Religion, Realism and Social Theory - Making Sense of Society (Published in Association With Theory, Culture & Society) (PDFDrive)
Religion, Realism and Social Theory - Making Sense of Society (Published in Association With Theory, Culture & Society) (PDFDrive)
Religion, Realism and Social Theory - Making Sense of Society (Published in Association With Theory, Culture & Society) (PDFDrive)
Mellor
Religion, Realism
and Social Theory
Making sense of society
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Centre Administrator
The TCS Centre, Room 175
Faculty of Humanities
Nottingham Trent University
Clifton Lane, Nottingham, NG11 8NS, UK
e-mail: [email protected]
web: http://tcs.ntu.ac.uk
Critique of Information
Scott Lash
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Philip A. Mellor
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Apart from any fair dealing for the purposes of research or private study, or criticism or review,
as permitted under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, this publication may be
reproduced, stored or transmitted in any form, or by any means, only with the prior permission
in writing of the publishers, or in the case of reprographic reproduction, in accordance with the
terms of licenses issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency. Inquiries concerning reproduction
outside those terms should be sent to the publishers.
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Contents
Acknowledgements vi
Bibliography 192
Index 211
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Acknowledgements
There are a number of people I would like to thank for their encourage-
ment and support. Jim Beckford, Grace Davie, Mike Gane, Robert Alun
Jones, David Lyon, Richard Roberts and Kenneth Thompson have all been
supportive, while my work has also undoubtedly benefited from the con-
vivial and always rewarding discussions at the British Centre for
Durkheimian Studies in Oxford. I would like to thank Bill Pickering,
especially, but also Nick Allen, Mike Hawkins, Willie Watts Miller, Robert
Parkin, Susan Stedman Jones and all the other participants in the Centre.
I have also appreciated the support of my colleagues in Theology and
Religious Studies at the University of Leeds, particularly that of Kim
Knott and Nigel Biggar, who offered comments on early drafts of parts of
the book, and I would like to record my thanks for the conversations,
criticisms and questions offered by a number of my doctoral students
(Louise Child, Jonathan Fish, Martin Hobson and Sylvia Watts), all of
which have helped this book to develop in the form it has. At Sage, Chris
Rojek has also been very supportive and I acknowledge my gratitude to
him. This book is the first to follow a long period of collaborative work
with Chris Shilling, and I owe a particularly great debt to him: not only
did he offer constructive criticisms of most of the manuscript, but the
book could not have developed in the way it has without the stimulus of
our joint work in the preceding years, and the staunch friendship and
consistent encouragement he has provided. None the less, the responsi-
bility for the arguments developed here rests entirely with me. Finally,
Lucie (our own little emergent phenomenon) and Francesca provided
(mostly) welcome distractions and reminders that some things are more
important than books, while Murielle did that yet also gave me the
unfailing love and support that made this book possible. My greatest debt
of gratitude is unquestionably to her.
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For Murielle
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1
Introduction: Real Society
thing real or true because they are so firmly in the grip of a specific culture;
on the other hand, human powers are so immense that the world has no
reality apart from the ways in which we conceive it. Against such argu-
ments, which reduce sociology to a philosophically incoherent form of cul-
tural interpretation, this book frees reality from its quotation marks, and
seeks to develop a view of humans that depicts them as neither feeble dupes
of culture nor masters (or mistresses) of the universe. What it rejects is the
widespread tendency to conflate questions of knowledge with questions of
being, and a related tendency to judge both in relation to what is empirically
observable: it builds upon the recognition that the real and the empirical are
not identifiable (Archer, 1995), and that social realities are far more com-
plex than extreme forms of constructionism suggest (Byrne, 1998).
The social realist position developed here draws on a critical analysis
of Émile Durkheim’s sociology, conducted in dialogue with a broad range of
contemporary social and cultural theories, and it is focused on the elemen-
tary significance of religion for how we make sense of society. Durkheim has
often been singled out as offering a particularly unsatisfactory and ‘archaic’
understanding of society in our ‘post-societal’ age (Touraine, 1989; Lemert,
1995; Urry, 2000; Bauman, 2002). None the less, attempts to consign his
understanding of society to a ‘classical’ stage of sociology look hasty and ill
judged. It can be noted, for example, that Durkheim’s work resonates with
some of the most radical scientific developments of recent times, since his
focus on the inherent complexities of social realities as emergent phenom-
ena has intriguing parallels in chaos and complexity theory (Byrne, 1998),
post-Newtonian reconceptualisations of the temporal dimensions of the
world (Adam, 1990), and contemporary non-reductionist philosophies of
the mind (Sawyer, 2002). Furthermore, in contrast to the implicit cogni-
tivism of much postmodern philosophising, it can be noted that Durkheim
illuminates social theory’s need to get to grips with social complexity in a
way that accounts for the embodied potentialities and limitations of human
beings, prefiguring many recent developments in the sociology of the body
(Mellor and Shilling, 1997). Durkheim’s (1995: 315) suggestion that a ‘soci-
ety will die’ if the idea of it is not kept alive within individual minds offers
a particularly valuable point of departure from which to begin a reassess-
ment of the concept.
In the late modern West, where the ‘beliefs, traditions, and aspirations
of the collectivity’ no longer seem to be felt and shared by many individu-
als, it is pointless to deny that society is, in some respects, ‘under siege’
(Durkheim, 1995: 315; see Bauman, 2002; Freitag, 2002). In Durkheim’s
view, however, this would not legitimate the notion of a ‘post-societal’ form
of sociology. For Durkheim, particular forms of society may die if their
beliefs, traditions and aspirations are no longer alive within individuals, but
there can be no question of a post-societal form of human existence since
society is not, in the first instance, a particular set of institutions, practices or
beliefs, but a collective way of being emergent from, and expressive of, what
it is to be human (Durkheim, 1982a: 57). Viewed in this light, as Karl
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these forces helps us to understand why it is that individuals, who have the
same human capacities and potentialities, can, because of their participation
in different societies, grow up to have radically different views of themselves
and their place in the world, and divergent understandings of the moral obli-
gations and religious duties they have towards others. In short, society has a
holistic character transcendent of the individuals who constitute it. As Byrne
(1998: 3) has noted, although ‘holism’ is currently an unfashionable concept
in the social sciences, one of the most significant aspects of post-Newtonian
science has been the recognition that ‘the whole is greater than the sum of
its parts’. Such recognition is also implicit in many critical realist accounts
of the ‘emergent properties’ of social realities (Archer, 1995, 2000), but
Durkheim’s vision of society as a sui generis phenomenon makes this
explicit, and demands that contemporary accounts of social ‘networks and
flows’ (Urry, 2000) are placed in a more holistic context.
Clarifications of the precise nature of those social forces that circulate
within social life, and examinations of how these give rise to the emergent,
sui generis reality of society, have, none the less, often proved elusive. Sawyer
(2002), for example, while embracing Durkheim as a theorist of emergence,
offers a structuralist analysis of different levels of emergent strata without
actually seeking to clarify the precise nature, and broader societal context,
of social currents and forces. A third key argument of this book, however, is
that a useful and illuminating way of understanding the character of these
distinctively social forces is to examine them in relation to what Durkheim
(1974a) has called a ‘hyper-spirituality’ specific to collective life.
Throughout Durkheim’s work he attempts to make sense of what have
aptly been called the ‘compulsions that order the social’, those forces that
precede and are given form in social life (Jenkins, 1998: 85). The notion of
hyper-spirituality, which has been neglected by social theorists until now,
can be used to capture a sense of how these sui generis social forces, which
are emergent from the embodied potentialities and characteristics of
humans, come to constitute a specific ecology within which the social
aspects of our humanity are nurtured and developed. Furthermore, it directs
our attention to the fact that fundamental dimensions of social life cannot
be understood within the framework of empiricism, since social reality is
not a one-dimensional phenomenon to be apprehended only through ‘hard
data’, but is complex and multi-layered, with some non-empirically observ-
able elements which can be known only through their causal effects
(Archer, 1995: 50; Sayer, 2000: 15). In this respect, the notion of hyper-spir-
ituality also draws attention to the importance of social theory: society can-
not be understood entirely through empirical studies.
The fourth key argument of this book is that grounding social theory in
an engagement with society as a phenomenon emergent from the relations
of embodied humans, and characterised by a specific hyper-spirituality,
allows for the development of a fresh understanding of the sociological
importance of religion. Focusing especially upon the historical and contem-
porary significance of Christianity for how we make sense of society in the
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(Un)real society
The infamous declaration, in the 1980s, by the then British Prime Minister,
Margaret Thatcher, that ‘There is no such thing as society’ reflected her
indebtedness to a liberal philosophical heritage, and to neo-classical eco-
nomics, where ‘society’ is, at best, an aggregate outcome of individual
actions or, at worst, simply an empty piece of rhetoric (see Strathern, 1998:
65). Although in other respects they make unlikely bedfellows, Thatcher’s
rejection of society found support from theorists of postmodernity such as
Baudrillard (1983, 1990a, 1990b), Deleuze (1979), Lyotard (1984) and
Derrida (1991). Rather than rejecting the notion of society in favour of a
strong view of the individual, these theorists directly or indirectly chal-
lenged both notions on the grounds that they do not refer to real phenom-
ena, but are simply culturally relative constructions masking the endemic
plurality and indeterminacy of the world. Attempts to eliminate the notion
of society from sociology by writers such as Alain Touraine (1989, 1995,
2003) and John Urry (2000, 2003) offered a further challenge to sociology’s
traditional object of study: rather than offering philosophical objections to
society in general, they simply suggested that its time had come and gone,
that what we used to call society has vanished into the global networks and
movements of a new era, thus necessitating a new ‘sociology beyond soci-
eties’.
These attacks on the reality of society stem from diverse philosophical
and sociological traditions, and offer a range of different explanations as to
why society is a concept best abandoned. All of them, however, tend to pro-
mote the idea that sociological conceptions of society are not only histori-
cally and culturally specific, but also, in some cases at least, abstract products
of the imagination rather than reflections of anything real. In this regard,
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to, and duties within, society, despite also pre-figuring the postmodernist
idea that much of what we take to be reality is actually illusion (Dumont,
1970). In fact, it is difficult, if not impossible, to think of a single example
of a social, cultural or religious context where some sort of reflection upon
the nature of society is not apparent.
The pervasiveness of reflections upon society across different times and
cultures not only calls into question the restriction of the term’s significance
to modern nation-states, however, but also raises doubts about a contempo-
rary sociological tendency to overemphasise the distinctiveness of present
social realities in relation to the past. Writers such as Giddens (1990, 1991a)
embody this tendency to stress the radical disjunction between (future-ori-
ented) modern and (past-oriented) premodern societies, while postmod-
ernism’s key defining feature is the idea of an end to modernisation
processes and the appearance of some sort of new age. The spiralling devel-
opment of various other ‘post-isms’, all of them eager to mark out some new
radical disjunction from the past, exacerbates the sense that sociology has an
increasingly flimsy grasp upon the notion of historical development. As
Kumar (1995: 17–18) has noted with regard to information society and
post-industrial theorists, they tend to work with a very short-sighted histor-
ical perspective that attributes ‘to the present developments which are the
culmination of trends deep in the past’. In this respect, it is also worth not-
ing that Urry’s (2000) ‘post-societal’ sociology draws extensively from
Adam’s (1990) account of temporal complexity, but ignores her arguments
about the need for historical factors to be examined in a vast, evolutionary
perspective. As Byrne (1998: 44) has suggested, although postmodernists
have adopted some of the language of complexity theory, particularly in
relation to temporality, there is something fundamentally atemporal about
their understanding of the world, since the location of something in the past
is often apparently sufficient to render it outmoded: the past is always passé.
Interestingly, however, such short-sightedness was not, in general, a char-
acteristic of the classical sociological theorists. Indeed, while they were
attentive to the specific characteristics of modern societies, they were also
rather more circumspect about these than many contemporary writers, and
certainly did not use the term society only, or even largely, with regard to
modern nation-states. In Marx’s writings, society tended to be a ‘residual cat-
egory’ rather than a fully developed concept, but it is clearly central to his
vision of communism and not confined to modernity (Gouldner, 1980: 12;
Burawoy, 2003:197). For other major classical theorists, the notion of soci-
ety is used in relation to a broad range of social and historical contexts.
Weber (1965), for example, while having a particular interest in modern
societies, also studied ancient Indian, Egyptian, Chinese and Babylonian
societies. Similarly, although Simmel (1997), of all the classical theorists,
expressed the most reservations about the term ‘society’, he was able to
identify and examine distinct religious patterns of interaction within society
in Christian and early Islamic contexts. It can also be noted that Bauman’s
(2002: 43–4) association of Durkheim’s conception of society with the
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Human society
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Robert Bellah (1973) has suggested that there is no word more wide-
spread and yet more difficult in Durkheim’s work than ‘society’, and
grasping ‘the many meanings of that word and its many levels of mean-
ing would be almost equivalent to understanding the whole of
Durkheim’s thought’.4 In fact, rather than simply accepting the reality of
society as an empirical fact, Durkheim’s entire body of work can be read
as an attempt to get to grips with the irreducible complexity of social life,
and the many levels of social, psychological and material forces, observ-
able and non-observable, that constitute its reality. This is why it has been
suggested that, for Durkheim, society constituted a ‘research horizon’, a
‘problematic’, rather than ‘a positively determined given’ (Karsenti,
1998: 71). This conception of society as a research problem has, perhaps,
been lost in much subsequent sociology, which might explain Giddens’s
(1987a: 25) comments about society being a ‘largely unexamined term’.
