ABSTRACT
This chapter argues that against any residual social understandings which retain some conceptions of the natural/ universal, rather than the social/specific, gualities of the social. The state regulates forms of social identity through homogeneous categories which mobilise and inflect the repertoires of a more general moral regulation and gear with relations of production more narrowly conceived. Different analyses of social differences begin with the material social classifications of race, gender, location, religion, age, occupation, ‘grading’ and so on. The project of sovereign individualism at the heart of the ideology of bourgeois society has had determinate consequences within sociology and Marxism-socialism. Although sociology, as it were, epistemologically sets itself against any biologism there is much slippage here which enables the return of the ‘natural’ in other guises. The text explicitly argues that state social policies are neither homogeneous in their gearing with relations of production nor uniform in their identifying and stereotyping.
