ABSTRACT
Society—any society—for our purposes must be constituted of a plurality of human individuals or persons who in fact co-operate and by this co-operation itself become elements in a structure or pattern. Social relations, the relations between persons, are not external and mechanical but intimate and organic. Members of a society do communicate one with another, act together and feel together. The social structure or the pattern of such a society consists of the customarily defined relations between clans, i.e., between clansmen, together with similarly defined relations between functionally distinguished classes of persons. Marxists of course contend that the economic pattern ultimately determines the whole structure of a society. In the meantime each society has its own world of knowledge and is responsible for its own conceptual reconstruction of reality.