In the work of Durkheim, none the less, society is examined and recon-
sidered repeatedly, contrary to suggestions that Durkheim never actually
defines the term (Lemert, 1995: 26; Poggi, 2000: 84).
As Steven Lukes (1973: 21) observes, Durkheim defined it in a number
of ways: society was the social or cultural transmission of beliefs and prac-
tices, the existence of association, the imposition of socially prescribed obli-
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gations, the object of thought, sentiment and action, and, sometimes, a con-
crete society (such as nation-state), or groups or institutions within it. In
general, however, and linking all Durkheim’s different uses of the term, the
concept of society is used to address the ‘supra-individual’ elements in social
life relating to social actions, feelings, beliefs, values and ideals (Lukes, 1973:
115). As Bellah (1973: ix) suggests, ‘Not only is a society not identical with
an external “material entity”, it is something deeply inner’. Durkheim’s
(1995: 12–18) critique of empiricism is significant in this regard, since he
argues that reducing reality to experience inevitably results in a denial of the
truth, meaning or value of anything outside the specific individual or social
constructions placed upon phenomena: in other words, the deepest strata of
human, social and natural forms of life are simply argued away. Contrary to
such reductions, he identifies society with ‘an immense cooperation that
extends not only through space but also through time’, combining ideas and
feelings in a rich and complex set of processes through which we become
‘truly human’ (Durkheim, 1995: 15–16).
For Durkheim (1973: 149, 162), since society arises from human rela-
tions it cannot be explained as ‘the natural and spontaneous development of
the individual’, but it also cannot be conceived of in isolation from the indi-
viduals who constitute it. Society depends on the individuals who constitute
it, but it is not reducible to them because, as an emergent sui generis real-
ity, it has the power to transform human beings in significant ways.5
Acknowledging this power is important, because, otherwise, it is easy to
overestimate the scope and potentialities of individual agency, and thereby
to underestimate the challenges and constraints that face individuals in their
day-to-day lives.
It is notable that, in this respect, Giddens (1976, 1984) has criticised
Durkheim’s notion of a sui generis reality above and beyond individual
agency, believing that it encourages an unsupportable vision of societies as
clearly delimited entities characterised by high levels of integration. As
Stephen Turner (1983) has shown, however, this involves a misinterpreta-
tion of Durkheim’s realism, and the reduction of his position to functional-
ism. When Giddens (1990: 64) suggests that sociologists have placed far too
much emphasis on ‘society’ he is identifying it with functionalist notions of
a ‘bounded system’, to which he contrasts his own concern with the chron-
ically reflexive processes through which patterns of modern social life are
endlessly reconstructed. Like Durkheim, he aims to offer an ‘ontology of
social life’, but he rejects notions of any ‘reified’ emergent properties or sui
generis realities to propose a focus on recurrent social practices and their
transformations (Giddens, 1991b: 203). Consequently, his vision of social
life is essentially processual, with everything in ‘fluid process of becoming’,
but he sees nothing emerging out of these processes other than some unin-
tended consequences of actions (Archer, 1995: 95–6). Even ‘structural prop-
erties’, the ‘rules and resources’ that enable and constrain agency, have no
existence outside their instantiation by agents, having only a ‘virtual exis-
tence’ in the heads of social actors (Archer, 1995: 97–8; see Craib, 1992: 42).
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Kilminster (1991: 101) has argued that this vision of social life tends to
underestimate the affective dimensions of humans that allow us to bond
with others, endorsing a highly rationalistic view of humans as reflexively
monitoring actors, but it also attributes humans with immense powers in
terms of shaping social realities (whose existence is ‘virtual’ outside their
actions).
In contrast to Giddens, Bhaskar (1989: 77) and Archer (1995: 139)
emphasise that ‘society pre-exists the individual’: ‘the church-goer or lan-
guage user finds their beliefs or language ready made at birth’ (emphasis in
original). With regard to religion, rather than something such as Christianity
having only a virtual reality ‘instantiated’ through actions, Christians find
themselves constrained by the systems of belief and practice that may date
back thousands of years. Some, of course, can feel repulsed rather than
attracted by the demands these might place upon individuals, and seek to
‘pick and mix’ from available traditions or even seek to invent new forms,
but this can only be done within already existing constraints that, minimally,
allow the use of the term ‘Christian’ at all. Furthermore, as Durkheim
(1982a: 51) suggested, ‘I am not forced to speak French with my compatri-
ots, nor to use the legal currency, but it is impossible for me to do otherwise
… Even when in fact I can struggle free from these rules and successfully
break them, it is never without being forced to fight against them.’ Here,
Durkheim is establishing the reality of social facts through their causal
effects upon action (Bhaskar, 1998: 220). However, the idea that society is
an emergent reality is not simply dependent upon notions of constraint: the
emergence of society is also expressed through the stimulation of ideas, feel-
ings and moral bonds that transcend the utilitarian calculation of self-inter-
est (Durkheim, 1995: 209). This is where the notion of ‘hyper-spirituality’
is particularly useful.
Hyper-spiritual society
Durkheim’s dynamic picture of social life is reflected in his interest in the pre-
contractual foundations of the ‘organic solidarity’ that, in his earliest book, he
believed to be characteristic of modern societies (Durkheim, 1984).6 What he
was suggesting was that the more formal contractual and institutional dimen-
sions of society depended on the circulation of pre-existing social forces, ener-
gies and obligations, an idea that Rowan Williams (2000: 58–9), via an
assessment of the continuing value of Bossy’s (1985) notion of the ‘social mir-
acle’, has recently emphasised as being crucial to a satisfactory understanding
of what societies essentially are. Although Durkheim later abandoned the dis-
tinction between ‘mechanical’ and ‘organic’ forms of solidarity, his interest in
these pre-contractual forces continued, and they are at the heart of what he
means by ‘hyper-spirituality’. What is of particular note about this notion is
that it expresses the idea that, emerging from the relations between individu-
als, there is a specific social ecology within which individual identities are
reshaped and developed in far-reaching ways.
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Religious society
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verse. Simply to equate the two is to adopt a sociological strategy that can-
not distinguish between the fairly unreflective gratification of immediate
desires and serious attempts to grapple with questions about human destiny
and the nature of life. In fact, such studies conflate religion with the hyper-
spirituality of society when they should be seen as distinct, though related,
phenomena.
In this respect, it is notable that Lemert (1999), drawing on
Durkheim’s theories, supplemented by historical studies of Greek soci-
ety, offers an account of religion that sees it, as Durkheim did, in relation
to ‘the serious life’.9 His argument is that the value of an engagement
with religion for social theory rests on its illumination of the contingency
and finitude of human existence, grounded in the human experience of
family and community. As he suggests, religion is a source of social and
political realism, in the sense that it reminds us that hope, and the feel-
ings of fellowship and identity that bind us into a society, are inextrica-
bly tied to the brute facts of human mortality and interdependence. For
Lemert (1999: 260), as for Charles Taylor (1994: 73), the value of reli-
gion in this sense is particularly apparent in relation to conflicts sur-
rounding the ‘politics of redistribution’ and the ‘politics of recognition’:
by accepting that issues of social injustice and cultural difference are
rooted in a religious engagement with human finitude, at societal and
individual levels, then some of the social, cultural and political conflicts
of contemporary societies can be placed in a new, more constructive con-
text.10
Nevertheless, Lemert’s focus on religion as a reminder of human con-
tingency and finitude robs its emergent cosmological dimensions of any
real ontological significance, and reduces it to a pragmatic means of cur-
tailing dangerous forms of social and political utopianism. In contrast, the
understanding of religion developed throughout this book holds that it is
a phenomenon that expresses, through actions and beliefs, a collective
engagement with the possibilities of transcendence emergent from the
contingencies, potentialities and limitations of embodied human life. As
already noted, Durkheim’s notion of an emergent hyper-spirituality sug-
gests that an open-ended orientation towards transcendence is a defining
feature of our embodied relations with others in society: it is this orien-
tation that facilitates the emergence and development of those distinc-
tively religious actions, beliefs and forms of knowledge that, with varying
degrees of systematisation, subtlety and complexity, reveal further
aspects of the world’s ontological depth, and thereby place human social
life within a broader, characteristically cosmological perspective. It is this
‘revelation’ of ontological depth that accounts for the social power of
religions, evident in the embodied commitment of individual persons to
morally, practically and intellectually demanding forms of life (Archer,
2000: 186), and in the structuring of societies according to religious prin-
ciples. Given that the latter might be regarded as the more problematic
of these two examples, since sociology has for a long time taken assump-
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Multi-dimensional society
In the course of this chapter, I have considered some key aspects of the con-
temporary critique of the notion of society, arguing that the mistaken iden-
tification of classical sociological notions of society with the modern
nation-state ignores their sensitivity to the historical development of diverse
societal forms. In particular, I have argued that such critiques tend to mis-
represent Durkheim’s thought, and have emphasised the value of building
upon his social realism in order to develop a more satisfactory understand-
ing of society. Following this, I have suggested that this new understanding
must take account of the following four arguments: first, that society is
dependent for its emergence on the embodied characteristics and potential-
ities of human beings; second, that, as an emergent form, society has a sui
generis character, transcendent of the individuals who constitute it; third,
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facing modern individuals, the first part of this chapter is focused on the
analysis of taboo, which, despite the postmodern concern with transgres-
sion, can be considered as a central manifestation of the impact of society as
a sui generis reality upon individuals, in the sense that taboos express some
of the obligatory aspects of hyper-spiritual dynamics. Following this, Mauss’s
(1969) account of gift exchange is considered as a key study of how patterns
of reciprocal obligation come to circulate within various types of society,
while Bataille’s (1991) development of Mauss’s arguments in his own
account of the ‘general’ and the ‘restricted’ economy is discussed as a direct
challenge to those postmodern theorists who seek to co-opt Bataille for
their own ends. What both Mauss and Bataille demonstrate is that the econ-
omy is always embedded in society, an idea that is also the cornerstone of
Polanyi’s (2001) contribution to the study of modern economic systems.
Consequently, the rest of the chapter examines Polanyi’s thoroughgoing cri-
tique of the market model of humanity and society, which, though originally
published in 1944, illuminates tendencies towards an economically driven
dehumanisation of social realities that are particularly relevant to the con-
temporary era of globalisation.
Chapter 5 extends the reappraisal of society further by focusing on the
broad temporal context within which societies develop, and the distinction
between the temporal and the spiritual that has had a major influence upon
the development of various theological, philosophical and sociological
notions of society. After discussing the value of a social realist account of the
significance of time for how we conceptualise society, it is argued that
Christian history has provided Western societies with certain cultural con-
tradictions, concerning the temporal and the spiritual, that continue into the
present and still affect how we make sense of social life. Following this, it is
argued that these contradictions run through influential philosophical
accounts of social bonds and contracts, and are present in some key socio-
logical visions of modernity. Throughout, it is suggested that many conven-
tional assumptions about contemporary secularity tend to confuse the way
we think about things with the way things really are, and that in this respect
the distinction between the temporal and the spiritual can be more analyt-
ically precise and useful than that between the secular and the religious.
Chapter 6 is concerned with how the tacit dimensions of society are
embedded within individual and collective forms of consciousness. The first
part of this chapter is devoted to exploring Durkheim’s notion of ‘collective
representations’ with regard to this ‘embedding’ process. Following this is a
critical assessment of Serge Moscovici’s ‘social representations’ theory,
which adds to Durkheim’s work a valuable account of the persistence of
certain ‘core themata’ within the fluid, shifting configurations of social
forms and processes that characterise modern life, and the role of social rep-
resentations in the world-views of even those who claim not to believe in
them. The rest of the chapter focuses on three different strata within social
reality that are dependent upon tacit forms of knowledge resistant to reflex-
ive deconstruction. First, various attempts to explore the sociological signif-
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Notes
1. Bauman (2002: 11, 43), for example, identifies sociology’s understanding of ‘society’
with the emergence of the modern nation-state; an identification reinforced by his description
of society as an ‘imagined community’ in the manner of Anderson’s (1991) well-known analy-
sis of the nation-state. Urry’s (2000) account of the history of the term ‘society’ also focuses on
its emergence with the rise of the modern nation-state and its subsequent incorporation into
European and American visions of the sociological project under the influence of Durkheim
and Parsons. None the less, this not only underestimates the subtlety and complexity of many
sociological theories of society, including that of Durkheim, but also offers a highly selective
account of the history of ‘society’ as a concept, even within sociology itself.
2. Contrary to the common sociological view of the bold claims Durkheim makes for soci-
ety, the Durkheimian tradition also offers a useful basis for thinking about society because it
can illuminate society’s limits. The common view ignores the extent to which Durkheim was
deeply concerned with philosophical questions of freedom, necessity and determinism, and the
fact that he developed a realist rather than idealist form of social theory that sought to take
these into account, emphasising that social facts should be studied as real things not as con-
cepts (Jones, 1999: 77). His concern with the embodied character of human beings, and there-
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fore of social life, is crucial in this respect, and is the proper context in which to assess his stress
on the socially creative role of phenomena such as ‘collective effervescence’ (Durkheim, 1995:
221). Consequently, I shall argue that, although Durkheim is often held to exemplify what
Archer (1988, 1995, 2000) has called ‘downwards conflation’ (reducing everything into soci-
ety), he actually proposes a realist form of social theory close to Archer’s own (even if her argu-
ments help illuminate certain limitations in Durkheim’s thought), and that this offers a
productive basis upon which to explore the relationship between society and humanity’s
embodied being-in-the-world.
