The old theoretical agenda

The balance between theory and research in scientific disciplines varies both within and between them over time. There is a division of labour within disciplines between those who concentrate on theory and those who test it out or apply it.

Theory comes first because it needs fewer resources and because it guides the work of the researcher. Historically in sociology it long predates the systematic gathering of data. The origins of the Western theory of society go back to Plato and Aristotle in Athens in the fifth and fourth centuries before Christ. These origins have had far reaching, not to say fateful, consequences.

The Greek philosophers lived in city-states in which the main problem was how to bond a definite group of people into a territorially based community. As a result the long tradition of Western social theory has largely focused on the relation between the citizen and the agency which controls the territory—the state. This has been the core issue even when generalised as the relation of individual to society.

Lewis Morgan, one of the great founders of anthropology through his studies of Native Americans, even dated the division between ancient and modern society to that time. He reasoned that before the Greeks social organisation was based not on territory and residence, but on kinship—who was related to whom. In our time we tend to associate modernity with the territorial nation-state which developed after the sixteenth century in Europe. But its social and political theory drew its inspiration from the Greeks.

Modern theory now speaks of the nation-state rather than the city-state or the Greek ‘polis’, but in each case society, people and state are treated as having the same boundaries. It replicates this ordering within the nation-state. The local community, the source of social order and well-being, becomes the local state with local citizens. This tradition of social theory provided the context for the birth of professional sociology at the end of the nineteenth century. Its origins are non-modern, but the nation-state gave it a specifically modern form.

There are two other traditions which have contested the claim which the nation-state made to set the frame for society. One is often thought of as Christian, but it belongs equally to Jewish and Muslim thought—namely the idea of human society, the potential of any human being to relate to the whole of humankind. These religions are universalistic, even though what often strikes the outsider most is their division of the world into believers and pagans, infidels or gentiles.

The other tradition is very specifically secular and modern. It took off in the eighteenth century as political economy and rapidly developed into economics. This line of thought treats society as an ever-extendable network of exchange of goods and services, a market within which a world-wide division of labour develops.

Therefore each of the main sectors of Western civilisation, state, religion and economy had a theory of society embedded in it, with origins in different times and places. The issue for sociology at the beginning of the twentieth century, then, was whether it could define its own distinct approach to society. In the event, even as it struggled to do so, by the middle of the twentieth century, in both Europe and the United States it was the ancient Greek problem of individual and society which prevailed.

The main reason was that the nation-states and the elites which controlled them had already set the agenda on their own terms in the late nineteenth century. For them society was threatened with revolution or at least disorder and decay. The development of the modern industrial economy had undermined long-standing rural communities and the new working class threatened established state structures. It was these issues which the authorities defined as the social problem and it was to their concerns that sociology responded.

With this prompting sociology in Europe, especially in France and Germany, took the decline of community in the face of an advancing modernity as its central problem. The key text for the next hundred years of theory was written by Ferdinand Tönnies (1855-1936) in 1887. Entitled Community and Association (Gemeinschaft und Gesellschaft) it contrasted two constellations of social relations, the one where people take their membership as a taken-for-granted feature of their existence, the other where they set up a rational organisation. The latter was the key feature of modernity.

Tönnies’ text is probably the most influential and least read classic in sociology. (The closest rival would be Marx’s Capital.) It provided the elementary ideas for the most famous duo in sociological theory, Émile Durkheim in France, who conceived sociology as an aid to the moral renewal of the country, and Max Weber (1864-1920) in Germany, who was deeply troubled by the threat of capitalism to values of all kinds, especially the nation-state.

There was then a nostalgia built into the foundations of European sociological theory which has never disappeared. By contrast the United States initially looked forward to creating a new future. The early sociologists were enthused by the ideas of competitive struggle from both Herbert Spencer and Charles Darwin. The main agenda item for sociology became the assimilation of waves of newcomers from Europe and the freed slaves into a newly created United States. Later the concerns of the Chicago school of sociology were to find new kinds of communal living in the growing conurbations. Its inspiration was the new European sociology, but in this case the Berlin Jewish sociologist Georg Simmel (1858-1918) whose theory made society a cosmopolitan configuration of social relations beyond the boundaries of national states.

