Sarah Hardy is Expert Found's Society & Culture Editor.

What is a Society?

Society is a historically developed complex of relations between people that are based on constant changes of forms and conditions of their activity. It is a fundamental category of philosophy and sociology. Philosophical and theoretical analysis of society is possible only on the basis of research of its’ ideal form. During the whole history of humanity there were a constant search for this perfect model and attempts to describe it. That is why different sociologists and researches give various definitions to the notion of society although there is one general and accepted variant of society definition.

Society is generally a group of people who share a common culture, occupy a particular territorial area, and feel themselves to constitute a unified and distinct entity. Norbert Elias was one of the sociologists where his work became relatively neglected in his life time. Elias developed his social theory in a relatively modest way, without explicitly presenting himself as `theorist'. He placed more emphasis on the empirical investigation of particular historical and sociological questions because he was concerned to transcend the division between social theory and social research.

Elias's social theory can usefully be seen as being organized around five interconnected conceptual principles. First, although societies are composed of human beings who engage in intentional action, the outcome of the combination of human actions is generally ‘unplanned’ and ‘unintended’. For Elias, what we call `society' consists of the structured interweaving of the diverse activities of a various human agents pursuing their own particular goals, resulting in social forms such as `Christianity', `capitalism', `modernity' and particular forms of culture and group identity, without those social forms having been planned or intended by any specific individual or group. Elias’s goal was to improve human control over social change, so that `people can only hope to master and make sense of these purposeless, meaningless functional interconnections if they can recognize them as relatively autonomous, distinctive functional interconnections, and investigate them systematically'.

Second, human individuals can only be understood in their ‘interdependencies’ with each other, as part of networks of social relations, or what Elias often referred to as `figurations'. Rather than seeing individuals as possessing an `autonomous' identity with which they then interact with each other and relate to something we call a `society', Elias argued that we are social to our very core, and only exist in and through our relations with others, developing a socially-constructed ‘habitus’ or `second-nature'. Elias introduced the concept of `figuration' in order to place `the problem of human interdependencies into the very heart of sociological theory' and to transcend an essentially mistaken opposition between `individual' and `society'. Third, human social life should be understood in terms of ‘relations’ rather than ‘states’ or ‘things’. For example, instead of power being a `thing' which persons, groups or institutions possess to a greater or lesser degree, Elias argued we should think in terms of power relations, with ever-changing `balances' or `ratios' of power between individuals and social units. This also made it possible to acknowledge that questions of power are different from questions of `freedom' and `domination', and that all human relationships are essentially relations of power. Fourth, human societies can only be understood as consisting of long-term ‘processes’ of development and change, rather than as timeless states or conditions; and finally, sociological thought moves constantly between a position of social and emotional ‘involvement’ in the topics of study, and one of ‘detachment’ from them.

None of these ideas are entirely unique to Elias, but what makes his approach powerful is his ‘synthesis’ of what is currently spread across a variety of perspectives in social theory. Elias offers a set of sensitizing concepts, an orientation to how one understands and practices social theory, with the promise of drawing many of its various threads together. Georg Simmel had a similar concept of society as Elias, however, he expressed his theories in a less modest way. Simmel believes that a society exists ‘where a number of individuals enter into interaction which arises on the basis of certain drives or for the sake of certain purposes. Unity in the empirical sense constitutes the interaction of elements (ie. individuals in the case of society).

Individuals are the loci of all historical reality, but the materials of life are not social unless they promote interaction. This follows since only this sociation can transform the mere aggregation of isolated individuals into specific forms of being with and for one another. In terms of Simmel's famous content dichotomy: any social phenomenon is composed of two elements which in reality are inseparable. Firstly, there is the ‘content’ which is the interest and the purpose or motive of the phenomenon or interaction. Secondly, there is the ‘form’ which is the mode of interaction among individuals through the shape of which the specific content achieves social reality. Furthermore, the existence of society requires a reciprocal interaction among its individual elements, mere spatial or temporal aggregation of parts is not sufficient.

According to Simmel you can have a little society or a lot of society. Basically there is no such thing as society ''as such'' - the 'quantity' of society boils down to the degree or kind of interaction or sociation that occurs.

Simmel conceives sociology as the science of social forms. He makes use of a helpful analogy of geometry as the study of forms (ie. shapes) which may exist in an unlimited variety of physical materials. Simmel believes that sociology should leave the examination of the content of societal interaction to other sciences (such as psychology or economy) in the way that geometry leaves content analysis to the physical sciences.

Simmel discovered various forms of social interaction when researching individuals on society. Simmel views exchange as the purest and most concentrated form of significant human interaction. In fact, much action that may initially appear to be unilateral actually involves reciprocal effects (ie. is a form of exchange) and generally all interactions may more-or-less be conceived of as exchange. One characteristic of exchange is that the sum of values (of the interacting parties) is greater afterward than it was before - ie. each party gives the other more than he had himself possessed.

‘Conflict’ was another form of social interaction that Simmel discovered to effect society. Conflict resolves divergent dualisms, in such a way as achieves some kind of unity, even though one of the conflicting parties may be injured or destroyed. Therefore, conflict has the positive characteristic of resolving the tension between contrasts. Indifference is a purely negative phenomenon. Simmel also contends that conflict is necessary for societal change to occur since a purely harmonious group is not only empirically unreal, but could not support real life process.

Society, then, is actually the result of both the positive and negative categories of interaction, which manifest themselves as wholly positive. This brings up the issue of the apparent dualisms Simmel is always bandying around. When he actually addresses the subject he makes the point that he does not promote the traditional notion of polar differentiations. Rather he thinks that we must think of these polar differentiations as of one life. We might construct these conceptual categories to help us understand reality, but the actual reality we seek to comprehend (ie life) exists as an integrated, unitary phenomenon. So Simmel supports the notion of unity rather than dualism.

In certain cases of interaction, opposition is actually an element in the relationship itself. Conflict may not be only a means of preserving the relation, but also one of the concrete functions which actually constitute the relation itself. This is a case of conflict in its latent form. Simmel notes that conflict must cooperate with unity in generating social structure. His analysis returns to the notion that elements of a relationship may not actually be experiences as conflictual but that this tendency to interpret separateness may constitute an artifact of hindsight and post facto perspective. Reality is dynamic and unity, but our interpretations and attempts to comprehend it tend to impose a dualistic matrix for interpretation.

Simmel also supported within his theory, domination, sociability, subjective culture and conflict in culture, which all express more reasons of interaction within society, however, I feel I have covered two subordinates that occur in everyday life- human interaction and conflict. Elias prefers studying differences in human habitus, conduct and social structure over time, but of course this brings him into disagreement with those who are more sensitive to the similarities between human beings at different points in time and in different cultural contexts, for example, Georg Simmel.

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