3. Furthermore, as Archer (1998: 193) notes, we should remember that the privileges of
Western societies have to be placed in broader human context: ‘The postmodern experience is
not on globally for those needing bread not circuses and seeking freedom of expression not
expressive freedom. There are transcendental material requirements for the existence of the
Collège de France and for the privileged practice of “playing with the pieces”.’
4. Even though this was not his intention, Bellah’s (1973: ix–x) comment that ‘Durkheim
uses the word “society” in ways closer to classical theology than to empirical science’ would no
doubt be taken as a damning condemnation by those sociologists who believe he reifies soci-
ety. None the less, Bellah’s comment touches upon Durkheim’s attempts to invest social reali-
ties with sufficient ontological depth.
5. Bhaskar (1998: 211) has sought to distinguish his own ‘critical realism’ from Durkheim’s
social realism on the basis that Durkheim associates society’s emergent powers with collective
rather than relational phenomena. He argues that, in contrast, collective phenomena must be
‘seen primarily as the expressions of enduring relationships’. This misunderstands Durkheim’s
position, however, which is actually very close to what Bhaskar is proposing.
6. Durkheim’s model of society has been described as ‘a social body which suffers all the
processes of life and death and rebirth’ (Gane, 1983a: 229), under the impact of sthenic and
asthenic cycles of social forces (Mauss, 1973: 292). The dynamism inherent to it has also been
developed by Victor Turner (1967, 1974) through his notion of communitas.
7. This is an especially significant point, however, in relation to contemporary Western soci-
eties, which are characterised by such diversity that Touraine (1989: 15), amongst others, can
argue that the complex and changing fields of social relations seriously compromise any sim-
ple association between individuals and an overarching totality. Here, social groups of many
sizes and strengths manifest diverse forms of practical action and varied representational sys-
tems that can have a complex and often conflict-ridden relationship with others, as well as with
nation-states and global forces and institutions (see Yeatman, 2003). Hyper-spirituality may be
an inherent feature of all social relationships, then, but the forms it takes not only vary enor-
mously but can also overlap in different emergent strata, and can thereby provoke social and
cultural conflict.
8. The hyper-spiritual substratum of a society is a ‘domain of uncertainty’, in the sense that
all sorts of phenomena can emerge from it to reflect upon the transcendent conditions of
human togetherness, such as sociology, philosophy and political theory. The persistent emer-
gence and endurance of religion, however, suggests that this uncertainty and indeterminacy has
boundaries, and that religion is, as Durkheim (1995: 1) suggested, a ‘fundamental and perma-
nent’ feature of social life.
9. Although, as I have already noted, Lemert (1995: 48) has, in the past, been highly criti-
cal of Durkheim’s understanding of society, his more recent writings have revealed an appre-
ciative and far deeper engagement with Durkheim’s thought than many other contemporary
critics. This is evident not only in his (1999) discussion of religion and contemporary social the-
ory, but also in his (2003) arguments concerning the presence of Durkheim’s ‘ghosts’ in many
contemporary social and cultural theories that ostensibly reject his arguments. For Lemert
(2003: 315), Durkheim’s enduring legacy rests on the honesty and rigour with which he inves-
tigates the tension between the socially constituted character of knowledge and the common
human basis upon which different social and cultural forms develop.
10. Anne Warfield Rawls (2001), again drawing on Durkheim’s account of religion, also
offers an argument that emphasises the value of returning religion to the centre of social the-
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ory. She identifies a ‘fallacy of misplaced abstraction’ that has characterised twentieth-century
sociology, exacerbated by the ‘cultural turn’ in sociological theorising. This fallacy, manifest as
the prioritisation of ideas and beliefs over practices, has led, inevitably, to the conclusion, evi-
dent in much postmodern theorising and cultural studies, ‘that there is no escape from the rel-
ativism of competing sets of beliefs, and competing sets of meanings, each of which defines a
competing reality’ (Rawls, 2001: 63). For her, conflicts concerning phenomena such as oppres-
sion, racism and sexism, which, in the light of the ‘fallacy of misplaced abstraction’, come to be
reduced to systems of representations, need to be understood primarily as phenomena ‘enacted
and experienced concretely by real people in real time and in real places’ (Rawls, 2001: 63).
11. It is for this reason that social theory must not only engage with theology, but must also
resist the temptation to reduce theological realism downwards into social realism: the reality of
God, for example, cannot be explained away as a mere symbol of distinctively social phenom-
ena (see Soskice, 1987; Torrance, 1998: 20; Patterson, 1999; Moore, 2003).
12. Further to this, it is inappropriate to suggest that, for example, Christianity and con-
sumerism are comparable ‘religious’ forms: they may share certain characteristics (e.g. the gen-
eration of powerful emotions in relation to shared ‘sacred’ symbols), but that is because of an
analogous hyper-spiritual substratum, not because they are ultimately the same sort of phe-
nomenon. Their engagements with the philosophical, moral and spiritual aspects of the human
lot are hardly commensurable, and, of course, phenomena such as consumerism are devoid of
any cosmological dimension. It is also inappropriate, however, to assume that religions such as
Christianity and Islam are commensurate social forms, given the profound differences in their
origins, theology and development over huge periods of time. Consequently, a social realist
account of religion, centred on the analysis of emergent dimensions within a ‘stratified ontol-
ogy’ (Sayer, 2000: 12), cannot, even if in other respects it is much indebted to Durkheim, adopt
the very broad model for what counts as ‘religion’ that has come to be associated with
Durkheimianism: it offers a reductionist interpretation of emergent phenomena that too read-
ily flattens out very significant differences under the weight of purportedly common social
functions, and thereby limits the degree to which contemporary differences and conflicts are
comprehensible.
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2
Complex Society
similar notion of a ‘complex society’ has been used by Karl Polanyi (2001)
to account for the interrelationship of diverse elements within society,
though he views modern societies as being particularly complex since they
are often characterised by forms of economic and philosophical reduction-
ism that expressly deny the social and religious realities within which they
are embedded. In the following discussion, this understanding of social com-
plexity not only helps make sense of the partiality of many contemporary
critiques of society, but also helps establish the social realist argument that
the difficulties and ambiguities surrounding the study of society need not
result in responding to complex questions about social life with the easy
answers offered by various form of relativism and reductionism.1
The chapter progresses as follows. The first two sections deal with the-
oretical approaches to society that link notions of a postmodern transfor-
mation of the contemporary world to a post-social fragmentation of human
relationships; a link that allies notions of ‘hyper-reality’ to a thoroughly dis-
embodied view of human beings. These arguments have had a significant
influence upon the post-societal visions of society as an ‘archaic’ sociologi-
cal notion, but also upon the techno-scientific and consumer-oriented analy-
ses of society that are discussed in later sections of the chapter. Sociological
analyses of the individualistic, morally indifferent or self-interested charac-
teristics of contemporary societies are also discussed, however, as influential
accounts of societal fragmentation that resist the logic of postmodernism yet
appear to render a social realist argument redundant. In the final section, a
brief account of sociological appropriations of scientific notions of com-
plexity is offered as a way of illuminating how a realist vision of social com-
plexity might develop further. Initially, however, the postmodernist idea
that society is now shaped by a hyper-reality rather than a hyper-spiritual-
ity can be introduced as a particularly influential post-social perspective.
Hyper-real society
I have already noted that, if the conventional view of sociology as ‘the study of
society’ is being challenged on a number of fronts, many of them tend to con-
gregate around the idea that ‘society’ is an arbitrary construct of certain types of
sociology, political ideologies and cultural theories, imposed upon the complex,
shifting and infinitely variable patterns of social and cultural existence.
Postmodernist philosophy offers an influential post-societal perspective built on
this type of argument. Its philosophical genealogy can be traced from Nietszche’s
proclamation of the ‘death of God’ and his deconstruction of all claims to truth
as manifestations of a ‘will to power’, through Foucault’s ‘death of Man’ and the
reduction of reality to competing discourses representing power interests, to
Baudrillard’s ‘death of the social’ and the collapse of reality into the ‘simulacra’ of
the ‘hyper-real’ (Baudrillard, 1990a: 186). What is notable about this genealogy
is the pattern of chronic social constructionism it expresses: the illumination of
social forces as the medium through which notions of God and Man are con-
structed leads eventually to the revelation that the social itself is actually a con-
struction too.
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29
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Disembodied society
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Complex Society
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a choice, and also ignores the fact that if everything is linguistically con-
structed then language itself would collapse (Trigg, 1998: 158–9).
In broad terms, then, although such forms of postmodernism ostensi-
bly challenge the reductive ‘imperialism’ of modern, rational thought
(Deleuze, 1968, 1969), and thereby seek to engage with the world’s com-
plexity in a more open, sensitive way, they actually manifest a thoroughly
partial vision of social and cultural life that reduces ontological issues into
an epistemological ‘playing with the pieces’ (Archer, 2000: 316). For
MacIntyre (1988: 369), in fact, Deleuze’s nomadism, which valorises what
Durkheim saw as a social pathology, abandons any serious engagement with
society for a self-indulgent immersion in ephemera. As Mike Featherstone
(1991: 9) has noted, the implication, for those who take such philosophical
positions seriously, is that sociological analysis must be abandoned for ‘play-
ful deconstruction and the privileging of the aesthetic mode’, since to do
otherwise would be to perpetuate the ‘grand narratives’ and fictional ‘total-
isations’ of modern sociology. Here, the rejection of ‘society’ or the ‘social’
involves the reduction of sociology into a highly relativistic form of cultural
studies (or literary theory), which, amongst other things, makes ‘a fetish of
difference and diversity’ without being able to deal with the realities of day-
to-day lives, let alone broader questions and conflicting claims about moral,
political and social justice (Turner and Rojek, 2001: 110). The vision of rad-
ically unattached individuals ‘thinking about thinking’ in the linguistically
constructed fictions and arbitrary simulations of the real not only ignores
the necessities of food, work and companionship, but offers a highly implau-
sible model for social theory since it massively underestimates the degree to
which we cannot simply reinvent the world to suit our own wishes, and
that, while we elaborate theories of hyper-reality, real people in real societies
have to face social, cultural and political pressures upon their capacities to
eat, think and act freely, and form associations that will enable their hopes
for themselves and their families to flourish rather than wither.
Archaic society
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directions (see Kelly, 1995: 25–6). In a later work, Global Complexity, Urry
(2003: 21) pays greater attention to Priogine and Stengers’s (1984: 292)
interest in emergent order, but focuses heavily on the idea of ‘islands of new
order in a sea of disorder’. Consequently, while in this book he is led to offer
more cautious arguments concerning the disappearance of society and the
decline of the nation-state he still tends to interpret these manifestations of
order in terms of ‘chaotic effects’ (Urry, 2003: 106–8).
Following from this, perhaps, his account of some major ‘emergent’
phenomena in this global (dis)order tends to be an account of unintended
and unpredictable consequences rather than ‘emergence’ as such. Thus, the
immense social, technological and cultural significance of the Internet is an
unintended consequence of its development for military purposes, global
warming is an unintended consequence of driving, and the growth of reli-
gious fundamentalism is an unintended consequence of the global spread of
Western consumerism (Urry, 2000: 208–9; see also Beck, 2000). Aside from
the fact that even ardent devotees of the ‘cultural turn’ in sociology might
baulk at the idea of explaining religious fundamentalism as an epiphenom-
enon of consumerism, it can also be noted that such a vision of a radically
disordered and disorienting world where anything can happen finds no justi-
fication in complexity theory (Byrne, 1998), and none in social realism,
since it lacks a systematic engagement with ontology. Indeed, radical inde-
terminism, the putative non-existence of society, and the peculiarly disem-
bodied vision of social agency are all linked.
There is an ambiguity in Urry’s account concerning whether society is
a ‘metaphor’ or a real phenomenon, albeit with ‘declining powers’. The issue
of agency is also problematic, given that the importance of corporeal mobil-
ity is stressed alongside ‘inhuman’ flows and networks. In fact, Urry (2000:
14) argues that ‘the concept of agency needs to be embodied’, but simulta-
neously suggests that ‘there is no autonomous realm of human agency’.
Thus, he draws attention to the significance of the senses in relation to the
emergence of distinctly modern forms of life and to the experience of con-
temporary post-societal ‘flows and mobilities’, but distinguishes this from
the assertion of any specifically human society, reality, essence or powers in
a world where inhuman objects constitute social relations through phenom-
ena such as technologies, texts and machines (Urry, 2000: 14, 77; 2003: 56).
For Urry (2000: 15–16), the idea of a ‘human agency’ that produces a ‘social
reality’ is absurd: ‘the ordering of social life is presumed to be contingent,
unpredictable, patterned and irreducible to human subjects’.
