emphasizing in contemporary Catholic social philosophy; while until recently there was a lack of contact with the empirical social sciences, there is currently a precipitous tendency to theologize concerning Christian social theory. It must be emphasized, too, that Catholic social doctrine does not depend simply upon ethical postulates; rather, its ethical principles are ontologically grounded in the natural law.

Unity of Society. Because man is a composite of body and soul, and hence a person who is responsible for his own conduct, the society he forms is, unlike other unities, unified by an intrinsic principle, the self-binding will of its members. In this specific sense, society is a unity resulting from an actualized moral order (unitas ordinis ). Nevertheless, society rests also on an extrinsic formative principle that adds to the note of order one of organization. The reason for this is not only that the self-binding will of its members is to some extent defective, but also that the concrete demands of society's intrinsic end are not fully recognizable by all of its members, and, furthermore, that the lasting realization of the social end from one generation to another can be secured only by organizational means, such as legal and administrative institutions.

Function of Society. The function of society is to actualize its inherent end, the common good, viz, the conditions that make a fully human existence possible for all of its members. Because the individual depends on others to bring about the end of society (principle of solidarity), the individual good is part of the common good.

Only when the common good has been established as an ontological criterion can the true functions of society be ascertained. For this reason, in line with the thought of St. Thomas Aquinas, the present exposition of society focuses on the idea of ends (ordo finium ) rather than on the idea of value found in modern social theory. When the idea of ends implicit in human nature is given equal prominence with that of value, three problems that beset the philosophical and ethical theory of value become more amenable to solution. First, the connection of value with objective being becomes more readily apparent, for in modern theory the recognition of value is made a matter of feeling or of mere a priori insight. Second, the obligatory character of moral values in the personal and social sphere can be shown more easily; this follows from their being related to inherent tendencies in human nature (inclinationes naturales, in Summa theologiae 1a2ae, 94.2), whose intrinsic ends indicate the will of the Creator. Third, in this way the standards for defining the order of values and the scale of values in the life of both the individual and the community can be established. Apart from these considerations, moreover, an ontologically founded teleological order makes it apparent that man, as a member of the community, has to achieve ends or realize values on his own responsibility (principle of subsidiarity) as far as this is possible.

Instead of ends and values, one may speak of interests (e.g., general or public interests, group interests, individual interests); even in this terminology, however, the ontological idea of ends is indispensable for an objective evaluation of subjective claims based on interests.

Reality of Society. The common good is a reality over and above the good that individuals can achieve separately; consequently, in realizing the common good, society emerges as a reality of a special kind. Predicamentally this reality cannot be defined simply in terms of the disjunction between substance and acci dent (see categories of being). Society is not a substance, but neither is it a mere ontological accident. The interpretation of the good of the individual as part of the common good of society, which had far-reaching implications for Aquinas, has been concretized by those social scientists who give equal importance to nurture and nature in forming the fully human existence of the individual as a person. They see in nurture the culture or the civilization of the society by which the individual's psychic, mental, moral, and religious predispositions are largely formed. In view of their analysis, the category of relation is not sufficient to describe the being of society, for it would suggest that society is a structure consisting in relations between fully developed persons, whereas man reaches the fullness of his human existence only through social interaction. This is especially true during adolescence, but it is true too in later life; as Aquinas also taught, only the completely matured person is morally permitted to leave society and to live in solitude. Society's ontological nature is also obscured when it is reduced to an "I-Thou" relationship or to a "we" relationship or to a "dialogue" form of human existence, even though such attempts contain elements of truth and may serve to illustrate man's social nature and responsibility. In Aquinas's thought, the relation ad alium singulariter is given due consideration, but emphasis is laid on the relation ad alium in communi, i.e., on the community as such (Summa theologiae 2a2ae, 58.5). Other attempts are deficient in accounting for the supra-individual reality of society as this is actualized in the process of realizing the common good. It is, however, equally certain that the existence of society does depend upon the existence of man who ontologically is a substance. As a person he is also a supersocial being with supersocial ends; it is here that his rights to freedom, which are not to be violated by society, are grounded.

Structure. Since the ends to be realized through social cooperation are many, society necessarily has a pluralistic structure. This pluralism is of two kinds. The first is derived directly from the social nature of man in which are rooted not only such vital structures as the family and the state, but also the territorial as well as the vocational community and the ethnic-cultural group. Because they are based directly upon human nature as such, they are found everywhere in mankind and its history in one form or another. The second kind of social pluralism is based indirectly on human nature, namely, on common purposes open to man's free choice. This kind of pluralism intensifies in proportion to the growth of population and to the development of civilization. It results from the articulation and particularization of both material and mental ends and values, whose pursuit results in an increasing variety of associations and in a growing measure of socialization, i.e., closer interdependence among men. The pluralism existing in the modern democratic society derives its peculiar character from its causes; these lie in the mechanism of decision-making in the parliamentary process and in the striving for influence on government and parliament by pressure groups.

From what has been said about the structure of society, a further important characteristic emerges, namely, that it is always historically patterned. Only the fundamentals of social order are implicit in human nature; more cannot be found in such nature even for the family community, still less for larger elements of society and for the state. In their concrete aspects, the forms of society change as human nature changes, which, though invariable in its essence, is otherwise mutable (Summa theologiae 2a2ae, 57.2 ad 1).

Social Process. It follows from the fact that common ends are constitutive of society that a power of direction must be vested in some authority. To the extent that social ends are ontologically implicit in human nature, authority is itself ontologically grounded; otherwise, it is established by the agreement of wills of those who freely unite themselves for the pursuit of a common goal. Authority is necessary not only because the realization of common ends by a self-determining group requires coordination, but also because a governing power must determine concrete objectives pertaining to the common good as well as methods to attain them. The mode of exercising authority and the extent of its competence depend very largely on the form of society in which it operates. It is practically confined to a rule of custom in the case of the homogeneous ethnic community living as a national minority, whereas it is comprehensive in the case of a heterogeneous society such as a large territorial state, for this must rely to a great extent on organizational means.

Capacity for Action. Only the person is capable of having responsibility and of acting accordingly. Society as a whole is responsible for actualizing its own ends, and it carries out this responsibility through various organs (e.g., states conclude treaties and trade unions make contracts). Society, therefore, is a person; but because its bond of unity consists in a common responsibility, it is called a moral person, to distinguish it from the physical person of individual man. It is also called a juridical person because it possesses natural rights by reason of its responsibilities and is capable of legally relevant action. In consequence, society is a person not merely in a metaphorical sense but by strict analogy.

In a similar manner, society may be called an organism; in fact, one is accustomed to speak of the body politic, its members, and its organs. The organic theory of society lays stress on a community of responsibility to attain common intrinsic ends, whereas the mechanistic theory sees society either as a harmony of self-balancing interests (individualism) or as a unity to be organized for extrinsic ends by a ruling group (collectivism). Aquinas refers to the Church as a person (Summa theologiae 2a2ae, 83.16 ad 3) and a body (ibid. 3a, 8.4).

Types. A major consideration of social philosophers is the relation between a society and its members; these latter may be individuals or they may be smaller societies. Hence, the first classification is that of the allembracing society, such as the state or the organized society of nations. Particular societies are referred to as intermediate structures because they serve as social units between the individual and the all-embracing society through their particular ends, responsibilities, and rights. Another division is that into necessary communities, relatively necessary communities, and free associations. Necessary communities, examples of which are the family and the state, are indispensable to human existence and are based directly on human nature; they also impose indisputable moral obligations. Relatively necessary societies also are based directly on human nature, but they are structures with limited functions, such as ethnic groups. Free associations (e.g. the literary club and the stock company) are based on human nature only indirectly; they have their origin in the free choice of their members and are limited to serving man in various spheres of culture.

All of the foregoing social units belong to the natural sphere, as distinct from the supernatural. The Church, by reason of its divine mandate for salvation and its life of grace, forms the mystical body of christ, a supernatural society. A society that affords all the requisites for the full development of human nature is called a perfect society: examples are the state in the natural order and the Church in the supernatural order. Imperfect societies are the smaller societies; these are capable of performing their functions only as members of a perfect society. The free society, in which the state fully recognizes human rights, particularly that of free public opinion, is to be differentiated from the totalitarian society, in which the government assumes unlimited dominance over the individual. The free society is an open society to the extent that it allows communication with individuals and associations outside its domain in an unhampered way. A closed society excludes such communication. In a different sense, one speaks of a closed society when a traditional social morality (H. Bergson) or Ethosform (M. Scheler) prevails to unite its members in an intimate spiritual bond. Finally, the juridical society may be differentiated from the amicable society. The first rests upon legal provisions (e.g. a municipality or a business corporation), whereas the second rests upon a good-will agreement on the part of the members (e.g. a sports club or charitable organization).

Narrower Sense. Society is sometimes used in a narrower sense to designate relative autonomies as compared to the more absolute autonomy of the state. The distinction is of crucial importance for social philosophy and social ethics. In the narrower sense, society is composed of individuals and smaller social units with their own particular ends and responsibilities; the state, on the other hand, has an all-embracing end and effects the basic ordering of social functions in the over-all society. This is the common understanding in English social theory, in contrast to Hegel's theory in which society is absorbed by the state (cf. E. Barker, Political Thought in England 1848–1914 [Oxford 1942] 66).

F. Tönnies (1855–1936) uses the word "society" in a still narrower sense as designating only associations based on free choice and generally with material purposes, to distinguish these from the community as a biological-spiritual unit, especially the family, the ethnic group, and the nationality. As an example of the first, he would cite the modern market society that is formed by commercial exchange in balancing supply and demand. Influenced by Tönnies as well as by Marx, not a few regard the state itself as a purely functional social entity. There is an element of truth in Tönnies's distinction, easily recognized in present pluralistic democracies. Yet in light of the principles of social philosophy pointed out above, the state is much more than an arbitrary structure; it is grounded in the social nature of man and can subsist as a political society only if it is rooted in consent with respect to common values. This has been the thought of political theorists from Cicero, Augustine, Aquinas, and Edmund burke down to the rise of individualism. One who sets society altogether apart from community, as does Tönnies, overlooks the fact that society in any form must rest on a sharing of values, particularly those values that man finds revealed in his nature as morally binding for life in society.

Other philosophical theories. In the latter part of the Middle Ages, nominalism set the stage for the undermining of the ontological and metaphysical concept of society. It held that only individual things are real, hence also only individual human beings; for the nominalist, therefore, society could exist only in mind as an idea, not as a reality. The so-called fictive theory of society is believed to be traceable to Pope innocent iv, who, referring to social grouping, used the expression fingatur una persona; what he meant by this, however, was only that society is a res incorporalis, for he was concerned with establishing the difference between a juridical and a physical person.

Under the influence of nominalism, the doctrine developed that society depends exclusively on the will of the people, giving rise to the theory of the social con tract. According to T. hobbes (De Cive, 1642; Leviathan, 1651), the natural state of man is a struggle of each individual against the other. Fear and self-preservation lead to the social contract, by which men establish an order that guarantees a limited amount of freedom for all.J. J. rousseau (Contrat social, 1762), advocated the opposite theory, namely, that man in his natural state lived in freedom and equality, both of which were destroyed by the introduction of property, to be followed by strife and war. Order was established by means of the social contract, and thus by the will of the people, with the result that each man obeys himself, having cooperated in establishing law and authority.

According to G. W. F. hegel (Grundlinien der Philosophie des Rechts, 1821), society is "the realization of the substantial will" expressing "the objective spirit," the moral consciousness made effective in group life; participating in this spirit, individual man attains fully human existence, but this is only an "accidental" being. In K. marx's theory of dialectical materialism (Zur Kritik der politischen Ökonomie, 1859), society is patterned on the "mode of production of material life"; hence every advanced precommunist society must be a class society, if only because of the "social power" inherent in the private ownership of production.

In spite of manifest discrepancies, some element of truth is to be found in all these theories. They are not so much concerned with society, however, as they are with the justification of the state and its authority; yet all of them presuppose that association is necessary for man and even essential to his nature. This is the basic problem in social philosophy; it still calls for analysis and explanation. Moreover, since these theories take as their starting point an inadequate notion of the person, they reach false conclusions, such as those on which individualism and collectivism are based, and continue to have detrimental consequences in the development of modern society. The element of truth to be found in the social contract theory is that society and its order rest upon the individuals' responsibility to comply with the demands of human nature and thus upon a union of wills (or upon what Aquinas, following Cicero and Augustine, calls a iuris consensus, Summa theologiae 1a2ae, 105.2). The basic mistake of any social contract theory is the notion of absolute sovereignty, which Hobbes situated in monarchy and Rousseau in the people. Hegel was right in emphasizing that society requires a spiritual basis of unity and that only by participating in it can man achieve a fully human existence; this is akin to the scholastic doctrine that the individual good is but a part of the common good. However, Hegel left too little room for the individual, particularly when the supersocial and superpolitical ends of the human person are to be considered. For Marx, social (and consequently the individual) human consciousness are formed wholly by the material world with its technical and economic means of production; moreover, he too finds no room for the individual's own being and responsibility as a person, having disavowed the "dualism of spirit and matter." On the other hand, there is an element of truth in his theory of society, particularly in its emphasis on political economy as the most important socially uniting bond; the latter's relative importance as an integrating factor was acknowledged by Aquinas as well.

Bibliography: j. messner, Social Ethics: Natural Law in the Modern World, tr. j. j. doherty (new ed. St. Louis 1965). e. welty, Man in Society, v. 1 of A Handbook of Christian Social Ethics, ed. j. fitzsimons, tr. g. kirstein (New York 1960–), bibliog. b. a. paparella, Sociality and Sociability: A Philosophy of Sociability according to St. Thomas Aquinas (Washington, D.C.1955). j. maritain, The Person and the Common Good, tr. j. j. fitzgerald (New York 1947); Moral Philosophy: An Historical and Critical Survey of the Great Systems (New York 1964). j. f. cronin, Catholic Social Principles (Milwaukee, Wis. 1950). m. j. williams, Catholic Social Thought (New York 1950). a. f. utz, Die Prinzipien der Gesellschaftslehre, v. 1 of Sozialethik (Heidelberg 1958—), international bibliog. g. gundlach et al., Staatslexikon 3:817–823, 842–847.