Yet there was also a thrust to declare that the future had arrived. By the 1950s the Harvard sociologist Talcott Parsons had produced a new synthesis of European and American theory which conceived the individual-society issue and social order as the problem of integration into the nation-state. In this frame the local community fulfilled a key subordinate function.

To this day sociological theory in the West is dominated by the individual-society issue, often restated as agency and structure, in the context of the loss of past community. Only recently it has produced a popularised political offshoot known as communitarianism which aims to enhance personal responsibility to the community, and thence to the nation-state.

The contemporary problem for theory

This historical background to Western social theory explains why it is inadequate for the conditions of the contemporary world. Globalisation has meant social as well as economic, political and cultural transformation. Globalisation in a social sense means that the globe provides the space and the boundaries for social relations. The individual/nation-state relation is only one of the major forms of social relation, and community only one of the major possibilities of human association. The new social conditions force us to see how narrow the dominant tradition of Western sociological theory has been if we spell out obvious alternatives.

For a start we should distinguish the individual-society relation in general and for humankind from the issue of relations between individuals and particular societies. Then we should distinguish people’s relations with the society to which they are deemed to belong from relations with other societies. Finally we should consider society-society relations.

But ‘society’ in this classification is only a general heading for a multitude of types of social unit. In each case there is a different kind of relation: individual-community, individual-organisation, individual-movement, individual-class, community-organisation, community-class, and so on. These are not empty boxes. Each has given rise to extensive research. It’s just that the theory remains obstinately locked on one variant above all.

These are not paper distinctions. Any manager knows, or should and needs to know, that the workforce, individuals in the organisation, are also individuals in families, that they split into classes, live in communities. Movements too tend to recruit their members from particular backgrounds. It has long been recognised that the Green movement draws its main support from professionals in the public sector.

These multiple reference points then go to the heart of the theoretical problem for sociology which is to provide the propositions which have the maximum scope over time and place for understanding human society in general. Community and association, while broad, are still too narrow in scope. Before Tönnies got to work in Europe, Sumner recognised this in America. ‘Political and social events which occur on one side of the globe now affect the interests of population on the other side of the globe. Forces which come into action in one part of human society rest not until they have reached all human society.’

In fact this unity of human society has always been a lesser theme in social theory as far back as the Greeks. Socrates was reputed to have said he was a citizen of the world. Even then it was subordinated to the theme of political community. It was poetic fate that he was condemned to death by the citizens of Athens.

Transformations of the second half of the twentieth century mean that the globe is now a standard reference point. This accounts for the popularity of the idea of globalisation. The encounters of differing cultures with each other are such that the thrust of sociological work has shifted from community to nation and identity. Each is seen as shifting and non-territorial.

Moreover, ‘the world’ is no longer the West. Cultural encounters are not matters simply of finding ways of tolerating different lifestyles. They involve recognition of differing constellations of social relations. In particular the two major encounters, at least in terms of population size, between China and the West and India and the West, involve two radically different types of society, both from the West and from each other. Each has shown remarkable resilience over two millennia. In each particular social relations are foregrounded.

In China Confucian theory made society an extended family with ruler-subject relations replicating father-son relations, and including marriage, brotherhood and friendship. In India relations between the four historic caste groups depended on mutual obligations which framed both life and death. Before the influence of the modern West neither India nor China conceived of social relations as something to be shaped by the needs of human projects. They were sacred, grounded in the nature of things.

Under conditions of globalisation the agenda for sociological theory in the West is no longer confined to the interests of the nation-state and the local community but extends to the possibility of a frame which will take in India, China, Africa and the rest of the world. But equally globalisation means that those parts of the world may develop their own frames to take in the West! The only concept which is adequate to this task is ‘social relations’.