The only things that appear to have a real existence in this post-socie-
tal vision are machines: transportation systems, cable and wireless networks,
microwave channels, satellites and the Internet are the ‘scapes’ that ‘consti-
tute various interconnected nodes along which the flows can be relayed’
(Urry, 2000: 35). ‘Real human beings’ are no more than ghosts in these
machines, which means, for example, that Urry’s examination of the notion
of citizenship in a post-societal era (‘a citizenship of flow’) has to skirt
around the absence of any ontological foundation for the balance of rights
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Complex Society
Techno-society
Craig Calhoun (1998: 380) has noted that the excitement of new technol-
ogy can lead researchers to start with computer-mediated communication
and then look for communities associated with it, rather than studying the
role of computers and other communications media within communities
that already exist. Following this, as Christopher May (2002: 85) suggests,
calling communities that have a presence on the Internet ‘virtual communi-
ties’ ignores the degree to which face-to-face encounters, pre-existing tradi-
tions and networks, and enduring forms of social solidarity can be much
more important than electronic communications media. This excitement
about technology is a characteristic feature of many writings about the
‘information society’. These writings do not tend to reject the notion of
‘society’ per se, but offer visions of a reconstruction of social and cultural life
that is so radical that classical sociological notions of society and humanity
have to be abandoned. Daniel Bell’s (1974, 1980) account of the increased
significance of scientific, technological and informational processes in ‘post-
industrial society’, and Touraine’s (1969) arguments concerning the emer-
gence of a new class structure based on the control of knowledge and
information in the ‘programmed society’, were influential early attempts to
make sense of this reconstruction.
Where Touraine offered a critical vision of the dehumanising aspects
of contemporary social and cultural changes, however, more recent accounts
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of the information society have exhibited what Calhoun (2000: 47) has
called a ‘failure of imagination’ in their presentation of such changes as
inevitable. As David Lyon (1988: 8) has suggested, a common orientation
that has developed in accounts of the information society is that of techno-
logical determinism, where human beings have to adapt to changes brought
about by technological and scientific developments, resulting in new social
and cultural processes and patterns. As he suggests, the danger here is that
moral and philosophical questions about the ‘human condition’ become
displaced by assumptions about the technological possibilities of social engi-
neering (Lyon, 1988: 158; see also Webster, 1995). Similarly, May (2002: 21)
identifies in notions of the information society a ‘shift from engagement to
passive accommodation … by presenting these changes as epochal rather
than merely taking place within contemporary society’. The notion of an
‘information age’, like that of a ‘postmodern age’, in fact, thereby manifests
a neglect of enduring questions about being human in favour of a focus on
novel, large-scale transformations to which people simply must adapt.
Castells’s (1996, 1997, 1998) work on the information society is
instructive in this regard: he is critical of a number of aspects of ‘the infor-
mation age’, including its tendencies towards social fragmentation and the
commercialisation of communication, but none the less believes that poli-
tics outside the new communications media is now impossible, and that the
powers of individual states necessarily wither in the face of global informa-
tion networks (May, 2002: 34, 94, 120). Furthermore, technology now
reconfigures time and space. Castells (2000: 15) recognises that ‘networks
are very old forms of social organisation’, but argues that in the information
age they have taken on new life ‘by becoming information networks, pow-
ered by new information technologies’. These networks are characterised by
‘timeless time’ and the ‘space of flows’: past, present and future occur in
random sequences, and meanings, identities and functions are no longer tied
to particular places or localities (Castells, 2000: 13–14).
Thus, the technologically induced reconfiguration of the social also
involves a reconfiguration of the human. For Castells, social networks now
operate on the basis of humans who are configured like computers and, as
such, have no means to make a necessary linkage between knowledge and
experience: ‘The autonomous ability to reprogramme one’s own personal-
ity’ becomes the dominant mode of identity-construction in ‘a culture of
real virtuality’, ‘where all symbols coexist without reference to experience’
(Castells, 2000: 21). This is how it is that the Internet becomes the princi-
pal metaphor for the contingent, fluid character of contemporary social life
(Urry, 2000: 40–1): we can talk about an ‘information society’ if we wish, but
the notion of society has been stripped of much of its distinctively human
content in favour of the ‘programmes’, ‘nodes’, ‘grids’, ‘networks’, ‘virtuali-
ties’ and ‘hypertexts’ of communications technologies. In so far as people
figure at all, they are disembodied ‘minds’ assimilating codes of information
and images of representation (Castells, 1997: 84). In this respect it is notable
that Castells touches upon knowledge and experience, but does not grapple
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Complex Society
with being, which might encourage him to question the extent of this trans-
formation of human beings and societies, or, at least, to grasp more fully the
de-humanising aspects of some of the processes he considers.2
Paul Virilio’s (2000) analysis of these developments, on the other hand,
while it shares elements of Castells’s approach, offers a much more robust
critique of contemporary developments, particularly with regard to their
dehumanising consequences. Furthermore, he links dehumanising processes
with a corruption of knowledge that alienates us from our own being rather
than simply talking about the circulation of knowledge within technologi-
cally constructed domains. In fact, Weber’s (1991) concerns about modern
science as a stimulus to the dominance of instrumental over value-rational
action is multiplied several times over in Virilio’s (2000: 1) view of twenti-
eth-century science’s ‘pursuit of limit performances, to the detriment of any
effort to discover a coherent truth useful to humanity’ (italics in original).
Quoting Rabelais’s view that ‘Science without conscience is mere ruination
of the soul’, Virilio (2000: 2–4) argues that ‘techno-science’ is ‘gradually
wrecking the scholarly resources of all knowledge’ as it abandons intellec-
tual adventure for technological adventurism, testing limits for the sake of
testing limits: extreme science, which now shares a cultural kinship with
‘extreme sports’, has no connection to any notion of the ‘common good’.
For Virilio, this absence of any connection between techno-science and
common, human values is relentlessly enforced by the way in which global
networks of information increasingly disconnect us from the Earth, bringing
about ‘an end of geography’, as time and space become warped by the
cybernetic interactivity of the contemporary world (Virilio, 2000: 9). Within
this cybernetic reconstruction of reality, the global becomes the centre of
things and the local the periphery, as virtual geography starts to dominate
the real dimensions of the Earth (Virilio, 2000: 10). This domination is
apparent in the construction of Internet communities, where the ‘neigh-
bourhood unit’ is no longer local, but an elective, global association medi-
ated by technology (Virilio, 2000: 59). Such communities operate on the
basis of a ‘tele-presence’, rather than an embodied encounter with others,
across virtual time and space.
This lack of an embodied co-presence in our encounters with others
means that we are increasingly deprived of our sensuality, and that our old
‘animal body’ is increasingly out of place in this emerging symbiosis
between technology and the human (Virilio, 2000: 40). As Virilio (1997:
20) expresses it, ‘getting closer to the ‘distant’ takes you away proportion-
ately from the ‘near’ (and dear) – the friend, the relative, the neighbour –
thus making strangers, if not actual enemies, of all who are close at hand’. In
other words, the whole phenomenology of our embodied encounters with
others is not only being displaced by new, virtual encounters, but also these
invert, if not destroy, conventional social patterns. The phenomenon of
‘cybersex’ is an extreme example of this process of divesting human inter-
action of its embodied basis. Like a ‘universal condom’, offering contact
without contact, cybersex turns an act of the flesh, and an exchange of bod-
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Complex Society
human beings, natural and transcendental realities, and society have onto-
logical substance to them. Likewise, there is a keen sense of the moral capac-
ities and potentialities of humans that informs his work, and stimulates the
outrage he expresses in relation to many aspects of techno-science. What he
shares with writers such as Castells and Urry, none the less, is the belief that
a radical reconstruction of such things is taking place. Thus, what alarms him
is the dehumanisation, disembodiment and moral anaesthetisation that is
now, he believes, accompanying the substitution of virtuality for reality.
The power of Virilio’s analysis is evident when we consider those med-
ical and scientific practitioners who appear to take a professional pride in
leaving others to assess the moral consequences of their actions, those tech-
nological developments that encourage people to ignore those around them
in pursuit of electronically mediated pleasures and projects, and those
changes in military technology that give the annihilation of civilians the
appearance of video games. And yet, as challenging and genuinely illumi-
nating as this vision is, it tends to underestimate the abilities of people to
resist such processes, and the sheer impossibility of this virtual substitution
proceeding beyond a certain point. With regard to the former, it can be
noted that everyday acts of solidarity, sociability and moral responsibility
mark many people’s lives, including that of Virilio himself: although his
Christian faith has a highly elusive presence in his writings, in his daily life
he is closely involved with the Catholic worker-priest movement, working
with the poor and the homeless. With regard to the latter, it can be noted
that even the electronically mediated thrills of ‘cybersex’ depend on a sen-
suous, material body able to experience arousal and orgasm. Furthermore,
Virilio’s vision of a world where a real, embodied proximity is being trans-
muted into a virtual cyberworld sometimes reflects a social constructionist
aspect to his thought that sits uncomfortably alongside his more fundamen-
tal convictions about the nature of human beings and the world. Thus, his
declaration that ‘reality is produced by a society’s culture’ (Virilio, 1997:
107; Armitage, 2000: 43), contradicts his critique of Lyotard, where he
asserts that certain ‘grand narratives’, such as ‘justice’, cannot be seen as cul-
turally relative constructions (Armitage, 2000: 39).
Consumptive society
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Complex Society
ate issue is how to live a more meaningful life within a society increasingly
defined by consumption’.
In this respect, Lyon’s (2000: 84) suggestion that consumerist patterns
of consumption manifest a form of the ‘Durkheimian sacred’ needs to be
qualified. These patterns, which can be associated with the stimulation of a
range of emotional responses attached to powerful symbols, and to patterns
of identification with others in relation to these symbols, clearly manifest
something of the social energies and processes Durkheim (1995) associates
with religion. Yet they do not offer much in the way of an engagement with
the desires, struggles and limitations that characterise our mortal, embodied
condition, and cannot convincingly be presented as manifestations of soci-
ety’s ‘profoundest being’. In short, these ‘cathedrals of consumption’ make
unconvincing ‘nurseries of meaningful life’, and the promise of ‘redemption
through consumption’ soon wears thin (Campbell, 1987; Falk, 1994;
Bauman, 2001).
This is not to say, as Stjepan Mestrovic (1997: 107) has done, that such
phenomena are simply imitations of the ‘authentically’ religious processes
analysed by Durkheim: his notion of a ‘postemotional society’ presupposes
a highly implausible reconstruction of human embodiment wherein the
experience of ‘authentic’ emotion is no longer possible, at least collectively.
Rather, what such phenomena suggest is that hyper-spiritual aspects of
social life emergent from human interactions reappear even in contexts that
appear to be highly rationally planned and ordered, but that such contexts
facilitate their rational manipulation for economic purposes. The rationally
organised manipulation of sensuous experiences of the sacred is not new, of
course, and is a key feature of the baroque cultures that developed in sev-
enteenth-century Catholic societies (Mellor and Shilling, 1997: 132). None
the less, the transient pleasures of consumerism are a vastly different phe-
nomenon to the eschatological visions of Counter-Reformation Catholicism
and, as Colin Campbell (1987) suggests, offer little in the way of overall
guidelines about how to consume, let alone how to live and die. In fact,
Bauman (2002: 182) has noted that consumerism serves to distract individ-
uals from serious questions about human life and destiny rather than to
stimulate reflections on questions of limitations and transcendence: it trans-
forms distraction, which was ‘once an individually contrived hideout from
fate, into the socially constructed lot’. In this regard, the peculiarity of con-
temporary consumerism is that it strives to emancipate consumption from
past instrumentality and functional bonds, which were mainly to do with
survival, in favour of a new plasticity of ‘needs’ that can be endlessly recon-
structed (Bauman, 2002: 183).
Unseaworthy society
Bauman’s (2002) account of ‘society under siege’ not only offers a thought-
ful analysis of the de-humanising distractions offered by consumerism,
despite its ‘religious’ characteristics, but also offers clues to the appeal of
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have placed far too much emphasis on ‘society’ makes sense: he rejects the
concern with a ‘bounded system’ because he is more concerned with the
fluid dynamics through which patterns of social life can be reconstructed. In
contrast to much postmodernist theory, however, this does not result in a
nihilistic social constructionism because his psychoanalytic influences
encourage him to see such constructions as potentially liberating. Thus, he
suggests that ‘The more we reflexively “make ourselves” as persons, the more
the very category of what a “person” or “human being” is comes to the fore’
(Giddens, 1991a: 217). Indeed, he believes that through such a pattern of
reflexive construction we can recover ‘moral/existential problems’ seques-
trated in earlier periods of modernity, and can reconnect with Heidegger’s
‘question of Being’ concerning how existence itself should be grasped and
‘lived’ (Giddens, 1991a: 224).
A significant problem with Giddens’s notion of ‘being’, however, is that
he operates with a mind/body dualism which means that people are essen-
tially minds for most of their lives, organising self-narratives and broader
patterns of world construction through reflexive patterns of cognition, while
embodiment in a broader sense only tends to become significant when there
is a breakdown of these reflexive attempts at meaning construction (Shilling
and Mellor, 1996). This cognitive orientation allows him to reinforce
Winnicott’s (1965) psychological view of childhood as a state of ‘going-on
being’ rather than ‘being’, meaning that a sense of being has to be socially
constructed with the help of a child’s ‘caretakers’ (Giddens, 1991a: 39). If
this is so, however, then it is difficult to see how the more we reflexively
‘make ourselves’ the more likely we are to reconnect with ‘being’ in any real
sense. On the contrary, all we can ‘connect with’ is a more or less satisfying
social construction of ‘being’, with ‘ontological security’ rather than any real,
ontological grounds of human being. It also follows from this that the ‘real-
ity’ of society is always doubtful too: society is only a construction that, in
premodern contexts at least, provided comforting fictions to shield people
from existential difficulties. This makes sense of his essentially contractual
understanding of social relationships: as in the case of ‘confluent love’, we
form relationships and make psychological investments in other people in
so far as they help us to construct a meaningful and satisfying narrative
about ourselves and the world. Just as there is no hyper-spiritual aspect to
love, so too there is no hyper-spiritual aspect to social life in general.