[j. messner]

Sociological Theories

The effects of nominalistic and individualistic theories of society upon social institutions were already evident when the modern science of sociology was first proposed and named by Auguste comte (1798–1857). His work and that of other early sociologists was in part a reaction against the dissolution of traditional groupings in the course of the french revolution. There remained, so it seemed, no intermediary groups between the individual and the state, and this condition heightened the importance of a distinction between society and the state that had not been made explicit up to that time. Sociology was conceived as a means for the discovery of laws of societal structure and change through the application of which a new social solidarity could be attained. Since ontological and metaphysical concepts of society had been abandoned, the search for such laws could be undertaken only with the method of "positive science." As the field developed, the original positivism became the object of a critique from within as well as from without, but the inductive study of society remained the distinctive task of sociology. Thus, although sociologists are aware that assumptions about the nature and reality of society affect the models, methods, and techniques that they employ, these assumptions are not their primary concern. Their attention is given to the observable fact of society.

Definition. The sociologist begins with the observation that individuals interact with reference to pluralities or collectivities of various types. Among these are some that are broadly inclusive and are called societies (assuming that they can be distinguished empirically from other types). Some definitions identify a society in this macroscopic sense as a plurality possessing a common cul ture, while others refer to a common territory or a common government. In general, these definitions are deficient because they do not distinguish sufficiently between society, culture complex, community, and nation. Marion J. Levy has attempted a conceptually precise and empirically relevant definition of society as "a system of action in operation that (1) involves a plurality of interacting individuals of a given species (or group of species) whose actions are primarily oriented to the system concerned and who are recruited at least in part by the sexual reproduction of members of the plurality involved, (2) is at least in theory self-sufficient for the actions of this plurality, and (3) is capable of existing longer than the lifespan of an individual of the type (or types) involved" (Structure of Society [Princeton, N.J. 1952] 113). In a human society, the "given species" is Homo sapiens and the system itself consists in the patterned, organized regularities observable in the interaction of men who are primarily oriented to the system and influenced by it.

In theory, animals may form societies according to this definition, but this does not imply that the anthill or elephant herd is of the same type or order as human society. Human interaction is empirically distinct. It involves symbols and meanings that have both subjective and cultural dimensions. It produces a specifically different kind of plurality with its own internal problems of order and its own dynamism of development (deriving ultimately from human rationality and freedom).

A society is not simply the sum of discrete interactions. Rather, its members or parts are organized in such a way that an emergent whole is maintained and develops, remains static, or disintegrates. "American society," for example, has meaning with reference to its past development, its present state, and its prospects for the future. Although the whole is the product of interaction, it is nonetheless a system of patterned relationships and institutions that influence behavior, even so-called unstructured or deviant behavior.

The members of a society vary as to the extent and the exclusiveness to which their actions are oriented to this system. Citizenship, which constitutes membership in the state, is not the basic criterion for membership in a society. A member is one whose actions are oriented more toward the major institutions of one society, especially the institutions that define its goals, than toward those of another. Most often contemporary societies and nation-states are coextensive, but they need not be.

The restriction that a society's members must be recruited at least in part through sexual reproduction excludes such pluralities as the association or collectivities that are prisons and religious communities. It implies further that a society must be composed of members of both sexes and must provide institutional regulation of sexual relations.

The norm of self-sufficiency requires that a society be capable of supplying "from within" all the adaptive and integrative institutions needed for its existence and operation. This excludes such partial systems as the family or the church that need the help of other institutions if they are to function. (The Catholic Church is a perfect society in the theological and canonical, not the sociological, meaning of the word.) Self-sufficiency in this context does not imply that a society must not import goods or services, but only that it must have the necessary structures to obtain what it needs.

Moreover, a society must be capable of existing beyond the life-span of its individual members. In effect this means that some provision has to be made for the effective socialization of the young. The society must possess the structural facilities—through its families, religious institutions, social classes, schools, etc.—to transmit the beliefs, values, and norms required for the survival of its institutions.

Theories and models. Although sociologists have relatively little difficulty in isolating a society from other types of social pluralities, they have not reached consensus on the analysis of its structure and functions. Is society simply a more complex organization of microsystems such as interactional encounters? Or is it a macrosystem in its own right with emergent structures and processes unique to its own level? If society is a whole made up of parts, how are these parts put together and how do they work? Is this whole an on-going process, a becoming, or a being? In attempting to answer these questions, sociologists have proposed various models or general images, often developed through analogy, about the kinds of units, the patterns of their relations, and the type of whole that is society. The literature is replete with models inspired by physics, biology, psychology, and even mathematics. Thus there are atomistic, organic, evolutionary, conflict, equilibrium, and statistical models. The extent to which any one of these models exhausts the sociological reality of society is still debatable since each seems to present some aspect of that reality. A completely adequate model that is more than an eclectic juxtaposition is still to be developed.

Comte. In some ways Comte prefigured most of the currently available approaches to the study of society. Although he never defined the term, he equated it with the whole of the human species. He considered the species to be one organism to be studied in itself, since a whole is better known than its parts. In practice, he tempered this extreme macroorientation by stressing the reciprocal influence between individuals, families, and pluralities of lesser scope than total humanity. He insisted that the family is the basic unit of society and gives birth to feelings of solidarity among men but that in turn "wise men," men with ideas, are needed to unite families together into tribes and nations. Although he postulated a basic antagonism between forces of innovation and conservatism, he viewed society as an order based on a universal consensus, the foundation of unity as well as of the division of labor. In another perspective, however, that which he called social dynamics, he referred to society as primarily a process of growth from a militaristic through a legalistic to an industrial stage of organization. Unfortunately, Comte never integrated his static and his evolutionary models, nor did he fully incorporate the functions of ideas and of conflict into his organic model. Each of his approaches seems to have had a "life of its own" prefiguring one of the competing theories to follow, just as his concern with these several approaches prefigured the more eclectic or synthesizing theories of contemporary sociologists.

Spencer. Perhaps Herbert spencer (1820–1903) was the most extreme among the early sociologists in his use of the organic-evolutionary model. He defined society as a superorganism progressing inevitably from homogeneity to heterogeneity, and he conceived it as an entity formed of permanently arranged units analogous to the arrangement of the parts of a biological organism having its own sustaining, distributive, and regulating organs or institutions. As a society grows its units become more differentiated. The result is an increase of structure as well as of mass. The process is similar to the growth of an organism even though the basic parts of society (individuals) are discrete and do not form a concrete whole. Spencer's macromodel assumes, in spite of some denial on his part, that societal laws are merely special cases of biological laws.

Durkheim. Such extreme forms of bio-organicism have long since disappeared from sociology, but more moderate models have persisted, to a great extent because of the influence of Émile durkheim (1855–1917). While he retained Spencer's macrosociological approach, he stripped it of all biologism. In his theory the social fact of solidarity is the essential characteristic of society, but solidarity is conceived as an emergent reality arising from the association of individuals and not reducible to the mere sum of their actions. Society has a consciousness (conscience collective ) that creates a system of values and norms binding upon the individual. The resultant solidarity has in one sense a life of its own; it progresses from a mechanical to an organic form as the collective consciousness becomes less imperative and the division of labor increases because of rising population density and effective communication. But even in a society characterized by organic solidarity, individual actions are only incidents within the large-scale social process in which society exists.

Tönnies. This undiluted macroorientation seems to postulate a substantial reality for society, a position that Ferdinand Tönnies (1855–1936) found unacceptable. Although conceiving society as a type of collective person, he defined it as a product of single persons, the will of one affecting another and vice-versa, with a collective will developing from this interaction. His theory suggests the possibility of microanalysis within a macrosociological framework. In fact, his societal types, Gemeinschaft and Gesellschaft, are explained in terms of human willing. The first is a union of persons relating to each other through a natural, unconditional volition, such as the love of a mother for her child, while the second is a plurality of individuals interacting as a consequence of "rational will," a sort of calculating volition whereby appropriate means are chosen for specific ends. In general, Tönnies saw society as changing from a Gemeinschaft to a Gesellschaft much in the same way that Durkheim saw mechanical solidarity being replaced by organic solidarity.

Simmel. Georg Simmel (1858–1918) retained the microanalytical approach but rejected the organic overtones. He defined society as a function and a process manifest in the relationships and interactions of men. He was not a reductionist, however, at least in the strict meaning of the term, since in his system individual interaction, while remaining discrete, is synthesized into the unity of society as each element (the content) is related to the others through forms (in the Kantian sense). Simmel posited the existence of society in the consciousness of its members, but the individual is not the group and therefore must become "generalized" by a postulated call or vocation. This helps to explain why quantitative growth can lead to qualitative changes in society, but Simmel did not discuss the process, perhaps because of his failure to attack the problem of macroanalysis.

Marx. Most of these theorists, in spite of their different views, were preoccupied mainly with the problem of unity or order. Karl Marx (1818–83) preferred a conflict-evolutionary model in his analysis of society. He defined it as a dialectical process of warring classes wherein economic factors determine the structure and development. The nature of this determinism has been the subject of much controversy, even among so-called orthodox interpreters, but the notion of conflict remains central to Marxian thought. Each stage of society is held to contain within itself the seeds of its own destruction and to prepare the next state until the final end of evolution, a classless order, is attained. Others before Marx noted the fact of conflict, but Marx postulated that the process itself and its resolution are the very core of society.

Sumner. This notion of conflict was taken up by William Graham Sumner (1840–1910) but recast in the framework of social Darwinism and Spencerian organicism. Sumner maintained that the basic law of society is the law of evolution that receives its impetus from the struggles for existence. Society is basically a system of forces arising primarily from the pressure of population and economic growth and generating through trial and error specific folkways (or ways of doing things). In his early thought Sumner believed that these customs could be modified by man to a very limited extent only, but later he seemed to allow man a larger role in the structuring of society.

Small. Sumner's idea was further developed by Albion W. Small (1854–1926), who defined societal conflict in terms of man's interests and society as the product of individual efforts to fulfill interests, resulting in a continuous process of conflict constantly resolving itself into cooperation. Like the organic model before it, the conflict model of society was slowly transformed into a more psychological conception, but one in which both conflict and order assumed prominence.

Ward. It was Lester F. Ward (1841–1913) who projected man into the evolutionary process. He conceived of society in terms of a psychological-evolutionary model. Attributing spontaneous evolution (genesis) to blind forces, he believed the process was bifurcated with the appearance of mind. Thus he defined "social forces" as psychic forces or feelings and assigned a crucial role to man's purposive actions (telesis). Recognizing that social forces could give rise to conflict, he held them to be checked by "synergy," the basic principle behind evolution, and molded into structures and society. In this way, Ward retained the notion of conflict but subordinated it to equilibrium.

Trend Toward Psychological Models. With the decline of the evolutionary school, the psychological model became more microoriented. In the thought of Gabriel Tarde (1843–1904) the fundamental elements of society are belief and desire and the basic processes are imitation or repetition, opposition, and adaptation. For him society could not be studied as such. Gustave Le Bon (1841–1931) accepted this proposition but attempted to reconcile it with Durkheim's stress on the collectivity, an effort at integration that influenced the work of James Baldwin (1861–1934) and George Mead (1863–1931) and found its sociological expression in the theories of Charles Horton Cooley (1864–1929) and William I. Thomas (1863–1947).

Cooley defined both society and individual as "simply collective and distributive aspects of the same thing" (Human Nature and the Social Order [New York 1902]2). The basic social fact, he maintained, resides in the imagination each person has of the other. He conceded, however, that social reality is not simply the product of agreement between individuals but the result of organization. Unfortunately, he never explained what he meant by organization. While sharing Cooley's basic orientation, Thomas was somewhat more specific. He postulated attitudes and values as the elements of society, but among the latter he included social norms that coalesce into institutions and social organization. This marked the beginning of a return to macroanalysis by theorists using psychological models.

Weber. This trend is pronounced in Max weber (1864–1920). Even though he believed the individual and his actions to be the basic units of study, he carried forward his analysis to all levels of social life. While Cooley reduced society to a socio-psychic complex, Weber postulated a continuum of social categories ranging from the individual actor to society. He saw the social relationship in which actors take account of and are oriented to each other as capable of patterning in different ways and of forming different pluralities, including society. His concern, however, focused on the subjective meaning of action; it is "meaning" that becomes patterned and expected in certain situations, so that in spite of the macrosociological scope of his historical studies, Weber remained strongly nominalistic and conceived of society mainly as a category of human interaction. This did not preclude his analyzing the evolution of social structures as the result of tension between the principles of traditionalism, rationality, and charisma, or his seeing a general trend of increasing rationality in the development of societies.

Pareto. With the renewed concern for macroanalysis it was inevitable that the organic model should return to favor. In a sense the equilibrium paradigm of Vilfredo Pareto (1848–1923) represented an attempt to incorporate elements of most previous approaches without reducing society to any one type of phenomenon. Pareto's notion of equilibrium was taken from physics and mechanics but he rejected the outright physicalism of a Henry Carey (1793–1879), who saw man as a molecule of society and society as a variation of the law of molecular gravitation. In spite of his terminology Pareto was more a moderate organicist than a mechanist. He conceived of society as a system whose form and state of equilibrium are determined by the elements acting upon it, which elements in turn are influenced by society. This type of system analysis implies both micro-and macrosociological orientations. Reciprocal causality is operative. If some change is introduced and affects the form of society, a reaction occurs tending to restore the form to its original state. Pareto, however, does not rule out all change of the system since the "sentiment" of resistance (an innate human tendency manifested in interests, knowledge, "residues," and "derivations") may not be operating for some reason. In fact, since there are two principal types of elites in a society, a governing and nongoverning elite, they can and do succeed each other and thus give birth to conservative and progressive phases. Thus Pareto's theory incorporates an element of change, but change of society is explained in terms of change within society.

Variant Tendencies. In effect Pareto achieved a partial synthesis of previous models. Although most contemporary sociologists follow his lead, a few remain committed to the early models. Leopold von Wiese (b.1876), for example, is basically microoriented. For him all plurality patterns, including societies, are nothing more and nothing less than neuropsychic patterns. Georges Gurvitch (b. 1894), on the other hand, insists that societies cannot be adequately analyzed unless the collective mind that operates through individual minds is recognized as the immediate social reality. George Lundberg (b. 1895) reduces society to physical phenomena, a field of force wherein individuals are attracted or repulsed as particles of an atom. George Vold (b. 1896) sees it as a congeries of conflicting groups and V. Gordon Childe (b. 1892) continues the tradition of the biological-evolutionary school wherein Darwin's theory of variation is transferred from organic to social evolution. But, for the most part, today's theorists have developed more complicated models of society.

