ABSTRACT
With superb intuition, Aristotle wrote: “The proof that the state [society] . . . is a creation prior to the individual is that the individual, when isolated is not selfsufficing” (Politics 1253a, 1947). In other words, the social comes first. But Aristotelian logic on this question is frequently ignored. This can be explained by the Zeitgeist. We live in an age when the narrative of social influence is muted while the individual, almost entirely loosed from social shaping, is considered self-purposing, self-determining and the sovereign of his or her fate. But, contrary to popular and much academic thinking, the facts are otherwise. If individuals act in a particular way, they do so because of social instruction and social support. If individuals fight bravely or run away as cowards or favor one politics over another or tend to choose one line of work over another, it is because they are socially imbued and socially encouraged. To search for the “individual” is not to encounter an autotelic entity endowed with “agency,” but rather is a quest for the particular history of social training and social support that has shaped a human organism into what we see, namely a thoroughly social actor. It helps to keep in mind that the “individual,” except in the physical sense, is not a fact of Nature, but, rather, a socially-invented notion, a product of a given time, an idea underwritten by a plurality of scholars, the overwhelming number of whom have inherited the idea from other scholars. My aim in this book is to underscore the claim of the social and to contest social science approaches to scientific explanation of human conduct that, oddly and wrongly, dismiss or ignore the social. I propose that social determination “explains” most behaviors by most people most of the time. This means that most people, most of the time, behave the way other people have taught them to behave, rewarded them for behaving that way and punished them for failing to do so. If this were not the case, there could be no society. And when a society changes, it is neither a random event nor the result of personal will, but rather is determined by new prescriptions delivered by newly valorized social sources. To the casual eye it appears as if this were not the case. Within the same society people behave differently from the way others do in what appear to be the same situations. It would seem as if it all depends on who is in the situation, as if “who” is the answer. Forgotten is that whoever “who” may be, he or she is not an autonomous entity, but is behaving according to the specifications, directions
or example of some combination of social sources. Both for collective similarity and individual differences we must look to social origins. From the moment of conception we are in relationship with another being and we depend for survival on that other. After birth, dependency continues, as we come to have increasingly interdependent relationships with others. Strikingly, only through social relations do individuals develop mind and the ability to think (Mead 1934) and only through social relations do we acquire the knowledge, skills and understandings that enable effective participation in the family, community and society. Or not, as when the individual’s social relations are warped, inadequate or malfunctioning. Despite our genes, we largely become what our earliest social relations mold us to become and if we do not follow this course, it is because later social relations, inserting influence of their own, abrogate the mandates of the earlier connections. Through the channel of social relations, the fact of human malleability enables the social production both of the astonishingly similar individuals within different societies and the astonishingly different individuals of the same society. That individuals differ widely from each other by culture, ethnicity, gender and family does not warrant the conclusion of individual determination of differences in conduct. Rather, I argue, it is evidence of the multivalent outcome of the interaction of social forces. No two individuals are socially shaped in exactly the same way. But this is not to say that social influence is therefore nil or minor or incidental or random or any other predicate that would lead us to believe that social effects are scant or unimportant. The other actors who populate our social relational landscape are frequently present in the flesh so that we may directly engage with them, but if the others are not physically present, they reside in memory, from where they may be retrieved and their contributions reviewed and mined. Robinson Crusoe was able to survive on his island because he recalled what he had learned from others at home in London (Mead 1936, p. 381). We are not essentially different from Crusoe.