For Bauman (2002: 53), however, there are ‘transcendental conditions of
human togetherness’, and the problematisation of these in contemporary
societies is a real problem, rather than a liberating source of ‘emancipatory
politics’, because, without them, notions such as justice cannot mean any-
thing and the inherent moral capacities of individuals are not allowed to
develop and to be expressed. The reflexive, transient and future-oriented
character of contemporary life anaesthetises people’s moral impulses and
responsibilities, and encourages people to avoid taking responsibility for
their behaviour (Bauman and Tester, 2001). The moral consequences of our
choices and actions seem to disappear into a game of solitaire that can be
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Market society
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Rethinking society
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Baudrillard’s (1983) vision of the ‘end of the social’, where all reality van-
ishes into the arbitrary significations of ‘hyper-reality’, is not a radical cri-
tique of this sociological consensus but its logical outcome. As with rational
choice theory, furthermore, the apparent resurgence in interest in religious
matters actually robs religion of any real social or human significance: play-
ing around with religious myths and stories can express a creative response
to indeterminate pluralism, but, since it cannot be grounded in anything
real, religion, like humanity and society, becomes lost in the ‘simulacra’ of
the present.
Such imbalanced accounts of humans and social realities, where one
or both effectively disappear from social analysis, are also evident in the
fascination with inhuman/human ‘hybrids’ in sociological rejections of
the ‘archaic society’ and critiques of ‘techno-society’. In offering social
theories centred on machines it is hardly surprising that society is increas-
ingly deemed to have no reality, because humans increasingly do not
either. Virilio’s depiction of the religion of the ‘machine-god’ that domi-
nates techno-society is instructive in this regard: religion, which is emer-
gent from the embodied, collective encounter with human contingency
and potentiality, becomes the vehicle for the technological obliteration of
the human. Here the reason for the apocalyptic tone of Virilio’s writings
becomes clear: techno-religion is actually the anti-religion; the ‘machine-
god’ is the Anti-Christ, which is why he believes we must now choose
between the two and agnosticism is impossible. Like many accounts of
the ‘information society’, however, this overestimates the power of tech-
nology, and underestimates the powers and potentialities of human
beings. It fails to appreciate how humans can ‘domesticate’ technological
products, rather than being colonised by them, and that using email is no
more likely to reconstruct our humanity than using a telephone or post-
ing a letter. It is difficult, furthermore, to imagine humans abandoning the
sensual pleasures of real, embodied sex for the digitised fantasies of
cyber-sex, or the warmth of face-to-face contact for a social life com-
prised entirely of Internet newsgroups and chatrooms.
Sociological visions of the ‘unseaworthy society’ being abandoned by
high modern ‘surfers’ tend to give ‘reflexivity’ the same sort of world recon-
structing power that Virilio associates with technology. Here, though, it is
not so much that humans are powerless in the face of changes out of their
control (though this is one feature of Giddens’s thought), but that humans
are peculiarly disembodied creatures reflexively constructing and decon-
structing relationships, beliefs, commitments and ‘life strategies’ in a sort of
psychoanalytic rewriting of the cost–benefit calculations of rational choice
theory as a therapeutic pattern of self-construction in a world of risk and
instability. Religion, not surprisingly, is largely absent here, because it is asso-
ciated with a ‘premodern’ collective constraint upon reflexivity and there-
fore upon human ‘emancipation’. As Bauman suggests, however, this
emancipation involves the anaesthetisation of moral sensibilities and the
promotion of a utilitarian individualism that fails to acknowledge, let alone
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seeks to build on, any embodied basis for human togetherness or the moral
duty of care towards others. Not only is there no hyper-spirituality, there is
no spirituality at the level of the individual either: identities, beliefs, mean-
ings, morality and commitments are always ‘until-further-notice’ reflexive
constructions.
This anaesthetisation of moral sensibilities is also a key feature of soci-
ological accounts of the ‘consumptive society’. Here, highly rationalised
social institutions exist alongside non-rational humans whose embodied
predispositions towards an emotional and symbolic enchantment of real-
ity can be manipulated for utilitarian purposes. The ‘religion’ of con-
sumerism thus expresses a kind of hyper-spirituality, but one that does
not develop into a serious engagement with human potentialities and
limitations, promising only ‘redemption through consumption’ in the
morally barren confines of ‘McSociety’. Thus, society, humanity and reli-
gion remain significant, but all operate on the basis of a questionable
ontology. As with visions of ‘market society’, a corrosive utilitarianism
underpins the whole human and social process and, like the reflexive
‘surfers’ of high modernity, we can see it as an ‘unseaworthy’ model of
society if some notion of ‘meaningful life’ is our goal.
In short, the various conceptualisations of humanity and society consid-
ered in this chapter have a number of different characteristics, and some of
them, if not others, point to real problems confronting people in contem-
porary societies, and to significant difficulties in developing a satisfactory
understanding of society. Overall, however, it can be argued that they do not
add up to a damning critique of the value of the notion of society because
some basic ontological issues concerning humanity and social life are not
addressed satisfactorily or, in some cases, not addressed at all. Indeed,
although nearly all of them make something of the ‘complexity’ of contem-
porary societies, they also tend to opt for various forms of reductionism that,
through their simplification of social and historical processes, make possible
some grand, if dubious, claims about radical social, cultural and technologi-
cal transformations of the contemporary world. In order to take a further
step towards a more satisfactory understanding of societal complexity, how-
ever, the issue of scientific notions of complexity, raised in relation to Urry
(2000, 2003), can be commented on further.
I have already noted that Urry’s work draws creatively from notions of
complexity developed in the natural sciences, but prefers to focus on
notions of indeterminate outcomes and ‘overall disorder’ found within
this literature. In this respect, Urry is following a trend noted by Hayles
(1990: 176), Williams and May (1996: 160) and Byrne (1998: 5), who
have highlighted how social and cultural theorists, particularly those of a
postmodernist orientation, tend to adopt chaos and complexity theories
in order to focus on chaos as disorder, rather than, as it is for scientists, a
precursor of order. In this latter sense, complexity is understood to be ‘a
domain between deterministic order and randomness’, not the com-
pletely unpredictable contingency favoured by postmodernism (Byrne,
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ally imperialistic, we simply cannot understand social life if its broader con-
text is ignored (Hayles, 1991: 16–17). Indeed, viewed in relation to Capra’s
(1982) emphasis on reality as ‘interconnected wholeness’ (see Adam, 1990:
59), extreme forms of social constructionism look highly problematic: they
offer an anthropocentric reduction of the complexity of reality into patterns
of social and cultural phenomena whose nature and origins they have diffi-
culty accounting for.
Contrary to postmodernist appropriations of complexity theories then,
these scientific developments may indeed stress the difficulties of under-
standing the world, and clearly overturn some of the major assumptions of
modern science such as Newtonian concepts of time, but they remain
focused on grasping the intelligibility of the world as a mind-independent,
ontologically stratified totality (Byrne, 1998: 159). This focus is consistent
with the form of social realism outlined in the previous chapter: the argu-
ments introduced there concerning human beings, society as a sui generis
reality characterised by a substratum of hyper-spirituality, and the power of
emergent religious forms to exercise causal power over people, can help
contribute to a vision of society that interacts creatively with new visions of
an ontologically stratified universe developed in the natural sciences.
Indeed, in its concern with ontology, emergence, contingency and holism,
the scientific understanding of complexity can complement the notion of a
‘complex society’ found in the work of Durkheim, Gurvitch and Polanyi
and help in the refutation of those social theories that endorse the extremes
of various forms of reductionism or relativistic arguments about indetermi-
nate plurality. Gurvitch’s realist focus on a ‘complex, fluid, emergent social
reality’, for example, captures much of the essence of what Byrne sees as the
potentialities of complexity theories for the social sciences (see Korenbaum,
1964). In seeking to develop this social realist argument further, however, an
exploration of the concept of ‘contingency’ is crucial, since this is a term
often adopted by those theorists who, mistaking relativity for relativism,
seek to prioritise difference above totality, disorder rather than order, epis-
temology rather than ontology. As I shall argue in the following chapter, a
proper understanding of contingency necessitates a thorough engagement
with ontology, and, consequently, recognition of the embodied basis of
emergent social realities.
Notes
1. Stehr and Grundmann (2001) have expressed some scepticism about the ‘authority of
complexity’ in classical forms of sociological theory, arguing that this has inhibited the devel-
opment and application of social scientific knowledge, since a full grasp of complexity is ulti-
mately impossible. In contrast, they argue that, rather than seeking to offer faithful
representations of social reality in all its complexity, sociologists should follow the example of
Keynes, who worked with a simplified model of social relationships that proved to be of con-
siderable practical utility. While these arguments raise important issues, however, they can also
endorse a reductionist approach that, in the interests of practical utility, distorts representations
of social reality to reflect pre-existing assumptions on the part of the analyst. For Polanyi
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(2001), this is the principal error of those liberal philosophers who reduce human relationships
to market forces.
2. The partiality of Castells’s engagement with social reality is such that Abell and Reyniers
(2000: 749) have accused him of offering a ‘morass of banalities and truisms’ that brings social
theory into disrepute.
3. This view has a long history inextricably entwined within the development of modern
notions of the ‘market society’ (Polanyi, 2001), but Margaret Thatcher’s declaration that ‘There
is no such thing as society. There are individual men and women and there are families’, is a
key representation of this individualist post-societal view. As Strathern (1998: 65) expresses it,
Thatcher emphasised that ‘society’ is not a concrete thing after all, but an abstraction, a piece
of rhetoric. Thatcher’s reduction of society to empty rhetoric was met with much protest, ini-
tially, mainly regarding the implications of her views for the maintenance of health and welfare
provision by the state. None the less, the development of ‘rational choice’ forms of social the-
ory has reinforced her individualist, sceptical attitude to society, and encouraged the adoption
of the notion of ‘markets’ as the context within which individuals make choices about their
actions.
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3
Contingent Society
The principal aim of the previous chapter was to offer an initial critique of
post-societal arguments, and related accounts of the fragmentation and
problematisation of society, in relation to the core arguments of the social
realist position introduced in Chapter 1. While this critique is developed
throughout the rest of the book, all the following chapters, beginning with
this one, also have a more constructive focus in the sense that they are all
concerned with the clarification and elaboration of key aspects of society
that need to be taken seriously in contemporary social theory. An important
starting point in this respect is the need to develop a proper understanding
of the fact that society is a contingent reality. Here, as David Byrne (1998:
40) has suggested, Stephen J. Gould’s account of some of the key implica-
tions of chaos/complexity theory is a valuable starting point. In his book
Wonderful Life, Gould (1991: 283) draws an analogy between evolutionary
and historical patterns of contingency, and suggests that all studies of history
must acknowledge the central principle of contingency; that is, historical
analysis cannot ignore the fact that the ‘uneraseable and determining signa-
ture of history’ is the pattern whereby emergent forms depend upon
antecedent states. In this view, the notion of ‘contingency’ implies a rejec-
tion of simplistic notions of determinism, but does not suggest randomness
or indeterminacy. Rather, it directs our attention to the fact that things hap-
pen to have a particular pattern, order or character because of their contin-
gent relation to antecedent phenomena (Torrance, 1998: vii). Applied to the
emergence of society, this notion of contingency can help illuminate the
need for social theory to pay attention to antecedent factors since, as Archer
(1995, 2000) has emphasised, society is not a self-subsistent reality, but one
that is dependent for its emergence upon the human beings who constitute
it. It is for this reason that any assessment of the nature of human social life
in its various forms, including those of contemporary Western societies, must
grapple with general problems concerning humanity’s embodied being-in-
the-world and the ontological characteristics we can identify with it. Society
is, ultimately, contingent upon the embodied beings constitutive of it, even
though human being itself has a thoroughly contingent character.
In this regard, the arguments developed in this chapter emphasise the
importance of developing an embodied understanding of society, and seek
to demonstrate that the hyper-spiritual forces that are a key feature of social
life are emergent phenomena contingent upon, but irreducible to, human
individuals who possess particular potentialities and powers. None the less,
as a phenomenon emergent from hyper-spirituality, religion illuminates fur-
ther dimensions of contingency that are crucial to understanding how we
make sense of the complexity of social reality. In particular, the fact that reli-
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Constituted society
I have already discussed how social constructionism, which gives society the
power to define reality, as well as all forms of identity, meaning and value,
ultimately results in the dissipation of society itself into arbitrary patterns of
discourses, significations and ‘simulacra’. None the less, the appeal of con-
structionism for social theorists is not difficult to grasp because it touches
upon a real phenomenon; that is, it illuminates the social and cultural speci-
ficity and contingency of much that we think, believe and experience. We
can all recognise, for example, that if we had been born into another society
or another time then the values we hold dear, the ways in which we con-
ceive of ourselves and the world, as well as the basic organisation of our
material needs and wants could all have been vastly different. It is easy to
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see, then, how the recognition of such contingency could lead to the view
that all beliefs, ideas, meanings, values and even reality itself are simply
social constructions. In this regard, James Beckford’s (2003) adoption of a
‘modest’ form of social constructionism, while rejecting the more extreme
claims of ‘radical constructionists’, offers a pragmatic and, to some extent,
justifiable theoretical approach: his analysis of religion and society is situ-
ated within the recognition that meanings are always constructed through
human interactions. Yet this approach, which for him is merely an ‘analyti-
cal strategy’, involves bracketing out basic ontological questions about the
real characteristics of human beings, and how religions and societies are
emergent from these (Beckford, 2003: 4). This means that Beckford cannot
draw a line between ‘radical’ and ‘modest’ social constructionism except by
pointing to the fact of the materiality of the universe, a fact that suggests
only very basic constraints on otherwise limitless human constructions.