Contemporary attempts at integration. The insights of Durkheim, Weber, and Pareto have been combined by the "social action–functionalist school." The basic unit of society is taken to be meaningful social action, i.e., an action that has meaning for the actor because it takes into account the behavior of others. Florian Znaniecki (1882–1958) termed this concern the "humanistic coefficient of cultural data," while Robert MacIver (b.1882) drew attention to the "dynamic assessment" of the situation made by the actor. Both of these men defined society as an emergent reality and recognized that in some way the "whole" has causal priority over the part. Znaniecki subsumed the concept of social action under the concept of system and prepared the way for the study of a society as an inclusive "system of systems." MacIver proposed different levels of causal analysis and stressed the need to study the "teleological aspects of social phenomena." For him, while social facts are products of individual meanings, they may be distributive phenomena (activities of a like nature), collective phenomena (conjoint actions), or conjunctural phenomena (unpurposed results of activities by interdependent groups or individuals). Society includes all of these phenomena. Thus are joined in one model the micro-and macrosociological, the psychological and the organic approaches. MacIver added an evolutionary dimension. Society, while constituted by meaningful acts, is forever unfolding, and this process manifests itself in greater division of labor and increasing differentiation of associations and institutions.

Sorokin. In a sense Pitirim Sorokin (b. 1889) belongs to this school, although he denies any association with functionalism. His analysis is in terms of an idealistic organic model, but again, meaningful interaction is at the basis of society. Such interaction can be understood, however, only in terms of the total sociocultural system in which all the parts are mutually interdependent, some of which must be "logico-meaningfully" integrated. Sorokin denies neither the existence of unintegrated or neutral and contradictory or antagonistic elements nor the existence of congeries or elements related to the system only in terms of mechanical adjacency, but he does insist that every society is characterized by a central theme that is either sensate (equating truth with sense knowledge), ideational (equating truth with faith), or idealistic (equating truth with reason). In every society these central themes are forever changing. While MacIver sees a trend toward structural differentiation, Sorokin concludes to cycles of sensate, ideational, and idealistic themes.

Merton and Homans. The implications of Znaniecki's model have been developed by Robert Merton (b.1910) and George Homans (b. 1910). Merton, influenced by Radcliffe-Brown and Malinowski, defines functions as the consequences of any act, aim, or purpose within an organic-type system, including society. These may serve to maintain or to disrupt the system, and society thus becomes not only an integrated whole, but a net balance of integration and deviance that in turn affects the individuals composing it. Homans, on the other hand, isolates the structural components that contribute to the whole: activities, interactions, sentiments, and norms, some of which are oriented to solving problems arising from the environment, others of which are oriented to the internal problem of integration and differentiation. Society therefore is composed of an external system and an internal system, which interact with each other and set the stage for its survival or collapse.

Parsons. Perhaps the most comprehensive model of society in contemporary sociology is that of Talcott Parsons (b. 1902). He postulates a homology of small and large systems, a continuity between two-person interaction and society. His model is based upon (1) a voluntaristic conception of social action with psychological overtones, (2) the physicalist notion of action space and the law of inertia, (3) the mechanistic idea of equilibrium, and (4) the organismic postulate of functional requisites. Therefore the model combines micro-and macroanalysis.

Parsons defines society as a system of interaction, and the relations between actors (status-role reciprocities) compose its structure. In a sense the system is superior to its units and "calls" for structural contributions for its functioning. A society must meet all the essential functional requisites for survival through its own resources and must not be a differentiated subsystem of a larger plurality or, more precisely, collectivity. In other words, it must be a relatively self-sufficient system and possess a common culture to coordinate differentiated units that in the long run depend on human individuals as actors. In effect, this means that a society must have the needed institutions to meet the requirements of goal attainment, adaptation to the environment, pattern maintenance (socialization and tension management), and integration.

While society as defined by Parsons cannot be equated with nation, the boundaries of a society tend to coincide with the territory under control of the highest-order political organization. This holds true in spite of increasing structural differentiation, the specialization of function and separation of the kinship system, the economy, religion, the legal system, and the polity because, in effect, any institution whose orientation is primarily cultural rather than societal lacks the legitimate authority to prescribe values and enforce norms for the society. Nonetheless, in Parsons' model each institution contributes to the maintenance of society and is involved in a process of exchange by which equilibrium is maintained. These intermeshing processes deal with decisions about the disposition and allocation of resources that, from the point of view of the system, are consumed, and with media of control that, like power, circulate from one unit to another. In effect, Parsons sees the dynamics of society mainly as the processing of information.

But this equilibrium-maintaining process does not imply a static structure. Society is a cybernetic system of control over behavior, and structural change is inevitable in the equilibrating process because roles are continuously being played by new actors and strains are inevitable in the exchange between societal units. Control can resolve these problems up to a point; but when a cumulative process begins, change in the normative structure results and its general direction is toward functional differentiation and increasing complexity of the system.

Evaluation. Contemporary theorists seem agreed that Parsons' model of society helps to resolve many of the differences between the so-called individualistic and collectivistic points of view, but that the two have not been fully integrated. Significant objections have been based upon the model's failure to explain adequately the basic fact of conflict and its contribution to the "state of the system." Another objection is that the evolutionary nature of society is not really explained. Some sociologists, such as Lewis Coser and Ralph Dahrendorf, maintain that society is not in the harmonious balance implied by an equilibrium model. In their view, dissension arising from competition rather than consensus is a basic condition of society and a dialectical model of some sort is needed. Wilbert Moore insists that the notion of equilibrium either forecloses discussion of change or predicts change in one direction only, the restoration of society to a steady state. He suggests the use of a tension-management model, but one that makes no presumption that tensions or strains are in fact "managed." Moore would make both order and change problematical and normal.

Pierre van den Berghe, while recognizing that societies show a tendency toward equilibrium and solidarity, argues that they generate the opposites as well and require other mechanisms of integration than consensus. Moreover, he agrees that the equilibrium model does not account for endogenous change through conflict and contradiction. He suggests that there is need for a dialectical model (one that does not reduce social reality to polarized opposites), but he also recognizes that social dialectics alone cannot account for change through differentiation and adaptation nor account for consensus. He therefore proposes a functional-dialectical model wherein both conflict and consensus are basic.

Such a model has not been developed but may be promising. The juxtaposition of the two approaches is not as arbitrary as it might seem. In a sense, interdependence contains its own dialectic and dialectical conflict and is based on some assumption of equilibrium. The model of structural-functional analysis postulates that society is a system composed of interrelated parts but, whether institutions or actors, the parts are to some extent relatively autonomous. These parts may adjust or react so that equilibrium and interdependence cannot be equated. Adjustment itself occurs within a tension system wherein autonomy and control interact dialectically (in the broad sense of the word) so that consensus or stability cannot be a permanent or total state of the system. And reaction occurs within a system of interdependence in which equilibrium forces are operative so that society cannot be adequately defined in terms of simple conflict or change. As a system of relatively autonomous but organized elements, society is empirically a whole whose equilibrium implies a tension system and whose dialectics imply an evolving synthesis. As such, strain and deviancy are as much its components as harmony and conformity, and change as much its feature as stability.

Such a model, which might be called an evolving dialectical-equilibrium model, would seem to reunite the major insights of past theorists and resolve many of the contemporary objections to the structural-functional analysis of society. It would incorporate into one synthesis actor-interaction as well as holistic processes, conflict and consensus, stability and change as facts of society. Whether such a model is adopted sooner or later, the contemporary trend seems to point in such a direction.

Bibliography: h. e. barnes and h. becker, Social Thought from Lore to Science, 2 v. (2d ed. Washington, D.C. 1952). l. a. coser, The Functions of Social Conflict (Glencoe, Ill. 1956). s. n. eisenstadt, "Social Change, Differentiation and Evolution," American Sociological Review 29 (1964) 375–386. a. inkeles, What Is Sociology? (Englewood Cliffs, N.J. 1964). m. j. levy, The Structure of Society (Princeton, N.J. 1952). w. e. moore, Social Change (Englewood Cliffs, N.J. 1963). t. parsons et al., eds., Theories of Society, 2 v. (New York 1961). p. a. sorokin, Contemporary Sociological Theories (New York 1928). h. r. wagner, "Displacement of Scope: A Problem of the Relationship between Small-Scale and Large-Scale Sociological Theories," American Journal of Sociology 69 (1964) 571–584. p. l. van den berghe, "Dialectic and Functionalism," Americn Sociological Review 28 (1963) 695–705. d. martindale, The Nature and Types of Sociological Theory (Boston, Mass. 1965).

[r. h. potvin]

Society

History of the concept

Some contemporary approaches

BIBLIOGRAPHY

The concept of society has been formulated in various ways in sociological thought. At a general level there is some agreement as to the referent of the concept, but to abstract this common meaning from the welter of different and competing meanings of the term, we must first eliminate from consideration those usages which merely adopt the term as a shorthand label for the fabric of social phenomena in general. As the historical section of this article will show, the word is often used in this all-embracing sense. Indeed, “society” is frequently used merely to refer to an encompassing network of social relationships that enclose some more specific phenomenon which is the primary object of analysis. Thus, a student of race relations may insist that interracial behavior can be understood only as a part of the organization of the larger society in which it occurs and yet may fail to provide any analytical conception of the nature of this larger whole. It is only when analysts begin to isolate the attributes of the larger whole which we term “a society” that analytical treatments of the concept begin to emerge.

Definitions of society. Analytical definitions usually treat a society as a relatively independent or self-sufficient population characterized by internal organization, territoriality, cultural distinc-tiveness, and sexual recruitment. Specific definitions vary considerably in regard to which of these elements is emphasized. For example, some stress internal organization so strongly that they define the society as consisting in the organization and not in the population. Definitions also vary in the specific meaning given to such concepts as “self-sufficiency,” “organization,” and “culture.” Careful formulations must develop precise apparatus for specifying the units and boundaries of societies, for describing the nature of the links between units, and for establishing the mechanisms by which these links influence social processes within society. Nevertheless, the basic concept of the inclusive, self-sufficient group remains a constant element in most concepts of society.

When the concept of society is formulated in definitive detail, it is capable of entering into sociological thought in significant ways. Various conceptions of society define the essential problems of sociological analysis and thus shape conceptions of the subject matter of sociology.

The well-known functional conception of society put forth by Aberle and his colleagues will serve to illustrate a detailed concept of society and the way it enters into a system of sociological thought. According to these analysts, “A society is a group of human beings sharing a self-sufficient system of action which is capable of existing longer than the life-span of an individual, the group being recruited at least in part by the sexual reproduction of the members” (Aberle et al. 1950, p. 101). The authors proceed to specify four conditions that would terminate the existence of a society: biological extinction or dispersion of the members, apathy of the members, the war of all against all, and the absorption of the society into another society. These conditions enable the authors to specify the functional requisites of a society by enumerating the mechanisms that permit a society to exist, thus specifying the meaning of the core concept of a “self-sufficient system of action.” If the conditions terminating the existence of a society are to be avoided, mechanisms must develop to insure provision for sexual recruitment, provision for adequate relationship to the environment, role differentiation and the assignment of members to roles, communication, shared definitions of the world and of the goals of the society, normative regulation of means and of emotional expression, socialization, and the control of disruptive behavior. Thus, the authors have proceeded directly and logically from a definition of society to a conception of the essential concerns of societal analysis, even developing along the way some relatively specific hypotheses. For example, it is proposed that extremely rapid social change, such as revolution, tends to be accompanied by increases in the conditions terminating the existence of a society—mortality, morbidity, apathy, force, and fraud.

It is not surprising that definitions of society are so closely articulated with conceptions of the nature and functions of sociological thought, for from the very beginning of the analytical development of the concept, social theorists have found in “society” a convenient foundation for relating their specific problems to a larger context. Thus the student interested in elucidating the nature of bureaucracy may insist that it is embedded in a larger network of organization which determines, or at least influences, the emergence of bureaucracy and the forms which it assumes and which constrains purposive attempts to shape bureaucratic development.

If society is conceived as a set of external and constraining social forces, it is natural that the concept should be put to ideological use. He who would assert that some social institution ought to change or ought to be protected from change may point to the external and constraining forces of the larger society that encompass the institution, finding in those forces both an evaluative standard and an empirical justification for that standard. The emergence of analytical concepts of society has been inextricably bound up with the development of political ideology of this type.

History of the concept

In the Western world the concept of society as an entity distinct from the state emerged rather late. The age of reason, when philosophers began to search for secular foundations for critical analysis of existing political institutions, was one of the earliest periods when Western thinkers came to view society as something clearly prior to and outside of the state. The vehicle used to establish this differentiation was the social contract doctrine.

The utilitarian conception of society

In some of its forms the contract concept failed to distinguish between state and society. Thus Hobbes, wishing to insist that there is no middle ground between an organized state and the war of all against all, treated the social contract, the law of nature, and civil society as virtually identical. But the liberal thinkers of the Enlightenment wished to justify secular rational criticism of the state. In developing a critical doctrine, such thinkers as Locke began to distinguish the law of nature from the social contract that had formed the state. For Locke there is a layer of natural order guaranteed by man’s interdependence and his sense of the natural rights of all. It exists prior to and outside of positive political institutions; the state is a utilitarian device for insuring a more efficient, less cumbersome social order by developing specialized machinery for enforcing natural law. Such a theory squarely establishes the state as a dependent sector of a larger social order.

By a similar logic the critical philosophers sought to establish analytical distinctions between society and church and to separate church and state. The church was defined by reference to its utilitarian functions for the larger society, and these functions were distinguished from the functions of the state. Thus, through the use of the concepts “civil society” and “religious society,” church and state were defined as analytical functional aspects of a larger society.

Despite the incipient emergence of the conception of society as a set of interdependent organized functions, the idea of society developed during the Enlightenment was not entirely satisfactory, for the ultimate premises of argument continued to be the same premises from which Hobbes had derived the war of all against all. Enlightenment thought was founded on the concept of reason. The method of reason is analytical reduction; complex wholes must be reduced to their fundamental particles and the whole reassembled by a process of deduction from the laws governing particles. For society, the particle is the individual, and the law governing particles derives from the most essential quality of individuals, their natural reason. Each man uses his reason to rationally pursue his chosen ends. Parsons (1937) has termed this conception of society “utilitarian” and has shown that the attempt to derive social coherence and order from the faculty of reason in the individual was unsuccessful. The utilitarians could protect their Achilles heel, that is, the problem of conflicting ends, only by arbitrarily postulating such metaphysical concepts as the “natural identity of interests,” “natural rights,” and “the spirit of sociability.” [SeeUtilitarianism, article onsociological thought.]