Before Tönnies Marx had put social relations at the centre of his theory of society and insisted both on the primary importance of the social relations of production and in treating capital as a social relation. Among recent theorists Norbert Elias made the figuration of social relations the centre of his theory, although the state was the most important configuring force. Recently Anthony Giddens has focused on interpersonal relations and in so doing raised the issue of the concept of the pure relation. 8 Nearly all the major contemporary directions in sociology can be presented through the concept of the social relation, and this is how we shall look at theory in this chapter.

But, even with the weight of these theories, there is no natural necessity even today for social relations to be foregrounded in public consciousness as a distinct topic. They can be buried from view, under religion, or economy or work. In the West, unlike the civilisations of China and India where they are explicitly safeguarded, social relations are externalities, casualties of economic growth.

When social relations are brought to the surface this is in pursuit of a radical alternative to an existing order of society. This is what happened in the French Revolution with its slogan ‘Liberty, equality

and fraternity’. Each of these can represent an ideal to strive for. They are equally abstract expressions for the formal relational properties of society. We shall return to this later.

The unit of analysis

When the study of society came to be thought of as a distinct science and not just part of a general theory of humankind, one of the ideas it had to assimilate was the notion of an elementary unit on which to base research. This is an immensely powerful idea, going back to the Greeks who conceived of it as the atom. It is an idea which precedes research. It drives science to trying to find something evermore elementary. So what is now called the atom in physics has long since been disaggregated into even more elementary particles. At the same time the combinations of that unit, the molecule and the cell provide a higher level of complexity and have distinct properties which become the unit of analysis for other sciences, chemistry and biology.

The identification of the unit is important for research methods too. If researchers agree on a unit of sufficient durability which is replicated in differing contexts then they can enumerate them and compare results. They explore their properties through intervention, modifying some and leaving others alone, the basis of experimentation.

As we have just seen from the history of social theory the main candidate for the basic unit in Western sociology has been the ‘individual’. There are powerful reasons for this. Western law recognises individuals, though it spoils the apparent simplicity by talking of corporate individuals. The state finds it easy to give each individual a unique number which makes it easy to build databases.

Moreover, if we start with individuals, we build some crucial features into sociology, assumptions like freedom of choice, dignity, responsibility and self-determination. These were some of the reasons which led Max Weber to insist that sociology began with individuals. But there are big problems too.

For a start ‘the individual’ is an abstract unit. Almost universally societies recognise men, women and children as different in crucial respects. Individuals all have a social nature, which is what makes real people. Second, the individual as choice-maker appears to emphasise rationality and freedom from social ties. Economics developed to make the rationality of choice its special preserve and so this makes society appear as an afterthought or an outcome rather than a precondition.

These references to ‘real people’, ‘freedom’ and ‘responsibility’ make it clear that the question of the beginning of a science is not just a question for science. The first sentence of St John’s gospel, ‘In the beginning was the Word…’, prompted the German genius Goethe to have his anti-hero Faust, driven by an inner demon to search for knowledge, to run through the alternatives: ‘In the beginning was the Mind’, then ‘the Force’ and finally ‘the Act’.

So Weber himself had second thoughts on this issue and offered, like Faust, an alternative starting point to the individual with the ‘action’. So his famous definition of sociology was of ‘a science concerning itself with the interpretive understanding of social action, and thereby with a causal explanation of its course and consequences’. The advantage of this formula is that the same act, for example voting or reading, is performed by many people and can be counted. At the same time, as with economic acts like buying and selling, its rationality can be assessed. It enabled Weber to conceive of great constellations of social action and to link them closely to economic activity which was a main concern for him. He was indeed a professor of economics.

There are disadvantages to adopting this rational frame for individual action. It tends to lock people into rational institutions which, Weber conceded, became under modern conditions like an iron cage. Talcott Parsons, who took Weber as one of his inspirations, began with freely choosing individuals—what he called a voluntaristic theory—but then bound them into society by insisting that they had to adhere to its central norms and values. His critics have called Parsons’s individuals ‘cultural dopes’.

