Society is an intimation or an idealization rather than a social structure.
What is a society? It appears to be a group of people, like a tribe or a nation state or a civilization, which is self sufficient in that it provides in its institutions all that is required to provide a distinctive way of life for a people. The trouble is, though, that these entities are not self-sufficient, as when the Arab civilization has to sell oil and is beset by the inroads of Western civilization and so grapple with what is essentially Islamic, becoming more and more like a set of nation states. And, more grandly, what is society in itself, that to be understood as a simile for the sea in which the fish swim? What is that overarching but central and essential object for sociologists to study? Take note that in looking at that large item a choice is being made between examining the thing as a whole rather than the basic building blocks out of which it is made. Biologists can look at living bodies for the various functions they undertake, such as respiration and digestion and reproduction, but can also look at the life of the cell and so see that is the real meaning of biological life. Similarly, sociologists can study the role or the norm as the building block which animates society as that appears to be the overwhelming and encompassing social entity which is indispensable to mind.
A usual and workable idea of society is that it is the intersection of all the social forces that are in play within a society and so make people familiar with it. So a society is made up of social class and ethnicity and institutions of politics and religion and the mass media, and everybody responds to these structures and so are in society whether or not people think of society as an object in itself. Society recognizes us even if we don’t recognize it. But that is the rub. People can recognize they have familial obligations and interests without thinking themselves trapped or maybe safe within its strictures. Society is therefore the opposite or the residual of all the actual relations people have, in which case sociology sets society in opposition to the individual, ever diminishing the ability to act as individuals as when political sociologists ever more restricted the voter to make an independent rational decision about who to select by showing that voting was contingent on social class or education and less and less on beliefs or doctrines.The opposition between the individual and society as the two negations of one another is also manifested in psychological life when people are unhinged from their self directed mental decision making by the mind being invested and overcome with totalitarian or cultish thinking or by the pernicious effects of social media. It is always possible to find the pernicious cause that leads the individual to become absorbed by society, as happened when people thought that comic books were the poison that destroyed reason before comic books became regarded as an art form.
So all that society means is that it is the autonomous area outside the individual that allows people to go to the well for water, which is not experienced as society even if other forces, such as social order and some technology, are necessary for that everyday activity to transpire as what it will for reasons of no choosing, just its own internal dynamics, rather than a distinctive shining object of its own. If you are thinking of politics or the mass media or the rise of inflation, you are not thinking of society per se. Similarly, thinking of society as the intersection of functional prerequisites also begs the question of what society is. That is because it shifts the question of society from what it is to what are its needs, not providing what is palpable about it, as happens when life is said to start or end when the heart is beating, which is just an indication of the beginning or cessation of life which is different from the experience of being alive which for people means having consciousness. So the question for society isn’t what makes society tick but what makes it recognizable as society, as some essential property of the human condition.
Dealing with this matter requires slightly altering the nature of the question. The question is no longer what society is but the question of when it comes into view as a concept. When do people notice when there is society? That makes it an empirical question in that you can compare whether society is present or not on a particular occasion rather than treat “society” as a necessary or axiomatic matter, a term akin to Kant’s idea of “should”, a word he believed to be inevitable. So, in that case, “society” is like “the universe”, a word for everything, or “infinity”, which is unending numeration because you can propose the idea of that. Rather, “society” is a specific object whose absence can be noticed as an experience. There is also anarchy and there is just going to get water from the well, an everyday experience that does not require or is experienced as society even though getting water does depend on some degree of social order and some level of technology.
Moreover, society as an existent which is just either there or not there rather than a concept that is always an approximation or an indication is consistent with the Durkheimian idea that there always has to be a society as is evidenced by funeral ceremonies or the normative structure. Yes, funerals may well be a tribute to the eternality of society in that it lasts beyond the life of a person, but after the funeral ceremony and the meal afterwards, people go back to life without thinking all that often about how they are enmeshed in society. Here are some degrees of society as a level of societal embracement, though it is a set of rough approximations based on the presence or absence of features rather than a single yardstick of society.