The more perceptive figures of the Enlightenment—Hume, for example—recognized the inner weakness of the utilitarian conception. However, only a sweeping new movement of thought placed the concept of society on a less atomistic foundation.

Romanticism and organismic conceptions

In the latter part of the eighteenth century, and especially in the period after the French Revolution, many social theorists became disillusioned with individual reason and the reductive methods of the analytical philosophers. As the philosophy of romanticism became more influential, a conservative theory of society developed which stressed the unity of the integrated whole. Society came to be viewed as an organic growth, embodying the practical and profound wisdom of convention and tradition. Being a cumulative organic product, society has an organic unity. Abstract analytical segments cannot be separated from the whole and arbitrarily changed; to do so is to destroy the complex interdependence of the web of social life.

Again we have a concept of society as a larger whole, containing within it the standards by which particular phenomena are to be evaluated, but in this formulation the concept was put to conservative use. By assuming that the totality has an integrated character, one can effectively refute demands for arbitrary and rapid change in the parts.

The organismic conception sharpened the concept of society as a set of interdependent functions (which was already implicit in the philosophy of the Enlightenment) and drew attention to a new element, cultural tradition, as a functionally necessary part of a society. The idea of a cultural order as a constituent element of a society was developed further by August Comte in the early nineteenth century. Comte sought to synthesize Enlightened and Romantic modes of thought. Accordingly, he incorporated into his sociological system elements of classic liberal thought, such as the idea of a level of order arising from man’s natural economic interdependence, and the concept of a larger society from which government derives its legitimacy. At the same time he refused to derive the larger society from individual reason and the concurrence of interests. Drawing on organismic conservatism, he found in cultural tradition the specifically collective factor in society. For Comte, the formation of any society presupposed a system of common opinions about nature and man. The Enlightenment philosophers, by destroying the normative order of the religiously based society, had loosed anarchy upon the world. Comte argued that the reformation of society required the creation of a new, scientifically based moral order. Again we see an example of the ideological use of the concept of society. Society remains a set of external and constraining forces by which we are to judge the acceptability of political ideology. The concept enters into sociological thought as a set of fundamental premises from which we are to derive the social constraints on political action.

Comte’s plans for the reconstitution of society revolved about ideas for the reconstruction of religious, familial, educational, and political institutions. Embedded in his program is a contribution to the conceptual elaboraton of the idea of society. Comte did not believe that a bare consensus is a sufficient condition for organized collective life. The consensus must be organized in an institutional order that symbolizes, teaches, enforces, and implements moral ideas and rules.

The belief that society is an institutional order which embodies a fundamental set of cultural ideas was prominent in another branch of romantic thought which might be termed “idealism.” Idealism, which was especially prominent in nineteenth-century German thought, stresses the cultural distinctiveness of each society. A society reflects a peculiar Geist or spirit that is embodied in its distinctive traditions and institutions. The spirit of a society progressively unfolds in history. Once again the ideological implications are clear: proposals for change are to be evaluated according to whether they are consonant with the cultural distinctiveness of the larger society. [See the biographies ofBosanquetandHegel.]

The economic conception of society

Marx was an heir to the idealistic tradition, and the concept of society entered into his thought in a similar way. For Marx, as for the idealists, the elements of a society are closely intertwined into a complex and distinctive whole. For Marx, as for his idealistic predecessor Hegel, society is undergoing continuous transformation according to a logic of immanent development. The ideological implication is that social action is to be judged in relation to its correspondence to the immanent forces of change within society. At this point the similarity to idealism ceases, since for Marx the notion of a spirit or Geist is as metaphysical an explanation for the collective as the utilitarian postulate of natural order.

According to Marx, society exists in the concrete relations between social groups and not in the concepts used by philosophers to summarize these relations. The Geist is a mere analytical construct of the observer. The real foundations of society and the real springs of social development lie in the economic relations between men. The idea that the society outside of state and church is largely economic in character did not originate with Marx. The original utilitarian conception of society had stressed man’s natural economic interdependence as the source of order which is logically prior to the state. However, Marx developed the idea of society as an economy in rich detail.

The economic conception of society starts with the assumption that man’s most fundamental problem is to provide for his material needs. To do so, man must cooperate with other men by entering into relations of production. Stable relations of production constitute economic structures. Economic structures are variable, but they generally involve two crucial phenomena: the division of men into classes and the exploitation of one class by another. Stratification and exploitation make the continuing stability of economic structures precarious, and for this reason whole complexes of compulsive apparatus develop to support the economic order. The state, law, religion, and ideology function to bring temporary stability into inherently unstable situations. Since economic structure is more basic, it can be termed the “substructure” of society; and the supporting institutions may be termed the “superstructure,” since they are derivative in the sense that they are responses to the problems of economic relations. In the theory of substructure and superstructure, we see one of the first and most comprehensive theories of society as an institutional order. [SeeEconomy and society.]

Conflict theory

The Marxian conception of society is one of a larger set of conceptions that can be combined under the heading of “conflict theory” (Martindale 1960). The premise of conflict theory is that men are organisms, and as such they must compete for access to the resources of life. The struggle for existence does not occur between isolated individuals but between groups. In various versions of conflict theory the competing units may be families, bands, classes, nations, or races, depending on the special interests of the analyst or the stage of social development under analysis. As the conflict between groups becomes stabilized or organized or regulated, we may speak of the emergence of a structured society. Society is viewed as an organizational device for relating populations of organisms to an environment, and in this sense conflict theory may be said to adopt an ecological perspective. In conflict theory the concept of society enters into sociological thought as a means of relating social life to natural forces. In this way social scientists were able to develop a less metaphysical, more naturalistic account of society than had been produced by either Enlightened or Romantic philosophers. [SeeConflict.]

To see society as a device for regulating the struggle for existence and for relating man to his environment is not necessarily to renounce interest in cultural and normative phenomena. Sumner’s classic account (1906) views society as a product of antagonistic cooperation between competing organisms and groups; but the phenomenon that emerges to stabilize, organize, and regulate cooperation is a complex of customs, mores, conventions, laws, and institutions. The theory remains naturalistic in insisting that normative complexes develop gradually and naturally as a response to environmental problems. They do not emanate from cultural spirits, nor are they created de novo from a social contract.

Conflict theory is too general a rubric to imply any particular ideological purpose. It is apparent that some forms of conflict theory are susceptible to use in support of racial or nationalistic ideologies. It is less often remarked that conflict theory was often used in the development of liberal doctrines.

The perspective of conflict theory dominated sociological thought in the latter half of the nineteenth century. Its acceptance is closely associated with the impact of the Darwinian revolution in biology and the popularity of evolutionary modes of thought. It was in connection with the use of conflict theory as an evolutionary doctrine that sociological thinkers were able to place classic liberal ideas on a naturalistic foundation.

Emergence of the “utilitarian society.”

Nineteenth-century evolutionary theory was manifold, and its devotees worked out developmental sequences for every institutional sphere of society. Insofar as the evolutionary school had any common theory of the development of total societies, it was the idea of movement toward the development of larger and more inclusive wholes. By processes of consolidation, conquest, incorporation, and differentiation, societies come to increase in scale and complexity. As this occurs, unregulated conflict between small fractionated groups becomes less important, and the regulation of internal process becomes more important. Further, as the relations with the environment and other societies become more stabilized and the larger society becomes more consolidated, new forms of social organization become possible. Social organization can be built upon processes of free discussion, free exchange, and the pursuit of individual interests. The inflexibility of the “cake of custom” and rigid military organization becomes nonadaptive; only a looser framework of organization can improve the adaptation of society to the environment by unleashing the forces of creativity and innovation.

In this brand of evolutionary theory we see the re-emergence of the concept of the “utilitarian society.” However, in nineteenth-century thought the concept was no longer used as an analytical definition of the nature of any society, but as an increasingly accurate description of a historically emergent form of society.

Not all of the social analysts writing at the end of the nineteenth century viewed the emergence of the utilitarian society with equanimity. According to some analysts, the breakdown of old forms of organization meant the loss of what had once provided society with integration, coherence, and meaning. The utilitarian society, founded upon the industrial revolution, the capitalist system, and the market mentality, fails to provide for an ethical standard outside of the individual or a viable source of social cohesion.

In 1887 Tönnies incorporated this type of perspective into his famous dichotomy between Gemeinschaft and Gesellschaft. In the Gemeinschaft (usually translated as “community”) men are held together by communal feeling and organic ties. In the Gesellschaft (usually translated as “society”) organic ties are replaced by artificial ties of calculating self-interest. [SeeCommunity-society continua.]

Thus, from varied ethical perspectives and varied ultimate premises, social theorists came to conceptualize modern society as a mere collection of individuals united only through ties of self-interest. Spencer, working in the naturalistic tradition of conflict theory, and Tonnies, drawing on a more philosophical tradition, saw modern society as a collection of wills.

The independent reality of society

In 1893 Durkheim severely attacked both Spencer and Tonnies and reaffirmed the reality of society as an entity. Durkheim retained an evolutionary perspective; he accepted the notion of a developmental drift from a society based on very direct ties and commonalities to a society based upon more indirect interdependencies. However, he insisted that a modern society, founded on the extensive division of labor, cannot be conceptualized as a mere collection of the wills of isolated individuals. It is not a collection of contracts based upon self-interest; it is no less organic than earlier forms of society. It remains an entity sui generis (Durkheim 1893).

Durkheim wrote at a time when the young discipline of sociology was struggling for establishment in an academic setting. The problem for the sociologist was to establish the independence of his field from economics, political science, and psychology. Thus, it was essential to establish society as a set of external and constraining forces, more inclusive than the economic order, outside of the state, and independent of the sum of its individual members. Durkheim adopted the strategy of stressing the independent reality of such social facts as vital rates, currents of opinion, and established conventions. Social facts require explanation at their own level. It follows that society is an entity which cannot be reduced to a set of members or a set of economic contracts between members. It exists in the complex relations and interdependencies which unite its members into an organic whole and which in turn are reflected in a collective consciousness and a collective moral order. Persons who are drawn together in a web of interdependency interact as moral beings and create a body of collective representations of reality and regulative rules. The resulting complex regulates the utilitarian economic order and the actions of persons and is external to them.

Other analysts of the era developed similar techniques for identifying the reality of the social. Simmel found a social level in the mutual influence that interacting persons have upon each other. Mutual influence comes to have coherent forms, and thus, as people interact, they create society ([1902-1917] 1950, part 1).

Weber, although he insisted on relatively nominalistic definitions of collective entities, developed a perspective of the social order that gave a somewhat independent reality to social processes. As persons orient themselves toward each other, social relationships form; complexes of social relationships constitute a social order. Drawing upon Tonnies, Weber suggested that when actors take a rational orientation to each other, they create a Gesellschaft, whereas when they adopt communal solidary attitudes, they form a Gemeinschaft. But in either case the resulting social order is not a mere collection of wills or economic interests, since it is given stability by administrative organization, shared orientations to systems of status, and shared beliefs in the legitimacy of the order (Weber [1922] 1957, part 1).

The social-psychological approach

In the United States a social-psychological school emerged which found in the concept of symbolic interaction the key to the integrated treatment of society and the social person. Cooley, Mead, and others explored the development of personality and society as they emerge through interaction. Their analysis permitted a novel conceptualization of human society as a symbolically regulated process. Mead, for example, traced the process of becoming a social person. The human being comes to acquire a social personality as he learns to communicate symbolically. As he learns to adopt the perspectives of others toward himself, he is also learning to regulate his own activity symbolically by defining his self and his acts in appropriate ways. It is through participation in that complex of differentiated and interrelated roles called “society” that we develop our distinctly human capacities and identities. It is through adopting, playing, and imaginatively construing social roles that we develop social personality. Thus, self and society are intimately connected through the concept of role. Further, the analyst may make the transition in either direction; he may stress either socialization, that is, the process by which the individual organism is socially formed, or he may stress the process by which interacting persons create and transform society. The human capacity for symbolic control over action and sympathetic understanding of the action of others makes it possible for men to innovate, to appreciate innovation, and to incorporate innovations into complex networks of symbolically regulated activity (Mead 1934).

Society as process

The developments of the decades when sociology emerged as a discipline can be summarized by reaffirming that the most sophisticated analysts converged on the idea that society is ultimately an organized process. If society is more than the sum of its individual participants, its reality must lie in the organized relations that emerge as men interact. The units of these relations are not people but activities. Even Durkheim, with his insistence on the independent reality of the social, recognized that the coherence of society rests on the interdependence of activities and the moral regulation created by interaction.

The new emphasis on process did not eliminate the ideological component of the concept of society. To a greater or lesser extent, all of the thinkers of the formative period saw in society a standard for evaluating the acts and programs of individuals and other social units. In some instances the ideological functions of sociological method are quite plain, as in the case of the sociological jurisprudence of Ehrlich (1913). Ehrlich saw external and constraining social reality as existing in the “living law.” A spontaneous moral order develops in the associations and groups of society as men live and work cooperatively. It is this inner order of society that is the yardstick for measuring the value of the positive law of the state. Sociological jurisprudence is conceived as a corrective to conceptual jurisprudence. The latter, in its reliance on concepts and logic, is likely to become out of step with the real moral order of society and thus fail to respond to pressing social interests and problems. [SeeLaw, article onthe legal system.]

In other cases the ideological affinities of the concept of society as process are more subtle. For example, the popularity of the social-psychological approach in the United States cannot be separated from its capacity to provide a sociological foundation for modern liberalism. Classic laissez-faire liberalism had been founded on the utilitarian conception of society as a collection of wills. Sociologistic conceptions are more suited to the defense of either conservatism or radicalism, depending on whether social reality is conceived as an irreducible obstacle or an inexorable transformative force. The problem for modern liberalism was to justify individual freedom in the context of social regulation. The concept of society as an emergent regulative process, founded on the responsible actions of social persons, is consistent with the program of modern liberalism.