For these reasons Alain Touraine advocates beginning not with the individual but with the ‘social actor’. It has the advantages of emphasising both choice and the social qualities of the individual so that social formations, especially social movements, are the outcomes of individual acts. This fits the temper of the late twentieth century much more adequately, but it may still downplay society and the sheer resistance of social configurations to people’s wishes. This is often called the facticity of the social and is a feature of all society at all times.

This objectivity of society is what Émile Durkheim emphasised. He went, deliberately, to the opposite extreme and made societies his basic units, treating all social facts as statements about them. So the percentage of people committing suicide is a fact about British society. Durkheim’s most famous study was one which compared suicide rates between different societies.

This is effective in reflecting facticity, but not good in allowing for choice, or indeed explaining social difference. After all most people do not commit suicide, and it would be good to have a theory which explained why some do and others don’t. In fact it is in relations between people that we find the context, the meaning and the dynamics of the situation which leads to suicide.

In focusing on relations we bring agency and structure together. So my answer to Goethe’s Faust problem is ‘In the beginning was the social relation’. It is the primary human experience, it defines and sorts objects, and predates ideas. The totality of relations between human beings is the constitution of society.

Identity

If we recount history as a grand narrative of peoples and their achievements, as Herodotus began it, then your place and my place in this story as individuals is infinitesimally small. Yet it appears to matter to other people where we belong in it. Most people we meet will try to place us in a country and having a nationality. This is a main aspect of what we refer to when we talk about ‘identity’.

For a sociologist the key fact is that it is other people who do the placing. They do it by finding a place for us in frames of reference which are widely shared, where outsiders and insiders regularly agree who belongs where at any one time. But belonging to a people, being from a country, is not straightforward because over time they move. Identity depends on your biography, the way you and others tell it and who you are with, and then it depends also on the grand narrative of peoples and countries.

After the Berlin Wall fell in 1989, and with the collapse of the Soviet Union, it became possible for people who had been Soviet citizens but long identified with Germany, and had been registered by the Soviets as of German nationality, to travel to Germany. For them it was a return ‘home’, though they had never lived there and it was several generations since their forebears had settled in Russia. The ‘homecoming’ proved a terrible shock. Germany was not a bit what they had expected and many became very unhappy.

International political changes leave their impressions on society and in turn on personal identity. But identities also live on and we may strive to retain an identity. The unification of Germany has not removed the identities acquired after its division in 1945. Eight years after reunification Germans still talk of each other as ‘Ossies’ and ‘Wessies’, and often employ stereotypes of the two in accounting for differences between people resident in the east and west of Germany.

‘Ossies’ and ‘Wessies’, ‘Americans’ and ‘Chinese’, ‘Blacks’ and ‘Whites’, ‘Europeans’ and ‘Asians’, ‘Jews’ and ‘Aryans’ are typical identity terms. They reek of history and come loaded with associations. Edward Said has pointed to the way Western self-images required the East to represent a negative counterpart as irrational and unreliable, as ‘oriental’. The politics of identity revolves around the power differentials which create these stereotypes. In the most generalised form they simply create ‘the other’; simply the rest of humankind who fail to share the characteristics of one’s chosen people.

The universal prevalence of these identity terms results from the reality of group membership. We can generalise from national identity and see this as true for all groups, men and women, old and young, beggars and rich people. We recognised earlier that relationships exist not just between particular people, but between types from which individual instances may diverge considerably. We have general ideas of what to expect of people whom we judge to be young, male, American and rich.

Very often this universal phenomenon of human society has been equated with prejudice in a negative sense. Sociologists find it more useful to speak in terms of ‘typifications’ rather than prejudice,

which exists where a person refuses to recognise the reality of individual differences and allows the typification to distort their judgement. So it is prejudice if we don’t recognise that this particular rich young American man is genuinely concerned to give service in poor countries.