A war is a clear appearance of and an actualization of society. People within a nation can all feel compelled to at least assert that they are in support of a nation’s actions and to express some engagement in its efforts. We are all Germans or Brits or stigmatized as war malingerers or even traitors. People are aware ever since the French Revolution that the nation is mobilized and to be thought of as a collective entity dedicated to the nation’s war aims that since the American Civil War are existential in that the civilization in which they exist is now questionable. Moreover, wars do not just make people think about their nations as societies; they organize so as to carry out warfare even if it meant in World War II spending endless amounts of money and using War Bonds only to slake inflation rather than to in fact pay for the armaments that were paid for by the government by going into deeper and deeper debt. Governments build tremendous flotillas of ships and organizations of soldiers so as to confront and destroy navies and armies comparably equipped by the other side, as if the peoples and materiel were potlatches in a Kwakiutl society whose purpose is destruction, except in warfare the purpose is to preserve the society, one theme in the Cold War being “Better dead than Red”. The spirit can be high and the feelings noble and the mobilized forces magnificent despite the slaughter that will entail and so people can feel that they were of the “Greatest Generation''. So the grandeur of war is identified with society itself, other things, like making a living or writing a book, as pale by comparison. No wonder people love war movies however awful they feel over having come back from war.
Politics, like war, is a social structure that also indicates society without giving it its definition. Lipset said more than fifty years ago that politics accomplished its goal of making revolution unnecessary in that elections provide a way to have a transition of power without the need for violence. But that is a functional argument for the relationship of war and politics. Looking at the experience of democratic politics allows for the ways electoral politics, like war, intimates the sense of a society. People recognize themselves as fellow citizens participating in decision making of a collectivity, a government as such, and by inference for the nation for which the government presides. They consult the state of the society as the basis for deciding who is worthy to be elected as the designee of the people. As the public opinion pollsters ask, are things getting better or worse? That may not be an informative query, but it does associate incumbents and opponents with the state of society as a whole. People actually do enact their decisions about candidates and so these events are performative rather than merely opinions. Moreover, the voters are not required to have any special qualification or expertise to allow them to engage in balloting, only recently a requirement of an identity card so that they can exercise the franchise. The ritual of participation in an election enhances the sense of common participation and vies with religion and ethnicity as a society that weds its membership into a larger corporate entity, as each one sorts out the state of the forces that are at play in the nation lor political jurisdiction. A feeling of patriotism ensues, just as happens when a war invokes similar feelings in a populace. A nation acts, and that is taken to mean a society acts, its parts self-consciously interrelated to one another.
Another highly visible appreciations of society are some kinds of ethnicity even though many ethnic affiliations have little or occasional salience and so do not engage in the speculations about society, or because its cultural products are subject to the marketplace rather than because it ought to exist for its own sake, which is the view native ety, as happens with Americans who have to engage ingeneological research to find out that they were long ago came from France or Germany, or have medium salience, in having Greek or Turkish heritage, as when a Greek contributes to the Dukakis campaign or feels slighted when people recall the Armenian genocide. Some ethnicities, however, are more like Jews and African-Americans in that their ethnicity is always or nearly always salient and that the social world that surrounds them deals with all aspects of social life, not just their particular customs and beliefs, and so is an approximation of what it means to be a society. So Woody Allan jokes that every inflection by a gentile is given to be a comment on Jews and African Americans are often understood as the basic issue in the history of America, slave labor financing American prosperity, rather than one particular group within the dynamics of America and African Americans playing a small part of some of those, as in the Westward Expansion. But to presume or hint that an ethnic group is a society it makes demands for self sufficiency and culture, the ethnicity a sufficient reason for being because it is, after all, a or the society itself, rather than from alien influence.because, for example, it has an interest in politics but is not the main issue in politics, or treats its culture as something essential in itself rather than subject to the marketplace, Native Americans wanting their cultures subsidized and protected from alien influence.