Here, for example, the human body is seen primarily as a physical site for
social constructions rather than a source or medium for emergent social and
cultural forms (Beckford, 2003: 208).
It is possible, however, to see the body as something that testifies to the
contingency of humans as mortal creatures born into a particular place and
time, and yet as something that grounds this contingency in something more
substantial than mere materiality. However important language is to the
development of distinctively human experience, for example, our linguistic
capacities and potentialities, and the development of these in socially and
culturally specific ways, have to be placed within an embodied context that
predisposes us to ‘make sense’ of the world in specific ways (Howes, 1991).
As Archer (2000: 111) notes, ‘physiological embodiment does not sit well
with social constructionism … social constructions may be placed upon it,
but the body is stubbornly resistant to being dissolved into the discursive’.
This is so not only because we have what Archer calls a ‘learning body’,
adapting to natural and social environments even before we have acquired
language, but also because physical responses related to pleasure, pain,
desire and need continue throughout our lives to challenge the construc-
tionist overemphasis on language. In fact, even though our highly developed
ability to reflect, discourse and theorise about ourselves and the world
surely manifests things distinctive to humans, our embodiment means that
we share certain fundamental characteristics with other animals.1
This is not to say that society and culture can be reduced to biological
factors because, as Mauss’s (1950) study of ‘body techniques’ and Hertz’s
(1960) study of the cross-cultural pre-eminence of the right hand demon-
strate, the ways in which embodied capacities and potentialities are devel-
oped (or not) is thoroughly contingent upon specifically social processes.
Hertz’s study is particularly worth considering in this respect. His argument
is that, despite the physical resemblance of left and right hands, in nearly all
societies they are treated with an astonishing inequality: ‘To the right hand
go honours, flattering designations, prerogatives … the left hand, on the con-
trary, is despised and reduced to the role of a humble auxiliary’ (Hertz,
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Frail society
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ished animals’, whose societies furnish them with cultural systems that
‘complete their unfinished ontological characteristics’, is understood to be
in accord with Hobbes’s conception of humanity’s inherent ontological
insecurity (Turner and Rojek, 2001: 32). This notion of an inherent ten-
dency towards ontological insecurity, also evident in the social theory of
Giddens (1991a), is central to the embodied sociology of Turner and Rojek:
humanity’s embodied ‘ontological frailty’ is manifest in biological (disease,
ageing, death), psychological (fear, anxiety) and social forms (providing
humans with the meanings, values and identities they inherently lack). As
compelling as this vision of human embodiment is, in some respects, how-
ever, there are two major problems with it that need to be addressed.
First, for all the talk of humanity’s sensual being-in-the-world, it tends to
endorse a rather cognitivist view of humans as existentialist philosophers
perpetually on the brink of a catastrophic collapse into meaninglessness.
Berger’s (1990) vision of society providing a ‘nomos’ of meaning that shields
humans from the essentially ‘anomic’ reality of their ‘biological unfinished-
ness’ is built on the same German philosophical foundations, and offers a
similarly anxiety-ridden vision of human embodiment. While it is important
to acknowledge, sociologically, the mortality of humanity and the inherent
vulnerability of human systems of knowledge and meaning, it is not at all
clear that most people go about their daily lives with any great sense of their
inherent ontological frailty. In fact, as Durkheim (1995: 268) suggests, the
widespread belief in notions of some sort of ‘soul’ connected to human
embodiment (often immortal in character) is a powerful testimony to the
way in which society incarnates a sense of meaning and value within indi-
viduals, and makes their individual identities seem anything but frail and
arbitrary.
A second problem with this vision of embodiment is that it goes beyond
notions of contingency and conceptualises humanity’s social experience in
terms of a deficiency: the notion of ontological frailty as an inherent charac-
teristic of our being-in-the-world not only suggests that individuals cannot
escape the anxieties attendant upon their frailties, but also that society can-
not, ultimately, add to, or subtract from, them in a substantive way. Society
can offer patterns of organisation that take these common frailties into
account and, ideally, provide collective arrangements for the protection and
care of others but, in the end, society offers little more than that. For exam-
ple, when Turner and Rojek (2001: 123) offer their somewhat bleak view of
health as a temporary respite from an inevitable condition of disability, they
start from a position asserting biological frailty and move, from there, to
emphasise the precariousness of societal environments that either exacer-
bate the problems attendant upon bodily limits or partially mitigate them:
there is no possibility of their transcendence or, even, their transformation.
In short, their ontology of frailty constrains the possibilities whereby society
might make a real difference to the human experience of embodiment: all
society can do, at best, is to make life a little less ‘nasty, brutish and short’.
While not sinking into the pessimism of Rom Harré (1979), whose view
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of human social life emphasises its futility, ugliness, pain, folly and under-
current of resentment, Turner and Rojek’s sociology, reflecting its depend-
ence upon Hobbesian contract theory and German philosophical
anthropology, none the less tends towards a view of humans that interprets
contingency exclusively in terms of frailty and vulnerability, with the result
that society, a contingent development of the embodied capacities of
humans, also appears to be a somewhat frail phenomenon. Indeed, for
Turner (1991: x), a satisfactory sociological engagement with social com-
plexity has, ultimately, to grasp the fact that the ‘open-ended’, ‘contingent’
nature of human life results in an existential uncertainty that underpins all
social institutions, including religious ones. In contrast, Archer’s (2000)
account of embodiment emphasises not ontological frailty, but an ontology
of human robustness, while her vision of society emphasises not its defi-
ciencies (though she is aware of its limitations) but its emergent properties
and powers.
Emergent society
Like Turner and Rojek, Archer (2000: 18) stresses the unavoidability of ‘our
embodied accommodation to the mercy of nature’, but also sees in the
organic constitution of human beings a capacity for reflexivity, self-con-
sciousness and moral discernment that allows people to be much more cre-
ative and adaptable than an ontology of frailty allows. This is reinforced by
her emphasis on the primacy of practice in relation to ‘that prime human
power, our self-consciousness’ (Archer, 2000: 8). For her, people are not
existentialists grappling cognitively with the arbitrary fictions of language
and culture that serve to shield us from life’s inherent brutality; on the con-
trary, human reflexivity is exercised and developed through practical activ-
ity in the world. Against the Cartesian separation of mind from practical
experience, she argues that it is only through practice that thought and
knowledge can develop. None the less, contrary to the ‘anthropocentric’
assumption that our knowledge, because it is embodied, simply creates the
world, she emphasises that human limitations relating to the experience of
reality do not exhaust all that the world is. In fact, the creative, adaptable
powers that distinguish humans from other animals (though they too are
engaged in practical activity) are only able to develop because of our ongo-
ing attempts to survive and flourish in a world that transcends our fallible
capacities to impose meanings on it (Archer, 2000: 145).
It is on this embodied basis that Archer argues that ‘human interaction
constitutes the transcendental conditions of human development’, meaning
that all humans, from different times and different socio-cultural circum-
stances, share a common, practical orientation to the world through which
distinctively human properties and powers are reflexively constituted
(Archer, 2000: 17). The development of society is made possible by these
‘transcendental conditions’, but once in existence it has, like humanity, sui
generis properties and powers since it entails emergent structural and cul-
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Dynamic society
For many writers, the analytical distinction between ‘the individual’ and
‘society’ central to such arguments has become highly problematic.
Zafirovski (2000), for example, has questioned sociology’s division into
‘individualist’ and ‘holist’ forms. In another more far-reaching critique, how-
ever, Strathern (1998: 63) notes how twentieth-century social theories have
swung between the pendulum of ‘individual’ and ‘society’; her view is that,
in now rejecting ‘society’, we can reject ‘the individual’ too and free our-
selves from this unproductive polarisation. For her, this Durkheimian
dichotomy has become a liability, because ‘social relations are intrinsic to
human existence, not extrinsic’ (Strathern, 1998: 66; see also Lemert, 1995:
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38). In other words, pre-social individuals cannot be set against a social real-
ity distinct from them, but of which they are members. Theory should be
centred on ‘sociality’, not on ‘society’ or ‘the individual’. Urry also expresses
scepticism about the individual being/social being duality. He suggests that
sociological debates concerning the relative merits of individualism or
holism are unhelpful because they cannot account for the complex mobili-
ties and intersections of contemporary ‘regions, networks and flows’ (Urry,
2000: 15). Like Strathern, he rejects both ‘society’ and ‘the individual’,
though he focuses on ‘sociation’ rather than ‘sociality’ to express the fluid,
mobile forms of interaction and identification characteristic of contempo-
rary persons (Urry, 2000: 142). While it can be noted that these terms are,
none the less, derivations of ‘society’, the appeal of terms such as ‘sociality’
or ‘sociation’ is held to rest on their suggestion of something more interac-
tive than ‘society’. According to Toren (1998: 74), who also wants to aban-
don ‘society’, these terms are more ‘dynamic’, and do not imply a ‘system’,
distinct from individuals who are then ‘socialised’.2
Archer, however, offers a more subtle critique of Durkheim’s arguments.
Her acceptance of the authenticity of the daily experience of ordinary peo-
ple, who are conscious of themselves as individuals with an awareness of,
and responsibility for, their own actions, yet who are unavoidably social
beings subject to all sorts of possibilities and constraints, means that neither
the ‘vexatious fact of society’ nor the reality of individuals can be argued
away by social theorists. She notes, however, that sociologists have tended to
emphasise the importance of one element of this duality against the other:
methodological individualists have collapsed ‘society’ into ‘individuals’,
while collectivists have emphasised the all-embracing power of society to
the point where individuals are simply ‘indeterminate material’ waiting to
be given shape and substance by social forces. For her, Durkheim is the
embodiment of this collectivist ‘downwards conflation’ (Archer, 1995: 2–3).
In the light of this critique, it can be argued that the postmodernist decon-
struction of humanity actually has its roots in Durkheim’s reduction of indi-
viduals to epiphenomenal aspects of societal dynamics (Archer, 2000: 19).
Contrary to this argument, however, it can be noted that Durkheim
(1995: 275) stressed that his concern with social forces did not deny the
importance of ‘the individual factor’, and that ‘there can be no social life
unless distinct individuals are associated with it; and the more numerous
and different from one another they are, the richer it is’. Furthermore, he
denies that individual psychological life begins only with societies: what he
is concerned with is the greater development of human psychological life in
comparison to animals, and throughout human history, as an embodied pre-
disposition towards sociability produces ever more complex forms of social
life that act back upon individuals, transforming their experiences of them-
selves and the world. The greater the development of this sociability, in fact,
the richer and more diverse individual experiences, representations and
choices become (Durkheim, 1984: 284–5). In addition, and contrary to the
‘static’ image of society Strathern, Urry and Toren associate with Durkheim,
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Sacred society
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(Ginsberg, 1956: 51, 242; see Evans-Pritchard, 1956: 313; Lukes, 1973: 21,
35). For Touraine (1989, 1995), this deification of society reflects the only
partially secularised character of classical sociology: ‘society’ filled the God-
shaped hole left by the demise of Christianity, substituting social order for
divine order.
It is clearly the case that the early development of sociology was marked
by an experience of, and concerns about, the apparent secularisation of
Western societies, and that medieval visions of a human social order infused
with divine grace and eschatological hope were replaced by notions of soci-
ety as a secular milieu within which humans’ social capacities were shaped
and expressed in historically variable forms (Shilling and Mellor, 2001: 5).
With regard to Durkheim, however, in illuminating the enduring, religious
dimensions of society he was not simply filling a God-shaped hole with the
‘problem of order’. Touraine (1995: 352) follows Parsons in interpreting
Durkheim’s notion of society as the normative integration of individuals
into social order. This, however, is a misinterpretation of Durkheim’s views,
which are focused on problems of contingency as much as a problem of
order.
The underlying purpose behind Durkheim’s association of society with
the circulation of ‘religious’ forces is not the elucidation of the functional
requirements of social order, but the attempt to illuminate those dynamic,
always contingent, processes through which individuals become ‘social
beings’. As Poggi (2000: 85) has noted, for Durkheim, society is ‘not a sub-
stance existing in space’, but should be ‘conceived as a process, as a set of
events, of activities. It should be thought of as a flow of energy rather than
as a stock of objects.’ This dynamism is particularly evident in relation to the
polarity between sacred and profane, which Durkheim identifies as the dis-
tinguishing feature of religious thought and practice. In his view, the inher-
ent hyper-spirituality of collective life means that society always has
religious features, but the division of the world into two domains, sacred and
profane, expresses human attempts to represent their experience of this
spirituality in terms of beliefs, myths, legends and dogmas (Durkheim, 1995:
34). The origins of these representations, however, are in the embodied
experience of powerful emotions and energies arsing from human relation-
ships.