Some contemporary approaches

Despite the developments of the formative period of sociology, relatively little progress was made in defining the concept of a society. “Society” remained a term for designating an emergent and constraining level of reality. Until recent decades, the main purpose of analysis was to examine the nature of social reality and its modes of constraint, not to define the units and boundaries of concrete societies as entities.

Society as a social system

The major technical device used in recent years to attack the problem of defining a society has been the concept of a social system. A social system is an organized set of interdependent social persons, activities, or forces. It is called a system because its organization includes mechanisms for maintaining an equilibrium or some other constancy in the relations between the units. From another perspective such mechanisms can be seen as boundary-maintaining mechanisms, for systems can be isolated as separate entities only if they maintain some constancies in the face of environmental change, that is, if they maintain some boundaries vis-à-vis the environment. If every event within a system were a direct consequence of some event outside the system, it would be impossible to draw a boundary for the system; it would be, in effect, a mere unit in a larger complex. The concept of a social system seems ideally suited for use in defining a society analytically, for it contains within it the crucial concepts of “unit” and “boundary”; to define society as a special sort of social system automatically prepares the way for identification of its units and boundaries.

The idea of a social system was used by earlier thinkers, notably Spencer and Pareto, but it has been formulated in greater detail and applied to the present problem by the modern school of structural-functionalism. The paper by Aberle and his colleagues cited earlier in this article is an example of the functional mode of attack on the problem. The approach of that paper has been more fully elaborated by Levy (1952; 1966) and is similar to a definition proposed by Parsons: “A social system … which meets all the essential functional prerequisites of long term persistence from within its own resources will be called a society” (1951, p. 19).

The key concept in these definitions is “self-sufficiency.” All systems are self-sufficient to some degree; the definition of the term requires some mechanisms of self-maintenance. The isolation of total societies involves the search for global complexes with the highest degree of self-maintenance and the least reliance on other social systems for their requisite resources. Local communities, administrative units, institutional spheres, and bureaucratic organizations are all relatively dependent segments of a larger whole. Total societies are dependent only on other types of systems: personalities, cultural traditions, and a physical environment. [SeeSystems analysis.]

Overlapping process systems

The search for the self-sufficient society may be futile. In fact, the concept of a society with exclusive boundaries may be obsolete. This is not to say that it is not valid to do comparative study over very large aggregates. Indeed, one of the achievements of twentieth-century empirical social science is the thorough demonstration that society is real in the sense that social variables relate to each other differently in “societies” with different characteristics. In this sense the concept of society no longer rests on conjecture. However, at the theoretical level the search for a universally valid definition of the nature and boundaries of a society as a self-contained unit may obscure the complexity of social life.

Many of the historic and contemporary problems in the conceptual analysis of society may be clarified by viewing society as a complex of overlapping process systems. We may abstract from the concrete interaction of concrete social persons a number of types of interaction systems. Economic, religious, political, educational, and other types of activity come to cohere into partially independent systems with units, boundaries, and mechanisms of their own. These systems overlap; and when a relatively broad range of such systems cohere around a common population, we may speak of a society. There is no reason to suppose, however, that this society will be self-contained, that it will not overlap with other societies, or that its boundaries will be uniform across its constituent systems.

It would be a mistake to regard the notion of a self-sufficient society as intrinsically absurd. One might be tempted to argue that any society engages in at least some trade and cultural exchange with at least one other society, and that therefore there are no self-sufficient societies. This argument, however, misconstrues the concept of self-sufficiency. To call a society self-sufficient implies not that it is isolated but that its social system contains within itself cultural materials and role opportunities sufficient for carrying on controlled relations with an environment (Parsons 1966).

The truth or falsehood of alternative conceptions of society is not at issue here. Rather, we are contrasting alternative ways of approaching the problems of societal analysis. Thus, an approach based on the concept of social system can be criticized for failing to make several important phenomena immediately problematic. But this is very far from saying that it causes logical difficulties so severe as to prevent analysis of these phenomena altogether.

The alternative to the social system approach is to start with the concept of population. This involves making problematic not only the degree to which the activities of a population are organized into systems, but also the units and boundaries of these systems and their forms of interdependence. Thus the emergence of a bounded, unified social system is no longer assumed but becomes an object of inquiry.

The boundaries of a society are usually drawn at the outer limits of the interdependencies and commonalities that give it coherence. Special criteria are often used to define particular types of society. Thus, in the case of the nation-state the limits of political jurisdiction are taken to define the limits of the political system and, thus, of the society. In fact, if societies are viewed as complexes of overlapping process systems, it becomes natural to accept the fact that societal boundaries are irregular. From this, one is led to consider the sources and consequences of variation in the scope of systemic boundaries (for instance, by examining the consequences of the involvement of national states in international colonial development).

Another single-criterion approach to defining the boundaries of the societal population is to adopt the social system’s own normatively defined concept of membership (Parsons 1966). To this it may be objected that the members of a societal population may be involved in well-organized social systems that crosscut membership boundaries. The common solution to this problem is to treat the basic unit of society as the “person-in-role,” and then to allege that behavior in boundary-crossing roles is external to the society. One then attempts to identify the mechanisms for segregating roles and regulating members who cross societal boundaries. Again, the focus is on how such regulation is accomplished, not on the conditions under which it will emerge or the consequences of its absence.

To define society as a set of overlapping process systems also permits flexibility in the analysis of the units of society. The utilitarian conception of society was based on the notion of the isolated individual. As early as Comte, the wisdom of this approach was called into question. Comte saw the utility of beginning with more socially relevant units; for him, the unit of society was the family. Other analysts continued this tradition in their treatment of the communal aspects of society. Later, with the development of processual concepts, segments of the actions of social persons came to be used as units of analysis. Thus, Parsons has spoken of the units of social systems as actors in roles (1951, pp. 24-26).

If society is viewed as a complex of overlapping process systems, it would appear that the ultimate social unit is the act. However, it does not follow that the intermediate units of different process systems will be the same. Society does not have a single type of unit, but many: its constituent systems have units of different types, and these differences can be of considerable analytical importance. For example, many of the strains in modern societies derive from the fact that, although families are the molecular units of modern status systems, rational market and bureaucratic systems are predicated on the evaluation of specific performances in roles. In consequence, competing bases of evaluation are present in society.

The links between units may also vary from system to system. Theories of society have postulated six major types of links between units: emotional attraction, orientations of actors to each other, shared cognitive and evaluative perspectives, mutual influence or coercion, economic or functional interdependence, and common participation in an environment. There is no reason to assume that any of these types of links constitutes the one true mechanism of social coherence. On the other hand, one or another of them may be dominant in particular process systems. This possibility is itself a source of important sociological problems: we are led to ask such questions as “What is the consequence of the expansion of systems of economic interdependence beyond the boundaries of systems based upon emotional attachments?”

The notion of a set of overlapping process systems is not by itself a satisfactory model of society. It leaves open the question of the relation between a society and other social groupings. How, for instance, is a society to be distinguished from a community? The term community has been used in a variety of ways. For some, communities are locally based units of a larger society; for others, “community” refers to some aspect of society, such as its solidarity (that is, communal) or spatial components. Others, particularly in the German sociological tradition, distinguish communities as relatively solidary types of societies [seeCommunity-society continua].

It is legitimate to use the term “community” to refer to both locally based units and some aspect of the larger society. The former usage is well established in English speech. The latter usage is sometimes said to be justified by the need to establish a distinction between societies and other social entities. Institutions and special-purpose associations are said not to be societies because they have no communal components. The concept of population can be used in a similar way to distinguish societies from other sets of systems of social processes, since the latter may have sets of members without having populations in the biotic sense. A society is sustained by a population. To establish the boundaries of a societal population we may adopt a definition of population quite similar to the one employed by bioecologists. A population consists of the self-perpetuating inhabitants of a territorial area. In this context the term “self-perpetuation” implies mating, and the term “inhabitant” implies relatively permanent residence. Thus, the boundaries of a population that sustains a society are established by the limits of the largest territorial area within which mating is common and residence is relatively permanent.

These criteria establish a model that, while it does not completely correspond to any empirical population, does provide a means of clearly excluding types of groups that are not societies. Many groups do not qualify as societies because membership in them is not conferred by birth. Further, members of local communities quite often cross community boundaries for the purpose of mating and establishing new residences, while members of societies do not often cross societal boundaries for these purposes—indeed, that is why they form what I have called a population.

To start with the concept of a population is not to define a society as consisting in its population. The society is not the population but the complex systems of action in which the units of the population participate.

The next problem for the analyst is to establish the boundaries of these systems of action. In a highly organized society, which closely controls the relations between the units of its population and members of other populations, it may be useful to treat only relations within the societal population as internal to the society. On the other hand, when societal systems become very permeable to social influences that transcend population boundaries, it is more realistic to consider the society to have irregular boundaries and to overlap other societies.

Historically, conceptions of society have had ideological implications and overtones. Perhaps this conception of society as a set of overlapping process systems is not an exception, for it seeks to call attention to the problems of the emergence of larger and more inclusive networks of social organization. As man has expanded his ecological niche there has been a continuous growth of national organization that transcends the less inclusive traditional solidarities. At the same time, cosmopolitan and international organization has outrun national boundaries. The modern world is regularly upset by shock waves reverberating from local traditional cleavages through national political systems; sometimes these shock waves reach the international arena. If sociological analysis is adequately to represent the constraints imposed by this emergent global level of social reality, its analytical conceptions must not be inflexibly tied to the concept of the national boundary.

Leon H. Mayhew

[See alsoCooperation; Culture; Evolution; Integration; International integration; Natural law; Political sociology; Social contract; Social Darwinism; Sociology, article onthe development of sociological thought; and the biographies OfComte; Cooley; Durkheim; Hobbes; Locke; Marx; Mead; Mill; Simmel; Spencer; Sumner; Tönnies; Weber, Max.]

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Aberle, David F. et al. 1950 The Functional Prerequisites of a Society. Ethics 60:100-111.

Durkheim, Émile (1893) 1960 The Division of Labor in Society. Glencoe, III.: Free Press. → First published as De la division du travail social.

Ehrlich, Eugen (1913) 1936 Fundamental Principles of the Sociology of Law. Translated by Walter L. Moll with an introduction by Roscoe Pound. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Univ. Press. → First published as Grundlegung der Soziologie des Rechts.

Levy, Marion J. JR. 1952 The Structure of Society. Princeton Univ. Press.

Levy, Marion J. JR. 1966 Modernization and the Structure of Society: A Setting for International Affairs. 2 vols. Princeton Univ. Press.

Martindale, Don 1960 The Nature and Types of Sociological Theory. Boston: Houghton Mifflin.

Mead, George H. (1934) 1963 Mind, Self and Society From the Standpoint of a Social Behaviorist. Edited by Charles W. Morris. Univ. of Chicago Press. → Published posthumously.

Parsons, Talcott (1937) 1949 The Structure of Social Action: A Study in Social Theory With Special Reference to a Group of Recent European Writers. Glencoe, III.: Free Press.

Parsons, Talcott 1951 The Social System. Glencoe, III.: Free Press.

Parsons, Talcott 1966 Societies: Evolutionary and Comparative Perspectives. Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall.

Simmel, Georg (1902-1917) 1950 The Sociology of Georg Simmel. Edited and translated by Kurt H. Wolff. Glencoe, III.: Free Press. → First published in German.

Sumner, William Graham (1906) 1959 Folkways: A Study of the Sociological Importance of Usages, Manners, Customs, Mores, and Morals. New York: Dover. → A paperback edition was published in 1960 by New American Library.

TÖnnies, Ferdinand (1887) 1957 Community and Society (Gemeinschaft und Gesellschaft). Translated and edited by Charles P. Loomis. East Lansing: Michigan State Univ. Press. → First published in German. A paperback edition was published in 1963 by Harper.

Weber, Max (1922) 1957 The Theory of Social and Economic Organization. Edited by Talcott Parsons. Glencoe, III.: Free Press. → First published as Part 1 of Wirtschaft und Gesellschaft.

SOCIETY.

The concept of society is in transition due to globalization and the knowledge associated with it. Today's views of society are not altogether new, however. Rather, they are engaged with the rediscovery of the worlds of antiquity. Since the 1970s, scholars have reached to the past to explain mainstay concepts such as society. In this manner, ancient Eastern ideas flood into the current Western perspectives on society. The turn to the archaic East also heightens awareness of the West's own archaic past. Thus the concept of society metamorphoses while it embraces a living past.

Ancient Views of Society: East and West

Until the modern era, China did not have a word for society. The current term shehui means an organized assembly. In the ancient world, China utilized the idea of wenming (civilization), which literally meant the brightness of culture or the clarity of writing. It also had the idea of zhongguo (Middle Kingdom), denoting the middle of the world on a geographical plane and the middle of the universe (between heaven and earth) on a cosmological plane. During the pre-Qin era (third century b.c.e.), Chinese society was a living matrix of ideas and events, of spirituality and materiality. James Sellmann describes this world as "hylozoistic—a living world empowered with qi [life force]" (p. 5). As a "foci-field model" or "field cosmology," the pre-Qin society was conceived as an organic complex that changed as the seasons changed.

The Chinese philosophical coupling of yin-yang was an organizing principle that connected the heavens to earth and established all worldly changes. Political decision making relied on proper timing: the right season, the right pitch of the pipes, the right state of mind. The balance of space and time was the key to harmony in the Chinese dynasties to come.

In highly stratified and patriarchal societies such as the West and Middle East, women might constitute a society within a society. While similar situations existed in the Far East, the harmonizing balance of Chinese philosophy accommodated women throughout history to occupy prominent roles ranging from calligrapher to empress.

In the Roman world, socius was a word that meant friend—hence the English word society as a modern word related to a community of friends. In the ancient world, one could not get by without friends who shared common values, common work, and common lands. Thus the Roman word communitas as applied to society symbolized the collectivity of physical and spiritual relations that bound together a people, as in the slogan senatus populusque Romanus —the Senate and the People of Rome. Roman community was bound together by a sense of civitas or citizenship as defined by the civil virtues of Rome. The English word civilization derives from the Latin and carries the sense of a social, political, cultural, religious, and philosophical whole. The Middle Ages in Europe saw the splintering of Roman civilization into church and state, or into religious and political spheres of influence. As towns began to develop and the world split more visibly into city and country, social philosophers' views on society also bifurcated.

