ABSTRACT
The narrative and hermeneutic systems of European modernity tended to talk of social relationships only very rarely. Indeed, where those relationships were forced to be open to some reflexivity, they were more often than not identified as quite mundane and virtually beneath the dignity of the exercise of freedom. Instead, social relationships were pulled together and elevated to a great height by the concept and the image of society. In the conditions of European modernity, the routine daily life of women and men was fairly dismissively given less importance than the grand sweep of a more fundamental and a more significant entity called society. It was society itself which became quickly associated with all positive values (because society was intrinsically reflexive) as opposed to what was consequently held to be the atavism, or just plain badness, of the natural and of nature. Indeed, the conditions and the practices of both the garden and the allotment situations of modernity were quite impossible without the assumption of a distinctive milieu called society.