Most ethnic groups and tribes are absorbed into a larger social structure, such as the nation state and so are no longer societies in themselves. That happened to the Gascoynes in France and to a shift from Arab to national identity in Saudi Arabia. But some groups insist on remaining distinctive societies, the Jews malingering for four thousand years and the African Americans fighting among themselves not whether they are a distinctive people, but what are the terms they can make with their others without losing their distinctiveness as a society.
Another structure in society that makes society in itself highly visible as overarching and everywhere apparent aspect of that encompassing entity called “society” is courtship despite the fact that courtship seems a very personal thing, just the opposite of society in that in the modern world courtship involves people finding a spark of personal engagement because of their particular qualities rather than arranged meetings presided over by elders who think more of an economic and social match of a couple rather than their personal affinities. Modern courtship involves the most personal of feelings, both sexual and individually peculiar, and so invokes the individual rather than the societal. But that is not the case even on cursory inspection. People engaged in dating behavior that is serious minded in that there is the contemplation of long term relationships rather than one night stands or brief vacation like interludes, where people just pursue their pleasures, are repeatedly engaged in judging whether one’s advances to the other party are thought to be too forward or too reticent so as not to give offense to the other party. How far does one go either sexually or in unburdening one's secrets? Too much can offend and too little can seem prim or stiff and cold. People are, therefore, highly aware of those issues concerning norms and customs to be negotiated and yet these are constantly in alteration in the course of short as well as longer times, some people assuring themselves that the rules of courtship are millenia old and others sure that dating practices are as current as what their friends or recent books tell them they are or winging it on their own, navigating without instruction but following the zeitgeist, which is another name for “society”. You rely on society because there is nothing else that is sure as reliable. And yet people will engage in courting again and again until they think they get it right and think themselves having failed if they do not meet society's engrossed personal decision making. Some people may find it easy to swim within the currents of courtship or are more perfunctory in making decisions and so being rid of the distress, but most people think their single or multiple courtships to have been a great adventure where one tried to be brave, forward and decisive in making a decision.
The transition between courtship and marriage is a profound one even if the time is short because it means removing from the tempestuous troubles of social pairing into tube steadier waters of family, which is no longer centered on society but in the institution of family, which some people regard as so strong a matter of absorbed interest and fidelity that some would think the family the only institution, work and culture just exigencies or pastimes when the meaning of life was sitting at tube kitchen table making small talk or nothing at all. A married woman once told me that she was grateful to be settled with her husband, soon to have a child, and no longer beset by whether or not to sleep with her boyfriend. That might have been a time when initial sex was regarded as a big deal, but there are surely other aspects of society that might lead to anxiety for young couples, such as whether to live together or to alter a career or to move elsewhere. Decisions, decisions, ever to be made or rejected and reconsidered for a lifetime. Sometimes people decide, in courtship, that there is a mismatch in social abilities or in career ambitions. Courtship is exhausting however are its pleasures because so many and deep are the fissures of people as they are guided by the uncertain trumpets of society.
Is a particular match a good match? Some people are out of their league and some are good enough and everybody has to decide which qualities are discrediting, whether snoring or a mole or a religious or political belief or whether a person has decent table manners. Judging someone a good match requires assessing all the social orders so as to judge people palatable and so presumes society as the compendium of all the social orders. A black woman fifty years ago is stigmatized as a possible spouse for a white man but is compensated by charm and clarity of purpose and good education. Everything is in the mix and that is why it can be said that society as a whole is in operation.