Durkheim’s account of the origins of the sacred in the contagious emo-
tional energies of ‘effervescent’ gatherings, which are then periodically revi-
talised through ritual activity, expresses his dynamic and embodied
conception of society. The sacred is acquired by contagion, and is transmit-
ted contagiously, as intense, emotional energies circulate within social life
(Durkheim, 1995: 328). For Durkheim (1995: 352), such processes ‘set col-
lectivity in motion’, bringing individuals together, and forging a sense of col-
lective purpose and identity. The sacred, as a symbolic representation of
these processes, therefore expresses something elementary and universal
about the embodied basis of the constitution, development and mainte-
nance of societies, though Durkheim also stresses the contingency of the
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can divide as well as unite people, not only shows the impossibility of asso-
ciating his account of religion and society with a simple normative rein-
forcement of social order, but also suggests an ambiguity at the heart of
society itself (Durkheim, 1995: 417). Social energies may be the stimulus
for heightened moral sensibilities, self-sacrifice and even heroism, but they
can also provoke barbarism, violence, oppression and fanaticism (Durkheim,
1995: 213). Society, then, for all its God-like features, remains a complex,
ambiguous phenomenon within Durkheim’s sociology. This ambiguity sur-
rounding society can be illuminated further through an examination of
Bataille’s reworking of Durkheim’s notion of the sacred.
Homogeneous/heterogeneous society
As Richardson (1994: 34) has noted, for Bataille the sacred is the ‘funda-
mental element that makes possible the unity and continuance of society’.
In contrast to some of Durkheim’s followers, however, Bataille is also very
much interested in Durkheim’s emphasis on the fact that the sacred can
only be understood fully in relation to the ‘profane’. This understanding
works both ways. Bataille’s view is that modern assumptions about the ‘pro-
fane’ nature of society are inherently contradictory: there can be no such
thing since, as the ‘profane’ is defined in opposition to the ‘sacred’, the idea
of a ‘profane society’ negates itself (Richardson, 1994: 49). For Bataille,
however, although the sacred is the unifying aspect of society, it is a unifi-
cation that takes place at the margins of normal existence, where different
realities meet in a religious mediation of excess energies emergent from
human embodiment (Richardson, 1994: 34). Thus, the sacred has a para-
doxical character, since it is at the heart of society, yet it is encountered at
society’s margins. This, for Bataille, constitutes the ‘tragedy’ of modern life.
This ‘tragic’ dimension of Bataille’s thought has often been misinter-
preted, especially by those writers who claim him for post-structuralism or
postmodernism. As Richardson (1994: 5) has demonstrated, those who
interpret Bataille in this way tend to read him via Baudrillard (1993),
Derrida (1998) and Foucault (1998). While all these writers have done
much to spread Bataille’s influence in contemporary social and cultural the-
ory, they have focused on the influence of de Sade and Nietzsche and
tended to ignore the influence of Durkheim, while also seeking to co-opt
him for their own ends rather than engage fully with his theory. Baudrillard,
for example, dispenses with the moral dimension of Bataille’s work, and his
desire for a renewal of sacred forms of solidarity, focusing heavily on nega-
tivity and utilising Bataille to reinforce his own conception of the ‘end of the
social’ (Richardson, 1994: 5). Similarly, Foucault uses Bataille to reinforce
his own reduction of ‘society’ (and the ‘individual’) to a discursive concept,
which is completely against the grain of Bataille’s arguments, and develops
Bataille’s notion of ‘transgression’ while ignoring its inextricably close rela-
tionship to ‘taboo’ (Richardson, 1994: 7). Thus, although Noyes (2000)
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begins his discussion of Bataille by castigating those who fail to read his
work properly, he nevertheless seeks to claim Bataille for post-structuralism
and follows Foucault in presenting Bataille as the prophet of transgression
and unbridled negativity.
Bataille can only be claimed retrospectively (and somewhat anachronis-
tically) for postmodernism in the sense that his criticisms of modern soci-
eties were consistent and profound. None the less, these criticisms are not
based, in Foucault’s terms, on an anti-humanist, philosophical refusal of
‘totality’, since Bataille’s whole project is centred on the clarification and
pursuit of a sense of wholeness (Richardson, 1994: 7–8), but on his belief
that modernity systematically stifles the sacred basis of society, and thereby
deprives us of the means to realise our full human potential. Rather than
being a prophet of negativity, Bataille’s (1991) sociology is ultimately rooted
in a Durkheimian concern with the embodied ‘effervescence of life’ from
which all else springs, and the challenge this offers to those utilitarian and
individualist accounts of social life that reduce society to the contractual
arrangements of individuals. Where he goes further than Durkheim in this
is in his confrontation with a problem Durkheim tended to set aside: how
can the sacred (and, therefore, society) become revitalised again in a world
where ‘God is dead’, utility is prized above value, and our lives seem more
atomised and meaningless than ever before? His attempts to answer this
question mark his distinctive contribution to the attempt to make sense of
society as a contingent, inherently religious phenomenon.
For Bataille, human life is characterised by a series of fundamental antag-
onisms between life and death, meaning and meaninglessness, possibility
and impossibility, necessity and contingency. His consciousness of these
antagonisms informs his vision of society, which is defined by a tension
between a ‘negative’ deconstructive impulse to question all meaning, value
and knowledge, and a ‘positive’ commitment to the idea of society as the
creative force through which humanity realises its deepest, most profound
levels of being. His philosophical sources for this vision of society tended to
reinforce the negative dimensions of his thought, while his sociological
influences provide its more positive dimensions. Contrary to many post-
structuralist and postmodernist readings of his work, it is the creative ten-
sion between these two poles that must be kept in mind when assessing his
arguments (see Besnier, 1995; Hegarty, 2000). Taken together, these differ-
ent elements of Bataille’s work direct our attention to the fundamental soci-
ological significance of the circulation of those social forces and energies
that can be identified as the hyper-spiritual dimensions of society, even
though this significance is often obscured by the utilitarian concerns of
modern societies or ignored by social and cultural theorists who take the
ostensible secularisation of the modern world at face value. For Bataille, in
fact, this ‘secularisation’ has to be reinterpreted as the ‘homogenisation’ of
society relative to the ‘heterogeneity’ of a society with a strong sense of the
sacred/profane polarity.
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gation of individual existence even into the realms of heaven and hell after
death (Bataille, 1987: 120). For Bataille, the purpose of religion is not to
ensure the eternal life of the individual, but to offer a means through which
individuality is relativised in relation to the undifferentiated continuity of
the sacred.
Thus, what Bataille, building on Durkheim, is attempting to do is
broaden our conceptions of social and human realities to grapple with the
potentialities endemic within humanity’s embodied being-in-the-world and
the constraints upon humans in modern societies. Here, the ‘surplus’ or
‘excess’ inherent within the realm of the social is understood in dynamic,
inter-relational terms, though this is contrasted with a society that
(mis)understands itself in utilitarian conceptions that deny the reality of
hyper-spiritual forces. In this view, if modern societies are ‘frail’ it is not, as
Turner and Rojek (2001) indicate, because of the inherent limits of society
in relation to the ontological constraints of humanity, but because of their
failure to embrace the full scope of human possibility. For Durkheim and,
to some extent for Archer, however, this failure is signalled by the modern
neglect of those religious forms that engage productively with these human
potentialities emergent within social reality, while, for Bataille, the notion of
the ‘sacred’ becomes quite separate from existing religious forms. This sep-
aration compromises the extent to which Bataille can help us comprehend
the contemporary social power of religious forms such as Christianity.
Enchanted society
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sharply. She criticises his attempt ‘to discover the causes leading to the rise
of religious sentiment in humanity’ by noting that the conclusion is pre-
judged: the only causes entertained are social, so it is no surprise that reli-
gious sentiments turn out to have social causes (Archer, 1995: 291). Against
this, she asserts the importance of allowing for the possibility of ‘authentic
personal experience’ which, rather than simply arising on the basis of social
causes, facilitates an individual’s ability to filter the social practices that are
sought or shunned, and which thereby makes a significant difference to
their ‘chosen way of being in the social world’ (Archer, 1995: 292). For
Archer, in fact, this possibility expresses the ‘enchantment of being human’:
human embodiment predisposes individuals towards a ‘fundamentally eval-
uative’ engagement with the world, stimulating an ‘inner conversation’ con-
stitutive of our ‘concrete singularity’ (Archer, 2000: 318–19).
Essentially, Archer’s argument is that practical activity, through which
religion arises, is not identifiable with the social, even though it is
unavoidably intertwined with the social for much of our lives, because it
is a feature of human embodiment that has pre-social origins.
Consequently, it is possible for individuals to have an authentic religious
experience (for example, some sort of encounter with God) that does not
have social causes, even if that experience is, in other respects, thoroughly
social (for example, participating in rituals, reflecting theologically on the
nature of God, trying to live as God wishes etc.). On the other hand, of
course, Durkheim appears to offer an atheistic and rationalistic identifi-
cation of the ‘reality’ of religion entirely with social forces, contrary to
the beliefs of those who actually practise religions (Lukes, 1973: 461).
Furthermore, although he says that the reasons the faithful accept in jus-
tifying their rites and myths ‘may’ be, rather than ‘are’, mistaken, he none
the less suggests that in Christian theology we find a God ‘constructed
entirely out of human elements’ (Durkheim, 1995: 2, 64).
While Durkheim’s personal atheism is well documented, and his reduc-
tion of God to a symbolic representation of society is well established, how-
ever, it is less clear that his theory of religion does not allow (with some
development) for the possibility of the sort of ‘inner conversation’ discussed
by Archer or, even, the possibility of religion expressing something real in a
transcendental sense. Like Archer, he emphasises a natural reality out of
which society is an emergent phenomenon (Durkheim, 1995: 17). Like
Archer, his homo duplex view of humans emphasises the pre-social embod-
ied capacities and potentialities of individuals, and he stresses that the
power of the religious ideas we encounter in society ‘cannot add anything to
our natural vitality’, but ‘can only release the emotive forces that are already
within us’ (Durkheim, 1995: 419). Thus, he stresses that, rather than indi-
viduals being constituted entirely by collective forces, there are purely indi-
vidual as well as collective states of consciousness within us, and that the
former constitute the basis of our individual personalities (Durkheim, 1984:
61). For Durkheim, in fact, the idea that individuals are simply ‘tools’ of the
conscience collective is incompatible with the notion of individual freedom he
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Believing society
As Susan Stedman Jones (2001: 70) has argued, for Durkheim certain ele-
ments of human knowledge and experience are irreducible to particular
forms of society and culture, and can be understood to be characteristic of
humans in general and precede social codifications of experience. As she
suggests, the necessary embedding of consciousness, even if it is collectively
shared, in human agents with these capacities ensures that representation
becomes possible in the first place, as well as ensuring that reality, even if
collectively constituted, cannot simply be identified with representations
(Stedman Jones, 2001: 70–1). Consequently, as Jones (1999: 81) suggests,
Durkheim may have argued that the plasticity of human nature was greater
than many suspect, but he also asserted that it ‘cannot become just anything
at all’. Here, the human capacity to believe is particularly significant: while
the specific contents of belief systems may be socially constituted, this con-
stitution process would not be possible without an analytically prior capac-
ity to believe that is an innate aspect of human embodiment. Thus, he does
not suggest that the capacity to believe is socially constituted, only that the
nature of beliefs is shaped by social relationships (Durkheim, 1995: 34).
For Durkheim, then, it is clear that there is an embodied basis for belief,
in the sense that beliefs are propositional attitudes that play causal roles in
generating actions, and that humans have an innate capacity for adopting
such attitudes (Lacy, 1998: 477). He does not take specific sets of beliefs
seriously, however, in the sense that they refer to anything real other than
the social forces they represent ‘symbolically’, and he tends to see practical
activities as being far more important than beliefs in terms of generating and
maintaining particular types of religion and social order (Rawls, 2001). It is
this view of belief that has encouraged writers such as Smith (1978) and
Ruel (2002) to argue that studying religions in relation to their beliefs
reflects a Christian bias, since it is only in this context that belief has such a
central significance. As Ruel (2002: 109–10) elaborates, in contrast to the
‘monumental peculiarity’ of the Christian concern with belief, Judaism is
centred on the Torah, law, rather than belief, just as Islam is centred on the
law of the shar’ia, while Buddhism is centred on dharma, and does not even
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have a word for ‘belief’. Contrary to this view, however, no one with any
detailed knowledge of these religious forms could deny the immense impor-
tance of belief: Buddhist notions of rebirth and karma clearly depend upon
belief (see Harvey, 1990), for example, while Jewish and Islamic notions of
religious law make no sense at all without a corresponding belief in God (see
Nasr, 1988). In fact, with regard to Islam, as Ruel (2002: 109) himself notes,
submission to God (islam) can be identified with having belief (iman), while
a ‘Muslim’ is defined as a ‘believer’ (mu’min).
Where Ruel is on stronger ground is in noting the peculiarities that have
marked the history of Christian belief, particularly with regard to the emer-
gence, with Luther, of an existentialist focus on the subjective appropriation
of belief through an intense struggle (Ruel, 2002: 107). In this regard, it can
be noted that some forms of Protestant and Catholic Christianity can
express divergent forms of theological anthropology: it is clear, for example,
that a Protestant tendency to stress the foundational significance of revela-
tion in relation to an individual’s ‘faith’, mysteriously given by God, is quite
different from the Catholic emphasis on revelation as building on a general,
innate human ability to gain some real understanding of God and the world.