But typifications may themselves be distortions, negatively or positively. We might be surprised to find that in fact rich young Americans generally want to serve, but we shouldn’t assume either that this has anything to do with them being young, rich or American. Sociologists are not immune to prejudice themselves; their own special brand is the tendency to assume that individual characteristics are the product of group membership. It has to be an open issue. Assuming that individuals are entirely shaped by society and culture is what one sociologist has called the ‘over-socialized conception of man’.

No one can be sure how long a contemporary recognisable complex identity as, say, a sane, assertive, liberal, feminist, British working mother is here to stay. A considerable effort is involved on the part of those who hold it. I like the expression ‘personal Odyssey’ for the mix of striving, fate and grand narrative which make up the contemporary biography. It suggests that we can see the understanding of the struggle for identity as central to human experience even in the epics of Homer. The contemporary experience shares in the universal potential of humankind.

Trust

The negotiation of identity is the counterpart of the flux of boundaries. Given people’s capacity to opt in or out, there is a permanent uncertainty about who is friend or foe, or whether the group exists or not. In contemporary sociology this has become an important theme. Uncertainty about the existence of society is often called ‘ontological insecurity’, a lack of confidence in surrounding reality, which is a more fundamental insecurity than that produced by lack of employment or health, which are often seen as the narrow area of ‘social security’.

There are many who would argue that ontological insecurity has increased in contemporary society for many reasons, including the impact of mass media, migration and global markets. This is the background to the persistent call for a return to community where people know where they stand, which is expected to be much more than simply a welfare provider but rather a frame for social relations.

Yet revived community, potent though it may be as a slogan in political programmes, is not the only way in which human beings produce secure society. For community emphasises bonds which exclude as much as include. Social relations on the other hand cross boundaries as much as they constitute them. Anyone who travels makes assumptions about social relations in general and not just those within groups.

The counterpart to the theme of ontological insecurity is the one of trust—namely, our reliance on assumptions such as: strangers are generally friendly rather than hostile; it pays traders to be honest; my enemy doesn’t want a destructive fight any more than I do. Of course these assumptions may turn out to be wrong, but if we don’t adopt them then we avoid strangers, stop business and wage no-holds-barred conflict. There is therefore a general bias in social life towards benign trust, although without any guarantees.

Benign trust is a less obvious form of social integration than co-operation and it puts less emphasis on boundaries between social groups. Its minimal form is live and let live, its strongest is the assumption that others will regard your welfare in the same way as their own. Halfway is the idea that the other person has an interest in keeping their word. This is the basis of markets.

In the human social world where we don’t know everyone in our group, and where anyone can enter or leave, and where we can’t therefore be sure who is friend or enemy, the most basic relations we have are those of benign trust in the generalised other, just anyone, not anyone in particular. On its basis we can contemplate the possibilities of co-operation, of accords with our enemies and the luxury of competition in pursuit of common objectives.

In an older community-based theory of social integration its norms were held to be the basis of personal responsibility and loyalty to the group—the basis of morality. The loss of group norms was seen as ‘anomie’, with the danger of lapse into chaos. This assertion was a counter to idealist views of universal moralities, and indeed a boost for the tolerance of different cultures. But it gave the impression that sociology, and later anthropology, had to focus on the study of local cultures in order to counter the imbalance of abstract philosophies of humanity.

It disregarded the known fact of social interaction across boundaries and the very assumptions involved in travelling in foreign cultures even to study them: Bacon’s courtesy to strangers. But it would be blind optimism to imagine that trust alone will resolve conflict or bring peace and goodwill between people. There is evidence enough that relations between people are also driven by greed and the thirst for power.

On the other hand there is no evidence that a programme to return to communities without cleavage will diminish those drives, and considerable recent evidence to the contrary. It is in the institutions of the great society where we have to look to reduce the chances of carnage and degradation.