Another social structure that seems very personal but presents intimations of society is the relationship between parents and children. For millennia and before, having children was thought to be inevitable or functional. Children were born of the consequence of having sex and the contraceptive pill was developed only in the Sixties even if other forms of contraception such as withdrawal are as old as the Bible. Children were also a retirement plan for old people and why can’t Lear see that it is time to turn control to his children.Buj the modern age suggests another kind of reasoning about the relation of parents to children in that parents can see themselves as the stewards of society by raising their children and that is a very satisfying experience despite the financial and psychological difficulties that having children presents. However humble a family may be, parents can present themselves and in fact know more about how to manage activities in social life more than they can their children and it doesn’t just have to do with the practical tasks of teaching them how to tio tie their shoelaces or brush their teeth or how to say their prayers or even how to role model themselves as responsible breadwinners or nurturing mothers, or advocating the beliefs the children will culturally inherit. It is by parents having a lively sense of that amorphous concept of society, what with all its gives and takes, so that the child can pick up the rudiments of however malleable society works. A child learns to be protective of those considered needing protection because of frailty or wary of people who might be sources of danger. Some self protection may seem inevitable and rational and so not need to be taught, but parents can also know what groups of people are suspect and what groups, such as shopkeepers, are to be treated as protectors from harm. The social reality that groups of people are in antagonism is real and so belies the view that people have to learn to hate, but parents can frame the circumstances and load them with meanness so strong then antipathies that these feelings seem innate.
Children in both their earliest and later years have to constantly adjust to their altered circumstances and developing abilities. The Terrible Twos is the year or so when the children express their ability to say “no” and be other than passive about their situations. Preschoolers learn how to communicate with courtesy and ways to behave that award them for those they care to influence and elementary school students are treated as young participants in social life and treated as having moral responsibility. Teengers accomplish a certain degree of autonomy and some private concerns with sexuality and personal ambition. So each of these groups have to shed the previous behavior and adopt the new posture, un learning what has become before, as is the case when pre-teeners know is e that being obedient is a cardinal virtue while getting older means clinging to some independent area of activity, it being a mistake to stay behind and be only an obedient girl or boy however much not long ago it was the basis for praise. How are they to manage these social readjustments?
Parents can help children manage these social adjustments. Parents are not just people, as profound as they are, of being role models their children can emulate or deal with practical matters such as how to ride a bicycle or shave. Parents are also experts on everyday social life and so can tell new people the ropes about how to behave, what are the customs that hold at the moment even if they will change soon enough so that the teenagers can regard their parents as fuddy duddies. They tell their children how to dress but the children know better what is now appropriate dress. But for most of their childhood, children have a sense that parents are greater experts than they are about how to manage the social world.
Moreover, parents get great satisfaction from being able to offer their relative social expertise to their children and, indeed, may be one of the great satisfactions of raising children, given the fact that raising children is so expensive in the modern world and engages such emotional conflict during child rearing, both parents and children finding the other one wanting or limited. As Dr. Spock said, a mother who has a third child can write a book about child care. A father knows how hurtful a son can feel about his breakup with his first love. A parent can tell a child to overcome shyness and meet friends or not deeply hurt if a spelling test bombed-- or whether it is a signal gto shape up and apply oneself. Social wisdom is everywhere available to parents just because they have lived through it and so are mentors, a bit ahead of their wards, however unsophisticated or learned they may be. Everyone is assumed to know how to be a parent because they care about their children. So some parents will say which books teachers should have in their school libraries even if they do not themselves read books because patents have the general oversight of their children and treasure that authority.
But exercising that authority is difficult to manage because the actual social situations to be managed are so various and problematic and ever changing. So parents, however personal is the tie to children, are always on the lookout to society as that place which is constantly in flux and that is outside themselves and their family to guide them. Parents may not know the latest dance steps but still have to decide whether to intervene with regard to drugs, so as to forbid marijana or even cigarettes, or interfere with dating behavior by insisting on seeing a young man when he picks up a daughter to go to a movie, or is it alright for cliques of mixed boys and girls to congregate without parental oversight? What is allowed or not at a particular time in “society”, which is the ever changing context through which people behave?
Full embracement with “society” as a structure rather than an intimation leads to a distortion of the way social life works. That happens with understanding children. “Socialization” is the process whereby children learn to grow up as acceptable adults by learning how to adapt to and incorporate adult beliefs and practices. Children learn what society commends. This is an inaccurate account of what happens to children in that children are not that passive. They do not simply come to conform to what society dictates. Children reject or identify what elements of school, family and church propose, for as far back as when children engage in willfulness, which may be when they cry to have their diapers changed because they feel clammy or shift their positions in the womb, there being a host of alternative forces and this shifting kaleidoscope regarded in shorthand form as the society in which they are placed when in fact it is these various social institutions that have their impact.
