ABSTRACT
This chapter argues that societies are irreducible to people and discusses a model of their connection. It disputes that social forms are a necessary condition for any intentional act, that their pre-existence establishes their autonomy as possible objects of scientific investigation and that their causal power establishes their reality. The transformational model of social activity developed here will be seen to entail a relational conception of the subject-matter of social science. The necessary pre-existence of social forms suggests a radically different conception of social activity from that which typically informs discussion of the society/person connection. The chapter considers the claims of the naive position, which may be dubbed social atomism, or rather of its epistemological manifestation in the form of methodological individualism, to provide a framework for the explanation of social phenomena. The real methodological import of the absence of closed systems is strictly limited: it is that the social sciences are denied decisive test situations for their theories.