Early Modern Views of Society

When the Jesuits brought knowledge of their explorations into China back to Europe, an organic view of society as a compendium of functioning interdependent parts started to take shape. Although this was a bare shadow of China's sophisticated civilization, it led to a Western idea of a body politic, with the state as the head, the church as the heart, and economy and other social systems as the limbs and organs of society. This organic view had far-reaching implications well into the twentieth century, especially in structural functionalist views of society. Karl Marx (1818–1883), however, regarded these developments as a definitive conflict between the generation of civil society and political community. Civil society developed conflicting classes within it that were regulated by the political community. The contradictions of everyday life were monitored by a state that favored the ruling class, and the state wore a political lion skin for the dominant class. Hence, political relations were often mediated by class relations. Hence, society began to manifest simultaneously both conflictual and consensual components. Society was forever in a state of flux.

With the division of labor, industrialization, and the quest for the development of the nation-state, a new philosophical challenge emerged in the form of one question: What comes first, society or the individual? In the ancient Western world of Greece and Rome, the individual was not so much a factor. Rather, a person made commitments to the virtues of various institutions and traditions such as the family. But with the struggle for the creation of the European nation, especially in France, the concept of the individual greatly challenged definitions of society. On the one hand, the more conservative view of kings retained the idea of society as a given, as a complete whole functioning in accord with the will of God; individuals would simply obey the laws of society and work to maintain this equilibrium. On the other hand, the more radical views of French revolutionaries saw the individual as the center of the universe with a variety of inalienable rights; society would serve the individual while maintaining the supremacy of that individual through liberté, egalité, fraternité —liberty, equality, fraternity—a battle cry of the French Revolution.

Society: Consensus and Conflict

Views of modern Western society tend to fall into two camps: consensus and conflict. Consensus views beginning with the economist Max Weber (1864–1920) and continuing into the structural functionalism of the American sociologist Talcott Parsons (1902–1979) describe society as a complex combination of static and dynamic systems. Weber identified society as a system of potential harmonization, with rational actors choosing the best means to the end of ensuring the smooth operation of society; Parsons discussed the functional and dys-functional aspects of society as it strives for a dynamic equilibrium through complementary institutional structures.

Marx is still the main proponent of the conflict theory of society, among a plethora of thinkers up to Louis Althusser (1918–1990) and beyond. Marx conceived of society as a kind of shape shifter, culminating in and overcoming moments of conflict through a sequence of class struggles: slavery giving way to feudalism, feudalism giving way to capitalism, capitalism giving way to socialism, socialism giving way to communism. Althusser divided society into repressive and ideological apparatuses. He had a rather pessimistic view of society's transformations because of its ingrained structures of dominance, especially in the overwhelming powers of the modern state.

The philosopher Jürgen Habermas (b. 1929) combined both consensus and conflict theories while exploring a legitimation crisis of modern society struggling for a communicative competence among both institutions and individual actors. These five thinkers—Weber, Parsons, Marx, Althusser, Habermas—still stand as the most prominent models of social scientific thinking regarding society today. What is attractive about their approaches seems to be an ability to connect abstract macro-level ideas about society with more concrete micro-level ideas about individual social actors within the framework of these umbrella systems.

The New Ancient World: Leibniz, Vico, and China

Given the present trend toward global communications, more attention has focused on the origins of concepts of society, especially in the works of pioneering scholars in the relations between East and West. The philosopher Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz (1646–1716) did not simply rehearse Christian views of Chinese society. Like Giambattista Vico (1668–1744), Leibniz was impressed with the Confucian view of benevolence and the harmonious society that it spawned. Like Vico, he distrusted René Descartes's and Isaac Newton's image of a mechanical universe. Leibniz was indebted to the Jesuit Matteo Ricci (1552–1610), who was similarly open-minded about Chinese philosophical and religious life. Leibniz embraced a Chinese notion of society as a living organism and popularized this image in Europe. His description of matter applies to society as well: "Thus every portion of matter can be conceived as a garden full of plants or a pond full of fish. But every branch of the plant, every limb of the animal, every drop of its humors, is again such a garden or such a pond" (1965, p. 159). For Leibniz, society was a thoroughly interdependent living entity whose every fiber was connected. Every societal institution was dependent on each other and necessary for a harmonious balance. Since every entity was composed of matter, then matter itself was infinitely interconnected. His idea of monadology was clearly linked to the Confucian idea of li (principle, form, pattern) as a primary substance that generated qi (primordial vapor or life-energy force), both of which acted upon every aspect of the life-world. He correctly perceived Chinese society as holding to a cosmology that ensured harmonious relations: "Indeed, it is difficult to describe how beautifully all the laws of the Chinese, in contrast to those of other peoples, are directed to the achievement of public tranquility and the establishment of social order" (1994, p. 47). Leibniz so much admired China's "public morality" and "natural theology" that he referred to it as an "Oriental Europe."

Whereas Leibniz was influenced by Matteo Ricci, Vico was influenced by another religious friend, Father Matteo Ripa (1692–1746). Ripa had lived for many years at the court of Kangxi, the emperor of China's Qing dynasty. When Ripa returned to Italy, he brought with him copper engravings of world maps and garden vistas complete with Chinese poetry. Ripa introduced many Chinese scholars along with an abundance of knowledge to Naples, where he established the Collegio dei Cinesi (The Chinese institute). This cross-cultural milieu greatly influenced Vico's formulation of Scienza Nuova (The new science) and his image of society that aimed to give birth to the ancient past in the present.

Vico was interested in myth and language, especially in tracing etymologies of words to their ancient roots and then awakening them in modern contexts. In other words, language was a conduit for the past to become the present. It is language that gives life its poetic character. Hence Vico characterized society in terms of a "poetic cosmography," a mapping of the world of gods, heroes, and humans. As a humanist, Vico did not believe in the dominance of rationalism through physical and mathematical sciences to the exclusion of the arts of philosophy and history. Through each of these vehicles, humans could attempt to recover the essence of society. This fundamental societal essence is what Vico called "conatus," a primordial beginning or striving "proper to the human will" (p. 101). Vico endeavored to discover this beginning through various stages of history: the age of gods, the age of heroes, and the age of men. Each held its own nature or birth: divine imagination, heroic nobility, and modest conscience. Likewise, each represented a kind of government: theocratic, aristocratic, and human. Finally, each offered a language: divine poetic, heroic blazoning, and articulate speech. In his linguistic configurations, Vico is clearly indebted to both ancient Chinese and Greco-Roman thought. Divine written characters (hieroglyphs) were used "by all nations in their beginnings" (p. 341). These "poetic universals" were followed by heroic "imaginative universals" that spoke of noble events and then by human words.

The Chinese, for example, retained the number of pictographs in circulation for daily use from the large lexicon of classical and literary characters. Like the Egyptians, the Chinese maintained "the vanity of their imagined remote antiquity" (p. 21). This included the elevated speech of heroic singing reflected in the tones of the Chinese language and the recording of their first histories in verse. In many ways, Vico tried to emulate this style in his own works. He describes the Greek use of the dragon Draco, probably one of Gorgon's serpents attached to Perseus's shield (later Athena's shield) and eventually the writer of Athenian law in blood, as that which "signifies the rule of the laws" (p. 228) in the time of heroic aristocracies. He then compares this with the Chinese dragon used as a royal emblem and a symbol of civil rule, while marveling at the poetic convergence of East and West.

Phenomenology and Society

John O'Neill, who has made a significant impact on social sciences and humanities since the 1970s, develops Vico's ideas into a new phenomenological view of society. O'Neill recognizes Vico's call to enter language and thereby "renew" society through every word: "Thus etymology is the music of Vico's wild sociology inviting us to hear our beginnings in the birth of language" (1974, p. 37). Vico's Chinese-inspired metaphor of the body politic replaces a mechanical scientistic one. In attempting to recreate the "public functions of rhetoric," O'Neill revises Vico's project by identifying three levels of body politic in modern society: bio-body, productive body, libidinal body. The first refers to the institution of the family through the discourse of well-being; the second refers to work through the discourse of expression; the third refers to personality through the discourse of happiness. In addition, O'Neill maintains that "on the one hand, we have the bodies we have because they have been inscribed by our mythologies, religions, philosophies, sciences, and ideologies. But, on the other hand, we can also say that we have our philosophies, mythologies, arts, and sciences because we have the body we have—namely, a communicative body" (1989, p. 3). Influenced by Maurice Merleau-Ponty, O'Neill's idea of society takes shape by way of a communicative body as a reciprocal crossing of experience somewhere between idea and flesh. It is the visceral grounding that is the heart of a society in constant flux. O'Neill is not afraid to cross spatial and temporal borders in his embrace of global thought, both East and West. His influence is wide, reaching into political theory and philosophy.

Building upon a similar understanding, Fred Dallmayr invites scholars to move "beyond orientalism" in discarding the Eurocentric views of society. Dallmayr is concerned with the recognition of non-Western cultures in the current shaping of a "global village." Phenomenology helps shape "cross-cultural 'co-being' in a shared world—where the issue is neither to distance the other into the indifference of externality nor to absorb or appropriate otherness in an imperialist gesture" (p. 52). A strategy for understanding a global society necessitates a comparative political theory. Hwa Yol Jung's Comparative Political Culture in the Age of Globalization (2002) follows Dallmayr and O'Neill in evoking phenomenology to explain a cultural hybridization of East-West views of society. Inspired by Merleau-Ponty and Martin Heidegger, Jung promotes an idea of "planetary thinking" whereby a "global citizen" (homo globatus ) engages in a world beyond the nation-state. Jung writes, "For the transversalist, globalization means to decenter Western hegemony and disclaim Western superiority thereby empowering the non-West to participate fully in the new worldmaking as an act of hybridization or imbrication" (Jung, p. 14). The writings of O'Neill, Dallmayr, and Jung go a long way to providing a new global understanding of the concept of society.

See also Chinese Thought ; Civil Society ; Communism ; Globalization ; Marxism .

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——. Making Sense Together: An Introduction to Wild Sociology. New York: Harper and Row, 1974.

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Jay Goulding

SOCIETY

A group of perennial problems in social philosophy arises from the concept "society" itself and from its relation to the "individual." What is the ontological status of a society? When one speaks of it as having members, is that to recognize it as a whole with parts, or is the relation of some different kind? Or is this a case of what Alfred North Whitehead called the fallacy of misplaced concreteness?

Social Action and Social Relations

"Society" is used both abstractly and to refer to entities that can be particularized, identified, and distinguished from each other as social systems or organizations. The phrase "man in society" is an instance of the more abstract use, for it refers neither to some particular form of association nor to a particular collectivity in which individuals find themselves. It refers, rather, to the social dimension of human action—to a certain generalized type of human relationship. Purely spatial or physical relations between human beings, like contiguity, are not social; for social relations give to human actions a dimension possessed neither by the mere behavior of things nor, indeed, of animals.

Max Weber defined a social action as one which, "by virtue of the subjective meaning attached to it by the acting individual (or individuals), … takes account of the behavior of others and is thereby oriented in its course" (Theory of Social and Economic Organization, p. 88). That is to say, the agent understands his own action as having a particular point, which in turn depends on an understanding of what another individual or other individuals have done in the past (as, for instance, in an act of vengeance), are doing now, or are expected to do in the future (as, for instance, in a proposal of marriage). So, said Weber, the efforts of two cyclists to avoid hitting one another would have a social character, whereas the collision between them would not.

An action would not be social merely because it was the effect on an individual of the existence of a crowd as such. For instance, laughing less inhibitedly in a crowd than one would when alone would not be an action oriented to the fact of the existence of the crowd "on the level of meaning"; while the crowd may be one of the causes of the action, the point or meaning of the action does not presuppose some conception of, say, the crowd's purposes or the reasons for its presence. Nor would merely imitative behavior be social; one could learn to whistle by imitating a man, a bird, or a whistling kettle. Learning and performance need neither an understanding of what is imitated as an action nor an orientation toward expected future action of the model. Nevertheless, says Weber, if the action is imitated because it is "fashionable, or traditional, or exemplary, or lends social distinction … it is meaningfully oriented either to the behavior of the source of imitation or of third persons or of both" (pp. 112–114). Weber then goes on to define "social relationship." This would exist wherever, among a number of actors, there existed a probability that their actions would be social actions.

Weber's concept of the "meaning" of an action is rather obscure. It may be a meaning "imputed to the parties in a given concrete case," or it may be what the action means "on the average, or in a theoretically formulated pure type—it is never a normatively 'correct' or metaphysically 'true' meaning" (p. 118). This concept is connected with Weber's much criticized conception of empathic understanding (Verstehen ). But this connection is not strictly necessary, for the meaning we give to the actions of others depends not so much on an attempted reconstruction of what is in their minds as on a knowledge of the norms and standards regulating their behavior in a given context. Thus I know what a man is about when he presents a bank teller with a signed paper of a certain size, shape, and color, not because I can reconstruct his state of mind in imagination but because I can recognize the procedures for cashing checks.

Weber insists that it is the probability itself of a course of social action that constitutes the social relation, not any particular basis for the probability. Yet we can rely on situational responses (like the bank teller's, for instance) very largely because we expect them to conform to norms and procedures, by which such responses are deemed appropriate or otherwise. Assuming, as many sociologists would, that even war is a social relation, the acts of opposing commanders are mutually oriented by an understanding of the aims and practices of warfare and by the supposition that the other's actions will be appropriate, not only in terms of means and ends but also in consideration of whatever rules of war may be current. Thus we can move from the concept of social relations as frameworks for interaction to Talcott Parsons's conception of a social system constituted by differentiated statuses and roles.

Societies as Organizations

The concept of "a society" implies a system of more or less settled statuses, to each of which correspond particular patterns of actions appropriate to a range of situations. By virtue of qualifying conditions a man enjoys a status; in virtue of that status he has a role to play. These concepts, however, are meaningful only in the context of rules or norms of conduct—a man's role is not simply what he habitually does (for this may be no more socially significant than a tic), nor even what he is expected to do, if an expectation is only what one might predict about his future conduct from a knowledge of his past. His role is what is expected of him, in the sense of what is required of him by some standard. The role of secretary to an association, for instance, requires that he read the minutes of the last meeting, because the rules of procedure assign this action to whosoever enjoys this status. Less formally, a father's role may be to provide the family with an income, and failure to do so will be regarded not merely as falsifying predictions but also as disappointing reasonable or legitimate expectations—reasonable, because grounded on an understanding of the norms constituting the structure of the family. Indeed, though what we knew of some particular father might give us good grounds for predicting that he would neglect his role, that would not mean that its requirements did not apply to him. Of course, when we speak of "the family" or "the modern state," we commonly have in mind ideal types or paradigms. There may be significant deviations from these in practice. Any particular family may have its own standards, deviant from the social norm, according to which the role of father does not include providing the family income.

