The vexatious fact of society

Social reality is unlike any other because of its human constitution. It is different from natural reality whose defining feature is self-subsistence: for its existence does not depend upon us, a fact which is not compromised by our human ability to intervene in the world of nature and change it. Society is more different still from transcendental reality, where divinity is both self-subsistent and unalterable at our behest; qualities which are not contravened by responsiveness to human intercession. The nascent ‘social sciences’ had to confront this entity, society, and deal conceptually with its three unique characteristics: first, that it is inseparable from its human components because the very existence of society depends in some way upon our activities; second, that society is characteristically transformable; it has no immutable form or even preferred state – it is like nothing but itself, and what precisely it is like at any time depends upon human doings and their consequences; third, however, neither are we immutable as social agents, for what we are and what we do as social beings are also affected by the society in which we live and by our very efforts to transform it. Necessarily then, the problem of the relationship between individual and society

was the central sociological problem from the beginning. The vexatious task of understanding the linkage between ‘structure and agency’ will always retain this centrality because it derives from what society intrinsically is. Nor is this problem confined to those explicitly studying society, for each human being is confronted by it every day of their social life. An inescapable part of our inescapably social condition is to be aware of its constraints, sanctions and restrictions on our ambitions – be they for good or for evil. Equally,we acknowledge certain social blessings such as medication, transportation and education: without their enablements our lives and hopes would both be vastly more circumscribed. At the same time, an inalienable part of our human condition is the feeling of freedom: we are ‘sovereign artificers’ responsible for our own destinies and capable of remaking our social environment to befit human habitation. This book begins by accepting that such ambivalence in the daily experience of ordinary people is fully authentic. Its authenticity does not derive from viewing subjective experiences as self-veridical. By themselves, the strength of our feelings is never a guarantee of their veracity: our certitudes are poor guides to certainty. Instead, this ambivalence is a real and defining feature of a human being who is also a social being. We are simultaneously free and constrained and we also

have some awareness of it. The former derives from the nature of social reality; the latter from human nature’s reflexivity. Together they generate an authentic (if imperfect) reflection upon the human condition in society. It is therefore the credo of this book that the adequacy of social theorizing fundamentally turns on its ability to recognize and reconcile these two aspects of lived social reality. Thus we would betray ourselves, as well as our readers, by offering any form of

social scientism with ‘laws’ which are held to be unaffected by the uses and abuses we make of our freedoms, for this renders moral responsibility meaningless, political action worthless and self-reflection pointless. Equally, we delude one another by the pretence that society is simply what we choose to make it andmake of it, now or in any generation, for generically ‘society’ is that which nobody wants in exactly the form they find it and yet it resists both individual and collective efforts at transformation – not necessarily by remaining unchanged but by altering to become something else which still conforms to no one’s ideal. From the beginning, however, betrayal and delusion have been common practice

when approaching the vexatious fact of society and its human constitution. The earliest attempts to conceptualize this unique entity produced two divergent social ontologies which, in changing guises, have been with us ever since. Both evade the encounter with the vexatious ambivalence of social reality. They can be epitomized as the ‘science of society’ versus the ‘study of wo/man’: if the former denies the significance of society’s human constitution, the latter nullifies the importance of what is, has been and will be constituted as society in the process of human interaction. The former is a denial that the real powers of human beings are indispensable to making society what it is. The latter withholds real powers from society by reducing its properties to the projects of its makers. Both thus endorse epiphenomenalism by holding respectively that agency or structure are inert and dependent variables. In this way they turn the vexatious into something tractable, but only by evading the uniqueness of social reality and treating it as something other than itself – by making it exclusively super-ordinate to people or utterly subordinate to them. Furthermore, what society is held to be also affects how it is studied. Thus one

of the central theses of this book is that any given social ontology has implications for the explanatory methodology which is (and in consistency can be) endorsed. This connection could not have been clearer in the works of the founding fathers. We need to remain equally clear that this is a necessary linkage – and to uphold it. The tripartite link between ontology, methodology and practical social theory is the leitmotif of this whole text. Thus early protagonists of the ‘Science of Society’ began from an uncomprom-

ising ontological position which stated that there was indeed a Social Whole whose sui generis properties constituted the object of study. Thus, for Comte, ‘Society is no more decomposable into individuals than a geometrical surface is into lines, or a line into points.’1 Similarly, for Durkheim: ‘Whenever certain elements combine, and thereby produce, by the fact of their combination, new phenomena, it is plain that these new phenomena reside not in the original elements but in the totality formed by their union.’2 Here ‘Society’ denoted a totality which is not reducible and this

therefore meant that the explanatory programmemust be anti-reductionist in nature. Hence, the methodological injunction to explain one ‘social fact’ only by reference to another ‘social fact’. Correct explanations could not be reductionist – that is, cast in terms of individual psychology – because the nature of social reality is held to be such that the necessary concepts could never be statements about individual people, whether for purposes of description or explanation. Consequently, practical social theories were advanced in exclusively holistic terms (explaining suicide rates by degrees of social integration) and without reference to individual human motivation. This, then, was a direct and early statement of what I term ‘Downwards Conflation’3 in social theorizing, where the ‘solution’ to the problem of structure and agency consists in rendering the latter epiphenomenal. Individuals are held to be ‘indeterminate material’, which is unilaterally moulded by society, whose holistic properties have complete monopoly over causation, and which therefore operate in a unilateral and downwardmanner. The contrary standpoint is represented by Individualism. Those who conceived of their task as the ‘study of wo/man’ insisted that social

reality consisted of nothing but individuals and their activities. Thus, for J.S. Mill,

Men in a state of society are still men. Their actions and passions are obedient to the laws of individual human nature. Men are not, when brought together, converted into another kind of substance with different properties, as hydrogen and oxygen are different from water.4