As my examples make clear, society is elusive because it is a concept rather than a social force or a social structure. It is whatever is encompassing in social life and it is indicated rather than proven by consulting intimations of the whole ball of social wax so far as people are also limited in that they do engage in particular social forces and their financial reversals and tightened social structures that crowd out addressing society in itself, society like a sun which has to be shielded lest it go blind, which means have no actual recourse in managing the actual structures people manage, which happens when society becomes a word that becomes so encompassing that people cannot be independent actors, which happens in totalitarian times, people blaming utopian and dystopian societies, people’s actions understood as inevitable even if not ordained.
A social force that might seem to intimate society but does not is economic activity, which seems to be and is treated as independent of society and is instead an intrusion into society. During the Great Depression, people blamed themselves for their financial reversals and tightened their belts. In more recent times, people blame politicians for inflation and individuals in that people inevitably followed the recession rather than regarding these as the ebbs and flows of inevitable societal activity. Economic activity is a stab in the back and therefore the enemy of social life, an outside element like a comet that incinerates the world, alien to the ongoing purposes of social activity, which is filled with self conscious people accommodating one another so as to be of mutual benefit and to achieve community even though limited to the parameters of an ethnicity or a nation state and so only indicative of a society, however much after World War II tried to use the United Nations as an instrument for adhering to a declaration of the rights of man, and so invoking society as the concept of the whole. While nations and religions invoke subjective feelings and accommodations and conflicts, the understanding of economic life was understood as remorseless laws independent of the individual consciousness because people followed the rationality of self interest and could do no other. Recent economists try to factor in such measures as “consumer confidence” and so bring social life back into the rational equations, but that makes economic forecasting even less predictable than it otherwise may be and so leaves it as arbitrary, when social life is predictable, people understanding what their roles and futures are like and therefore society to be relied upon even if the concept is not adequately defined or needing to be defined. Society embraces people while the economy disrupts them.
It should be noted that many major sociological theorists have avoided using “society” as a key concept of structure in discussing social life even if textbooks often refer to sociology as “the study of society”, the term “society” originally assigned to commonality, and so meaning associations, lille philanthropic organizations, far short of what is meant by society. Hobbes referred to the mutual dependency of states and populations with the metaphorical term “Leviathan“. Marx thought the mechanism that engendered social life including the nation state and others identified with societies was the means of production, which is sometimes a very complex and always a rational form of organization. Weber looked at status, bureaucracy and religion as the key elements of social life, those originating in prehistoric times but achieving full development in the modern age. Simmel thought social life arose out of the very fact and inherent in the fact of human sociation. Conflict and group affiliation are species of that. It is only the Conservative tradition reaching back to Burke’s invocation of the weight of the memories of everyone and so taken to understand themselves of the past that conjure up the weight of society as the central object of social life, as that is elaborated by de Tocqueviille, Durkheim and Parsons.
While de Tocqueville based American society on the basis of the means of production in that the south had plantations and the north small farms cultivated on stone filled land The last two were thinking of a society of people or clans in isolation could b as reducible to a primary and universal unit found in anthropological societies whereas bands of kinship groups isolated from other peoples could be thought of as societies in that each of them had specific customs. But that is to presume what is primitive is therefore somehow more natural. Yes, indeed, primitive peoples can regard themselves as “the human” or as “everyone” and so a reference to themselves as a society, but that is a misapplication of the more modern term in that the primitive peoples do not think of their customs as the creatures of a society but just as the way things have to be. Only literate societies treat customs as peculiar to and generated by and in society.The key question is not whether society does or does not exist. It is whether it is a natural order of social life or whether it emerges as an idealization of the various ways the various social structures interface with one another, literate and modern society no less real than its predecessors, ever elaborating new structures,such as international law or social media, that being a fundamental reality of social life.