Looked at in these terms, a society is an aggregate of interacting individuals whose relations are governed by role-conferring rules and practices which give their actions their characteristic significance. Thus, to demand money with menaces is one thing if done by a common blackmailer or footpad, another if done by a tax collector.

Nevertheless, the act of John Smith, tax collector, is still the act of John Smith, who acts also in different roles in other situations—as father, member of Rotary, and so forth. So one may take two views of a society. On the one hand, one may see it, as a biographer might, as an aggregate of life histories of its individual members, each, in the course of his life, acting in a variety of roles that explain (but only partially) what he does. Or one may adopt the sociological standpoint. A society is then a pattern of roles, and what President Brown does is less important than that it instantiates the role of president.

Individualist and Holistic Accounts

Are there any statements about societies, or what Émile Durkheim termed "social facts," that are not ultimately reducible to statements about individuals? According to an extreme individualist or nominalist, such as Thomas Hobbes, social wholes have no substantial reality; propositions attributing properties or actions to a collectivity can be reduced, without residue, to a series of propositions about the relations and actions of individuals: "A multitude of men are made one person, when they are by one man, or one person, represented.… and unity, can not otherwise be understood in multitude" (Leviathan, edited by Michael Oakeshott, Ch. 16, p. 107). Karl Popper's methodological individualism is as uncompromising. So-called social wholes, he declares, are theoretical constructs; "social phenomena, including collectives, should be analysed in terms of individuals and their actions and relations" (Conjectures and Refutations, p. 341).

There is no agreement, however, on whether such analysis is possible. Some philosophers, while admitting that every action is the action of an individual, nevertheless deny that "statements which contain societal terms" can be reduced "to a conjunction of statements which only include terms referring to the thoughts and actions of specific individuals" (Maurice Mandelbaum, "Societal Facts," p. 482). While the "societal fact" of cashing a check can be expressed in terms of what individuals do, nevertheless the description will always contain such societal terms as bank and money, which cannot themselves be translated without remainder into wholly individual terms. Furthermore, such societal facts, it is said, interact with individual behavior; a banking system can have an effect on a concrete individual. For it is clearly true that for every individual, the institutions and mores of his society present themselves as independent and external facts, just as much as his physical environment does. And if that is true for every individual, it is true for the totality of individuals composing the society. That is not to say that a totality is a thing independent of individuals or that it has a group mind; it is only to say that for any participant or for any observer of an individual's actions, it makes sense to talk of him confronting and confronted by independent social facts (Ernest Gellner elaborates this point). Moreover, the principle that social action can ultimately be explained by referring to the dispositions of individuals to behave in certain ways in given circumstances overlooks the possibility that these dispositions may themselves depend on social facts.

The view that social facts are not reducible to individual facts is commonly called holism. In its more extreme forms it relies heavily on biological organic analogies. An organism, it is said, is prior to its constituent parts in the sense that any understanding of their nature and function presupposes an understanding of the whole organism. The whole organism is more than the mere sum of its parts, since no account in terms of the parts considered separately could add up to some of the things that could be said about the whole. (The same might be said, however, of some of the properties of a triangle that arise from the three sides considered in relation to one another.) Just as the liver is a more significant object considered as an organ of a working body than as a detached piece of tissue, so the acts of individuals are significant or intelligible only when considered as the acts of role-bearers or as manifesting characteristics of their social or cultural environment. So drinking wine has a different range of social meaning in England from the one it has in France. The thought-experiment of the social contract theorists, who put man into an asocial state of nature the better to understand his real purposes in society, was radically misconceived, precisely because it abstracted man from the very context in which alone he would be a man but still attributed human properties to him.

According to the Hegelians (Bernard Bosanquet, for example), so far are we from being able to reduce social facts to individual facts that it is the individual himself who must be explained as an expression of the concrete social universal—an idea manifesting itself organically in its differentiated parts, as the idea of an oak tree is differentially but organically manifest in its leaves, bark, trunk, and so forth, all in a sense different from one another yet all linked by the idea of the oak and collectively differentiated thereby from the corresponding parts of an elm. "Man" is an abstraction—we are men as we are Germans, Englishmen, Frenchmen; that is, we instantiate the spirit of our own society.

Holistic organicism of this kind has laid great stress on history. Social wholes, it is said (by Friedrich Karl von Savigny, for instance), are not like mechanical wholes. Mechanical wholes can be understood by reducing them to their smallest constituent parts that conform in their behavior to general laws from which the varying behavior of the aggregates can be deduced. A social whole, on the contrary, is sui generis, to be understood not by analysis but by studying it as a developing whole. Consequently, there can be no general theory of social action, and history is the only legitimate mode of sociological inquiry.

According to Popper, these arguments are totally misconceived. There is simply no way of studying wholes as wholes; any attempt at understanding implies abstracting from a particular configuration of properties and circumstances those that seem significant for the particular study and relating them to general laws and hypotheses that are valid for all cases, irrespective of time, in which the stated initial conditions are satisfied. A law of development could be a statement about the general tendencies of certain types of society, given certain initial conditions; but it is a misunderstanding of the nature of both scientific and historical inquiry to propose a study of a society as a whole, partly because a social whole is a theoretical construct and partly because to attribute to it its own peculiar law of growth, in some sense true regardless of, or despite, any initial conditions whatsoever, is to make any explanatory statement about its behavior impossible.

Community and Association

The individualist account of social action is most persuasive when the form of social organization under consideration is a joint-stock corporation or a trade association. There is little temptation to attribute group personalities to such bodies, except in a strictly legal sense, and therefore little resistance to treating them as nothing but procedural forms. Their members and officials are clearly identified individuals with limited common interests. These interests explain their interaction, without suggesting that the association is anything more than a means for promoting them. Moreover, such interests remain intelligible even abstracted from the context of the society.

Ferdinand Tönnies distinguished this type of organization, which he called a Gesellschaft (association), from its polar opposite, the Gemeinschaft (community). Paradigms of the latter type are the family, the village, the tribe, and the nation. These are much less formally organized than a joint-stock company. They have no clearly defined, limited aim; qualifications for membership may be poorly defined, depending very largely on subjective criteria. Yet individuals do not deliberately join such bodies—more usually they are born into them or acquire membership by residence. At the same time, membership in such a community may mean much more to the individual. So far from his using the organization as a means for the pursuit of personal interest, privately conceived, what he conceives to be his interest may depend very much on the influence of the collectivity upon him. He may feel bound to it by ties and responsibilities not of his own choosing which nevertheless demand his respect. Moreover, such communities appear to have a lifespan greater than that of any generation of individual members, which cannot be explained, as might that of a corporation, by the continuities of constitutional procedures. It is, rather, that from generation to generation there passes an attachment to a common set of symbols and a common history, a participation in what Durkheim termed "collective representations" in a collective consciousness—a common culture, in short—which enables members to identify one another where other criteria are uncertain, which gives the society its cohesion, and which provides the standards by which its members' actions are regulated and assessed.

A Functionally Inclusive Collectivity

"Boundary maintenance," to use Talcott Parsons's term, is a necessity for every society. To possess an identity, a society must furnish criteria whereby its members can identify one another, since their actions and attitudes toward one another will be different from those toward outsiders. But Parsons also conceives of boundary maintenance by social subsystems within a broader system. Thus he defines "a society" as a collectivity "which is the primary bearer of a distinctive institutionalized culture and which cannot be said to be a differentiated subsystem of a higher-order collectivity oriented to most of the functional exigencies of a social system" (Theories of Society, Vol. I, p. 44). Such a collectivity is organized by political, economic, familial, and similar subsystems. Parsons distinguishes polity and society, but he asserts that "the boundaries of a society tend to coincide with the territorial jurisdiction of the highest-order units of political organization" (p. 46). For, in Parsons's view, a society's existence depends so crucially on commitment to common values and on the maintenance of order between its individual and collective components that the political boundary tends to settle automatically the limits of the society.

The relation between state and society presented no problems for the Greeks. Political, religious, cultural, and athletic activities were largely undifferentiated and occurred within the single organizational structure of the polis. The first serious problems in this respect emerged with the Christian dichotomies between God and Caesar, church and state, the Civitas Dei and the Civitas Terrena. The medieval view was that, ideally, there was one universal community of humankind with two modes of organization, or "subsystems," church and empire. Reality never corresponded very closely to this ideal. It became irretrievably divorced from it with the rise of the nation-state and the Reformation. Since then, when people have talked of the society to which they belong, they have thought primarily (like Parsons) of the social order contained within the boundaries of a state and sustained by its organized power.

Nevertheless, liberal thinkers have striven hard to maintain the conceptual distinction between state, or polity, and society. One reason has been to resist the claim that the state could be the only focus of loyalty, competent by virtue of an overriding authority to lay down the terms on which other associations might function. On the other hand, there has emerged a new totalitarianism which identifies state and society. Every form of economic, religious, artistic, or scientific activity thereby acquires a political dimension, promoting or impeding the public good as embodied in state policy. G. W. F. Hegel provided a metaphysical justification for this kind of doctrine when he distinguished between, on one hand, civil society—a level of social organization including the market economy and the forces of civil order—and, on the other, the transcendent state—"the realized ethical idea or ethical spirit," "the true meaning and ground" of lower forms of social organization like the family and civil society (Philosophy of Right, Secs. 257, 256). By contrast, not only do liberals insist on the subordination of the state to society; they have also tended, according to Sheldon S. Wolin, to depreciate the political and to attach increasingly to other social subsystems, like the business corporation or the voluntary association, concepts like statesmanship, authority, and legitimacy, which have been considered hitherto characteristic of the state. Meanwhile, Wolin argues, the concept of an organization directed to the most general interests of the community tends to get lost, to be replaced by a model of conflicting pressure groups operating within a very nebulously defined arena. If Parsons is right, our notion of a society as the most inclusive framework of social interaction depends on the political not only for its boundary maintenance but also for its very identity. There may be a danger that in pressing the antitotalitarian, pluralistic account so far that it dissolves the state, it will lose thereby its capacity to define the society.

See also Bosanquet, Bernard; Durkheim, Émile; Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich; Hobbes, Thomas; Holism and Individualism in History and Social Science; Popper, Karl Raimund; Savigny, Friedrich Karl von; Social Contract; Sovereignty; Weber, Max; Whitehead, Alfred North.

Bibliography

Bendix, Reinhard. Max Weber—An Intellectual Portrait. New York: Doubleday, 1960.

Black, Max, ed. The Social Theories of Talcott Parsons. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1961.

Bosanquet, Bernard. The Philosophical Theory of the State. 4th ed. London: Macmillan, 1923.

Durkheim, Émile. Les règles de la méthode sociologique. Paris: Alcan, 1895. Translated by S. A. Solovay and J. H. Mueller as Rules of Sociological Method, edited by G. E. G. Catlin. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1938.

Durkheim, Émile. De la division du travail social. 5th ed. Paris: Alcan, 1926. Edited and translated by George Simpson as The Division of Labor in Society. Glencoe, IL: Free Press, 1947.

Gellner, Ernest. "Holism versus Individualism in History and Sociology." In Theories of History, edited by Patrick Gardiner, 489–503. Glencoe, IL: Free Press, 1959.

Hegel, G. W. F. Grundlinien der Philosophie des Rechts. Berlin, 1821. Translated with notes by T. M. Knox as Hegel's Philosophy of Right. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1942.

Hobbes, Thomas. Leviathan. London, 1651. Edited with introduction by Michael Oakeshott. Oxford, 1946.

MacIver, R. M., and C. H. Page. Society: An Introductory Analysis. New York: Rinehart, 1949.

Mandelbaum, Maurice. "Societal Facts." In Theories of History, op. cit., 476–488.

Parsons, Talcott. The Structure of Social Action. Glencoe, IL: Free Press, 1949. Includes extended discussions of the views of Alfred Marshall, Vilfredo Pareto, Émile Durkheim, and Max Weber.

Parsons, Talcott. The Social System. Glencoe, IL: Free Press, 1951. Parsons's intricate style and elaborate terminology will deter any but the most determined.

Parsons, Talcott, Edward Shils, K. D. Naegele, and J. R. Pitts, eds. Theories of Society. 2 vols. New York: Free Press, 1961.

Popper, Karl R. The Poverty of Historicism. London: Routledge, 1957.

Popper, Karl R. The Open Society and Its Enemies. 2 vols., 4th rev. ed. London, 1962.

Popper, Karl R. "Prediction and Prophecy in the Social Sciences." In his Conjectures and Refutations. London: Routledge, 1963. Ch. 16. Also in Theories of History, op. cit., 276–285.

Simmel, Georg. The Sociology of Georg Simmel. Translated and edited by K. H. Wolff. Glencoe, IL: Free Press, 1950. An anthology of Simmel's principal works on sociological theory.

Stark, Werner. The Fundamental Forms of Social Thought. London: Routledge and K. Paul, 1962. A study of the traditional organicist-mechanistic dichotomy and an attempt to overcome it.

Tönnies, Ferdinand. Gemeinschaft und Gesellschaft. Leipzig, 1887. Translated by C. P. Loomis as Fundamental Concepts of Sociology. New York: American Book, 1940. Reissued as Community and Association. London: Routledge and K. Paul, 1955.

Watkins, J. W. N. "Historical Explanation in the Social Sciences." In Theories of History, op. cit., 503–514.

Weber, Max. Grundriss der Sozialökonomik—III Abt: Wirtschaft und Gesellschaft. Tübingen: Mohr, 1925. Part I edited and translated by Talcott Parsons and A. M. Henderson (with introduction by Parsons) as Theory of Social and Economic Organization. New York: Oxford University Press, 1947.

Wolin, Sheldon S. Politics and Vision. Boston: Little, Brown, 1960.

Stanley I. Benn (1967)

Society

LINGUISTIC ORIGINS

SOCIETY VERSUS COMMUNITY

SOCIETY VERSUS THE STATE

THEORIES OF SOCIETY

CRITICISMS OF THE CONCEPT

BIBLIOGRAPHY

A society is a system for facilitating interdependent social relationships according to the values, norms, and ideologies of a shared culture while, at the same time, providing sanctions against individuals who engage in what are seen as antisocial behaviors. Among the primates, humans are unique in their capacity to develop large-scale systems of interdependence by means of culturally transmitted, group-level social systems; in other primate species, cooperation is generally limited to relatives, there is little division of labor, there is little or no social cooperation to care for the sick or wounded, and there are no formal social mechanisms (let alone cultural norms) to stop dominant males and females from taking whatever they wish from weaker members of their group.

As the term is generally understood in sociology as well as in commonsense usage, a society is assumed to have three fundamental characteristics: (1) it is bounded by readily discernible territorial borders; (2) it is structurally and culturally distinctive; and (3) it possesses an objective existence that is independent of the wills or actions of individuals.

Generally (if problematically), a society’s boundaries are assumed to be those of a nation: Thus we speak of “Canadian society” versus “American society.” Moreover, the boundaries of all of a society’s institutions, including economics, kinship, and religion, as well as politics, are assumed to be roughly coterminous. A society is not hermetically sealed from others, of course; every day, thousands of Americans and Canadians cross the U.S.-Canada border, and U.S.-Canadian trade is a vital component of the economies of both countries. Still, the fact that a society is essentially a culturally mediated system for facilitating interdependence means that, in principle, such relationships are more easily undertaken within the society rather than with outsiders. At the same time, it is clear that, with the advent and gathering momentum of globalization, a global society is emerging that is characterized, in part, by the formation of mutually beneficial social structures of unprecedented scope and size, including a new international division of labor in manufacturing.

Each society is unique in the way its various components have been altered and adapted so that they can be integrated with each other. Canada’s system of parliamentary democracy is modeled after the British system; however, it has had to adapt to the existence within Canada of a large, French-speaking, and potentially separatist regional minority, centered in Quebec. In part to address the legitimate language discrimination grievances that fuel Quebec separatism, the Canadian system has moved away from the British model toward that of a constitutional democracy with enumerated rights for French speakers. Despite their internal differences, the members of a society are aware of their society’s distinctiveness and their vast store of shared experience, and this awareness informs their identity. When asked what is important or very important to their identity, many Canadians mention language, but nearly all of them stress the uniqueness of their society and their country’s unique historical experience.

Society has an objective existence that precedes the individuals who live within it, exists independent of their will and subjective perception, and constrains their thought, beliefs, and behavior. This is so because a society consists not only of one-to-one relationships, which to some extent can be negotiated and altered, but also of organizations (such as courts, schools, legislatures, and hospitals) that possess vastly greater power and resources than any individual could muster. In addition, the members of a society are affected by collective outcomes of one-to-one relationships, such as economic recessions and depressions, which again are beyond the capacity of individuals to control.

Taken together, these assumptions argue strongly for a social science that seeks social explanations for social phenomena, and these assumptions collectively define what might be termed the classical sociological perspective (c. 1880s to 1960s). At the same time, each assumption is problematic. Contemporary sociology examines these assumptions critically and asks whether they can be shown to apply empirically.

LINGUISTIC ORIGINS

The English word society has its origins in the Indo-European sek^w_1, “to follow,” from which derives the Latin societas, “partnership, fellowship, association, alliance”— that is, followers of a common, mutual interest or common ideal. In line with its Latin origins, the English word can be applied not only to collective historical formations such as “Canadian society,” but also to de novo associations that are deliberately created to provide mutual benefit, such as professional societies or mutual assistance societies. In popular usage, society is sometimes intended to refer to a leisured, cultured, wealthy, and fashionable elite (“high society”).

The word society can be used scientifically only with caution and critical reflection. It connotes systems of mutually beneficial relationships into which individuals, perceiving the benefits, freely engage. Whether social interdependence is indeed mutually beneficial, let alone entered into freely, is an empirical question.

SOCIETY VERSUS COMMUNITY

All modern societies are capable of creating large-scale structures that facilitate interdependence, such as markets and the division of labor. The resulting structure extends to communities within the society, but more importantly, it also draws into its web of interdependence people who have never met each other and never will. As traditionally defined, a community is a group, such as a neighborhood or the congregation of a synagogue, that is characterized by face-to-face interaction in the context of shared local customs and traditions. As understood in classical sociology, communities are necessarily limited both in population and geographic extent because they depend on face-to-face interaction (rather than large-scale interdependence) as a means of achieving group solidarity,

In classical sociology, the modern distinction between society and community owes much to Ferdinand Tönnies (1855–1936), who redefined two German words to capture the distinction. Gemeinschaft (community) and Gesellschaft (society). In the Gemeinschaft, people are held together by organic ties and communal ideology; in the Gesellschaft, social relations are impersonal and based on a perception of mutual interest. Tönnies believed, pessimistically, that Gesellschaft would obliterate the remnants of Gemeinschaft, to the detriment of the human social experience.

Today, most sociologists accept that communities arise, not necessarily from face-to-face interaction, but rather from shared meanings. Because they are capable of promulgating shared meanings on an unprecedented scale, new communication and media technologies (including newspapers, motion pictures, radio, television, and computer-based communications) are capable of creating communities that vastly transcend the limits of face-to-face interaction.

SOCIETY VERSUS THE STATE

In contemporary usage, a society’s boundaries are frequently assumed to be the same as that of the nation-state with which it is equated, a fact that testifies to the growing ability of states during the past two centuries to circumscribe the sphere of social relationships in which their subjects engage. It should be noted, however, that the concept of society is by no means synonymous with the concept of a state. A state is a political formation that is fundamentally concerned with the acquisition, use, and protection of power. In contrast, the term society refers to all the culturally mediated, patterned forms of social interaction, including political interaction, that create the conditions for interdependence among a society’s members.

The term civil society is often used to differentiate between the state and society. Classically, the term refers to a zone of public social interaction that is positioned between the state, on the one hand, and the private lives of individuals and families, on the other. It consists of a variety of public but nongovernmental institutions and organizations such as voluntary associations, clubs, youth organizations, mutual benefit societies, community organizations, coffeehouses, charities, trade unions, social movements, and media such as newspapers. In a prosperous society, it is assumed, civil society is vibrant.

One of the most crucial functions of civil society lies in its capacity to foster the public sphere, a zone of public social communication in which free, open, rational, and critical conversation can take place concerning the proper ends of society—and, especially, whether the state’s policies are serving those ends. For some theorists, especially Jürgen Habermas, a healthy public sphere is a vital component of democratic self-governance.

THEORIES OF SOCIETY

It is possible to find antecedents of the society concept in classical Greek philosophy and, especially, in the work of the Islamic social historian Ibn Khaldun (1332–1406); however, the concept of society as it was understood in classical sociology is generally traced to the mid-nineteenth-century work of Auguste Comte (1798–1857), who is also regarded as the founder of sociology, the English social philosopher Herbert Spencer (1820–1903), and especially Émile Durkheim (1858–1917).

Observing what Durkheim took to be the decline of communities held together by religion and tradition, the anonymity of an increasingly urbanized society, and the prospect of endemic conflict caused by the increasingly violent confrontation between capital and labor, he asked whether modern societies possessed a core of common sympathies that could serve the integrative function formerly provided by rural folk communities and traditional cultures. Of crucial concern to Durkheim was the increasing division of labor generated by urbanization and industrialization. To the cynics of the time, the widening gulf between capital and labor presaged the collapse of social solidarity and, ultimately, the end of European civilization; for example, Karl Marx (1818–1883) believed that the conflict between capital and labor testified to a fundamental contradiction in capitalist society that would inevitably result in revolution, peaceful or otherwise. Yet Durkheim had read Comte and Spencer, and was able to counter this view with the organic analogy, which interprets the various components of society as if they were organs in a body: Each of them contributes, in its own differentiated way, to the mutual benefit that stems from their cooperation.

From this analogy, Durkheim went on to argue that the widening division of labor in industrial society did not necessarily raise the specter of social disintegration. On the contrary, Durkheim argued, to the extent that society is understood as an interdependence-fostering structure, the widening scale and scope of industrializing societies would require a corresponding intensification of new modes of social differentiation to serve as the foundation for subsequent, mutually beneficial interdependence. In addition, Durkheim argued that, despite the apparently widening gulf between capital and labor, there still existed enough shared culture and shared identity to overcome the divisiveness seemingly inherent in the new industrial economies. The key, Durkheim argued, lies in recognizing that shared culture and shared identity are not causal factors in themselves, but rather epiphenomena that result from sustained, mutually beneficial, and socially structured interaction. For this reason, Durkheim did not doubt that industrial societies would generate cultural and moral orders capable of social integration on an unprecedented scale, and history has vindicated his prediction.

Durkheim’s understanding of society was informed by likening its constituent elements to an advanced, highly differentiated organism. Scientific and technological advances in the twentieth century made new metaphors available to sociological theorists. Drawing on the emerging fields of cybernetics and systems theory, in the 1930s American sociologist Talcott Parsons (1902–1979) depicted the interdependence of social phenomena in terms of a hierarchy of intercoupled systems and subsystems. Niklas Luhmann (1927–1998), a student of Parsons, drawing on chaos theory, depicted society as a complex, self-organizing system.

Beginning in earnest in the 1960s, sociologists revisited and often criticized or rejected the core assumptions of Durkheimian sociology, often adopting new metaphors to capture their perspectives. With the rise of symbolic interactionism, ethnomethodology, and particularly the work of Erving Goffman (1922–1982), society could be understood as a stage on which performers create and shape social reality. Drawing increasingly on resource mobilization theory, work on social movements suggested that society is like a game in which teams compete with each other, both to acquire necessary economic, social, and political resources and also to frame their activities symbolically in a winning way. As Marxist perspectives found their way into universities in the 1960s, society came to be seen as a battle between social classes with fundamentally opposed interests. Still, rational action theorists, such as James Coleman (1926–1995), depicted society as an economy in which actors develop elaborate networks as they attempt to maximize their self-interest.

Influenced by developments in semiotics and French literary criticism, some postmodern sociologists have likened society to a battle between contending texts or a discourse of signs; others have argued that capitalism has so infected our consciousness that virtually all social activities can be understood by comparing them to producers and consumers in a media-driven marketplace. The production of new analogies shows no sign of abating; for example, society has recently been compared to a restaurant menu, a theme park, a collection of machines, and a set of warring tribes.

CRITICISMS OF THE CONCEPT

Criticisms of the classical concept of society focus on its several problematic aspects, including the assumptions that societies are neatly bounded, that the interdependence fostered by social relationships is mutually beneficial, that society has an objective existence, and that meaning and affect are mere epiphenomena of social relations.

Until recently, sociologists have paid little attention to the problems created by uncritical assumptions regarding a society’s boundedness. To the extent that it is meaningful to talk about “Canadian society,” for example, it is because Canadian society constitutes a field of social interaction within which Canadians are more likely to interact with each other than with outsiders. Yet, in the context of globalization, Canadians will increasingly interact with foreigners; at the same time, it is clear that Quebec could be seen as a society within a society. For some critics, sociology’s willingness to equate societies with nations shows that the discipline has made an uncritical accommodation to nationalist ideology. New directions in sociological theory employ spatial and ecological analogies to tackle the boundedness problem; the boundaries of social interaction are seen as a matter to be determined by empirical investigation rather than facile assumption. In addition, cultural sociologists are developing new approaches for understanding the dynamics of multicultural societies.

At the core of the concept of society is an assumption that amounts to a quid pro quo: By giving up the opportunity to pursue private interest without constraint, people take part in social relations that are, in the end, mutually beneficial. Still, it is obvious that many social relations are founded on asymmetries of power, and result in concomitantly unequal distributions of benefits. Critical sociologists argue that the quid pro quo concept masks asymmetries of power, which are, in their view, a key component of all or nearly all of society’s structures and institutions.

Sociologists readily assume that society has an objective existence that can be scientifically studied, even though there is no physical object in the world that one can point to and say, “That is a society.” Within sociology, a field called symbolic interactionism begins by rejecting the concept that a society has an objective existence that determines the way individuals behave. In contrast, people are seen to act according to the meanings they ascribe to situations. These meanings are learned by engaging in social relations. Action arises as individuals interpret situations in light of the meanings they have learned. Although symbolic interactionism has been influential, most sociologists believe that societies are quite capable of placing people into situations in which an actor’s interpretation of the situation is not the sole determinant of social outcomes. People who live in African American slum communities, for example, interpret their situation in differing ways, but this fact has little effect on the overriding social toxicity of these racially isolated neighborhoods. Still, symbolic interactionism served to alert sociology to the need to take meaning and affect seriously and, in so doing, has contributed to the rise of cultural sociology, which is arguably the most important development within sociology to have taken place in a century. In classical sociology, meaning and affect were seen as the outcome of social relationships rather than their cause. Today’s cultural sociology (e.g., Alexander 2003) shares with symbolic interactionism a commitment to taking meaning and affect seriously; however, it also recognizes that some social structures are indeed independent of individual will and are unaffected by the meanings people ascribe to them. Cultural sociology views social relations as the outcome of processes in which meaning, affect, and social forces interplay in ways that must be determined empirically rather than by theoretical fiat.

SEE ALSO Comte, Auguste; Cooperation; Critical Theory; Durkheim, Émile; Ethnicity; Ethnomusicology; Functionalism; Gemeinschaft and Gesellschaft; Gender; Goffman, Erving; Habermas, Jürgen; Interactionism, Symbolic; Marxism; Mexican Americans; Mills, C. Wright; Parsons, Talcott; Postmodernism; Public Sphere; Race; Semiotics; Separatism; Social Statics; Social Structure; Social System; Social Theory; Sociology; Sociology, Latin American; Sociology, Parsonian; Sociology, Post-Parsonian American; Sociology, Urban; Spencer, Herbert; State, The; Structuralism

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Alexander, Jeffrey C. 2003. The Meanings of Social Life: A Cultural Sociology. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press.

Blumer, Herbert. 1986. Symbolic Interactionism. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Durkheim, Émile. 1933. The Division of Labor in Society. New York: Free Press.

Tönnies, Ferdinand. 1957. Community & Society. Trans. and ed. Charles P. Loomis. East Lansing: Michigan State University Press.

Bryan Pfaffenberger