Even so, as Trigg (1998: 175–82) has argued, without some allowance for
‘natural theology’, grounded in the embodied capacities of humans,
Protestant claims concerning revelation and the universality of Christian
truth could not make any sense, and on this basis it is possible to appreciate
the immense sociological significance that religious beliefs can have.
If we view religion as a collective engagement with the ‘open-ended’
possibilities of transcendence emergent from the contingencies, potentiali-
ties and limitations of embodied human life, then the particular sets of
beliefs societies develop do not have an entirely accidental, relativistic char-
acter making them unworthy of study in their own right. Weber (1965)
appreciated this point, and clearly appears to take the comparative study of
particular belief systems far more seriously than Durkheim did, though he
also tended to adopt a form of psychological reductionism. Thus, he argued
that there is an ‘inner compulsion’ in humans ‘to understand the world as a
meaningful cosmos’, and analysed religions principally as theodicies, contex-
tualising life’s challenges and sufferings within a meaningful totality (Weber,
1965: 117; Morris, 1987: 73). Berger’s (1990: 53) account of the role of
theodicies in protecting a sense of meaningful order ‘against the threat of its
destruction by the anomic forces endemic to the human condition’ devel-
ops this aspect of Weber’s thought, and illuminates the philosophical
anthropology underpinning this approach to the study of religion and soci-
ety. In both cases, as in the case of the recent work of Turner and Rojek,
there is an ‘ontology of frailty’ that sees meaninglessness and chaos, rather
than contingency, as characteristic of humanity and society. The role of reli-
gious beliefs is to conceal the chaos, and thereby make social life bearable.
Indeed, Berger (1990: 26), following Eliade (1959), transforms Durkheim’s
distinction between sacred and profane into a distinction between the
sacred and chaos, and argues that religious beliefs about the cosmos falsify,
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conceal and alienate people from their real experience of life to protect
them from the threats of chaos and death that would otherwise paralyse all
social action (see also Berger, 1990: 86–7).
Although this Weberian tradition appears to take religious beliefs seriously,
then, it only does so up to a point. In the end, religious beliefs are reduced into
psychological compulsions and ontological deficits: religious beliefs are social
constructions motivated by psychological needs that artificially invest the
world with a meaning it does not have, and which always remain vulnerable
to chaos they attempt to keep at bay. In contrast, Michel de Certeau’s analy-
ses of society and culture in relation to a passion for believing, apparent in
human experience at its deepest and most ordinary levels, is not psychologi-
cally reductionist and focuses on an ontologically grounded surplus of human
potentiality, rather than some sort of deficit (de Certeau and Domenach,
1974; de Certeau, 1984, 1987). Indeed, just as Bataille posits an excess of
social energies within the hyper-spiritual substratum of society, so too de
Certeau is concerned with an excess of meaning that escapes culture but
which humans try to grasp through the beliefs that shape our day-to-day
experiences of the world (Moingt, 1996: 481). For him, if the (post)modern
world now teeters on the brink of a collapse into meaninglessness it is not
because of the frailty of belief but because of an effusion of belief: there are too
many things to believe, and the real nature of society and the world can
become lost in this effusiveness (de Certeau, 1984: 179). None the less, in his
more optimistic writings de Certeau also grapples with the persistence of
forms of belief that express something real about humanity, society and the
world since, although their emergence comes through the relationships of
human society and history, they are not social constructions but social encoun-
ters with religious forces that reveal the contingency of human life in a more
profound sense than that implied by an ‘ontology of frailty’. In this sense, de
Certeau’s writings also connect with a broader tradition of thinking about the
inherent potentialities of social life, including those of von Balthasar (1982).
In criticising positivism for its naïve empiricism and emphasising the com-
mon basis of theology and philosophy in an attitude of wonder before the con-
tingency of being, von Balthasar (1982: 65) reflects sentiments that are
pervasive amongst diverse strands of modern philosophy. Discussing
Wittgenstein, for example, Kerr (1986: 140) has noted his view that philoso-
phy must begin with wonder, and his consequent attempt to encourage the
abandonment of a widely disseminated ‘antipathy to bodilyness’ evident in,
amongst other things, a failure to take seriously the embodied interactions,
relations and dynamics that mark the day-to-day lives of people. Irigaray
(1984) has also sought to reassert the importance of an attitude of ‘wonder’,
in her case as the basis for an ethics of sexual difference tied to an engagement
with human embodiment. These evocations of wonder express a desire to
avoid reductionist analyses of social life, and suggest the value of an engage-
ment with the transcendent and open-ended nature of human and social phe-
nomena. As such, they return us to the issues of contingency introduced at the
beginning of this chapter.
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Wonderful society
This chapter began with reference to Gould’s (1991) Wonderful Life, which
is a critique of reductionist visions of science, and an argument for the
importance of grappling with the notion of contingency in our attempts to
make sense of history. The notions of wonder evoked by writers as diverse
as von Balthasar (1982), Wittgenstein (see Kerr, 1986) and Irigaray (1984)
articulate a similar sense of the value of a non-reductionist view of society,
as does Williams’s (2000) recent attempt to reassert the value of Bossy’s
(1985) notion of the ‘social miracle’. In this respect, if reality can be under-
stood as an open-ended series of emergent strata, collective engagements
with transcendence should not be reduced into lower level phenomena,
even if they have their social origins in the hyper-spiritual dimensions of
social life. With regard to these dimensions, and in contrast to Archer’s
(2000) association of the ‘enchantment of being human’ with individual
qualities, Durkheim’s account of a hyper-spirituality specific to society helps
to make sense of the ‘social miracle’ since it recognises a transcendent,
‘enchanted’ dimension to humans at a collective level. In this regard it is fair
to say, perhaps, that Archer’s (2000) sociological vision of human embodi-
ment, while rightly acknowledging the properties and powers inherent to
individuals, none the less tends to invest them with a self-sufficiency that
Durkheim helps challenge. That is to say, for her, society is unavoidable and
in some respects desirable, but there is not the sense of the powerful forces
of ‘attraction and repulsion’ to others that Durkheim illuminates and that
those following in his wake, such as Bataille, have sought to develop.
While it is the Durkheimian view that allows us to appreciate an inher-
ently religious dimension to human being-in-the-world at a societal level,
however, it is only by embracing the idea that downwards reductionism is
theoretically unacceptable that the real social significance of religion, as a
causal power affecting people’s views, choices and actions, can be appreci-
ated. Rightly, Durkheim (1995: 2) recognised the absurdity of claims that
religions were based on errors and falsehoods, since their social power and
influence over huge numbers of societies across vast tracts of time testifies
to their expression of something true. However, his reduction of this truth
to social forces is analogous to the reductionism he critiques. Consequently,
Durkheim’s (1995: 351) argument that God is purely a ‘symbolic expres-
sion’ of society cannot be accepted, since it reduces emergent theological
phenomena into social forces, and thereby precludes the possibility that
individuals can also have what Archer calls an ‘authentic’ encounter with
transcendental reality. In this respect, sociological attempts to ‘bracket out’
theological questions are no longer either desirable or necessary (see Berger,
1990). In fact, a sociological acceptance of the possibility of religious claims
on reality need not compromise the ambition of its project, even if it must
temper this with some humility. In short, religion may be emergent from
society but it is not reducible to it: this helps us to make sense of society as
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necessary, universes of meaning to stave off the reality of chaos, can also be
called into question. Berger and Luckmann (1966: 211) may conclude their
account of The Social Construction of Reality with the suggestion that soci-
ology ‘reawakens our wonder at this astonishing phenomenon’ of society,
but their vision of the ‘unfinishedness’ of humans, like that offered more
recently by Turner and Rojek (2001), is not fully alive to the potentialities,
powers and transcendent phenomena that circulate within society, and that
are emergent from the embodied being-in-the-world of humans. In contrast,
writers such as Durkheim, Bataille and de Certeau, though in many respects
very different, all help illuminate a ‘surplus’, ‘excess’ or ‘effusion’ that is at
the heart of social life and should be at the centre of sociological study.
Here, human and societal contingency do not signal relativism, construc-
tionism or chaos, but the complex, dynamic and patterned processes
through which a social world without self-subsistence nevertheless offers a
medium through which reality, meaning and some grasp of truth become
possible. Further to this, however, it is precisely such contingency that
allows for the emergence of an obligatory character within many aspects of
social life, even though this character might appear to be under threat in a
world apparently marked by processes of de-traditionalisation, secularisa-
tion and the systematic elimination of genuine religious consciousness
(Virilio and Lotringer, 1997: 124; Gane, 2003: 166). None the less, the clar-
ification and discussion of key aspects of society as a necessary reality is the
focus of the next chapter.
Notes
1. Studies of ‘chimp carnivals’, for example, have noted that the ‘collective effervescence’
Durkheim (1995) associates with human assemblies is also evident in the ‘social excitement’
that occurs when apes from different areas gather together where food is in abundance
(Reynolds, 1967; Allen, 1998: 158).
2. As Freitag (2002: 175, 177) has suggested, what this ‘slippage in vocabulary’ does is con-
ceal the fact that ‘the social is first apprehended as the societal’, thereby obscuring the onto-
logical reality of society and promoting a crisis of representation amongst sociologists.
3. As Richardson (1994: 35) points out, however, as well as being rooted in Durkheim’s
concept of the sacred/profane polarity, Bataille’s concepts of homogeneity and heterogeneity
can be understood to build on Tönnies’s distinction between gesellschaft (the ‘homogeneous’
society of organisation, law and cohesion) and gemeinschaft (the ‘heterogeneous’ society of
cooperation, custom and ritual expression).
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4
Necessary Society
Throughout the history of thought, the notion of contingence has regularly
been contrasted with that of necessity (Torrance, 1998: 85). As with ‘sacred’
and ‘profane’ or ‘public’ and ‘private’, however, these notions are not simply
opposites, but depend upon and express a close interrelationship. This is par-
ticularly evident with regard to society. In the previous chapter, the contin-
gency of society was examined in terms of its dependence upon the
embodied human beings who constitute it, seeking to develop the idea that
society is an emergent phenomenon in an ontologically open and stratified
world. Although society can, in this sense, be seen as ‘contingent’, in this
chapter I shall, nevertheless, attempt to establish the idea that one of soci-
ety’s key characteristics as an emergent phenomenon is its power to impose
itself as an unavoidable reality. In other words, my argument is that society’s
contingent origins do not result in its appearance as an accidental, arbitrary
or random human development but as an obligatory, unavoidable and nec-
essary reality. This is not simply so in the sense that individuals find it nec-
essary, for example, to speak particular languages or use certain currencies
(Durkheim, 1982a: 51), but also in the sense that even governments, for all
their immense economic, legal and political powers, often have to acknowl-
edge and submit to societal demands, even where these appear to contradict
or undermine their manifest policies and ideological commitments (Polanyi,
2001). In developing this argument, however, some influential accounts of
contemporary social and cultural life need to be challenged.
Offering arguments that are representative of a broad swathe of con-
temporary sociological opinion, Giddens (1991a), for example, has identi-
fied one of the key characteristics of modern societies as the fact that
individuals are presented with endless choices, possibilities and decisions,
since all routines, habits and rules are open to reflexive adjustment and
deconstruction. For Bauman (2002), indeed, the plurality of choices, options
and decisions now open to people results in an ‘individualised society’,
where individuals are no longer bound into tight social relationships but surf
across social life in pursuit of their own, reflexively constructed projects and
desires. In a similar vein, Beck (1992: 135) emphasises how identities are
now ‘dependent on decisions’ and our biographies are ‘self-produced’. In
these circumstances, the very essence of modern societies appears to involve
a rejection of any notion of obligation or necessity beyond the essentially
utilitarian needs of the individual. As Giddens (1990, 1991a) expresses it,
social obligations that do not have a reflexively constituted ‘until-further-
notice’ character can now be pictured as ‘pre-modern’ phenomena.
Giddens, in fact, explicitly defines modernity against notions of social obli-
gation, allowing him to interpret even the most intimate of personal rela-
tionships in terms of individual choices.1 For him, indeed, the reflexive
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from attack in prison, while, in military and certain civilian contexts, at least
a certain amount of ‘bravery’ is obligatory, and accusations of ‘cowardice’
still carry a very significant sting. Furthermore, as Stiglitz (2001: xii) has
suggested, it is hardly surprising that the contemporary British and
American devotion to the idea of ‘free market’ economics, which denies any
sui generis aspects of society, has wreaked havoc in Russia, East Asia and
other places where Western economists have encouraged experiments with
unusually pure forms of free market theory, since social realities are much
more complex than such economic models allow.
If developing an understanding of society with greater sensitivity to this
complexity goes against the grain not only of neo-classical economics but
also of some current views within sociology, however, it is of note that there
is a strong counter-trend against such views in the history of sociology. As
Caillé (1986) has suggested, within sociology there has long been a willing-
ness to question the presuppositions of economists and to engage with the
anti-utilitarianism that developed out of Western Christianity (see
Richman, 2003: 30). In this regard, Caillé’s organisation ‘M.A.U.S.S.’
(Mouvement Anti-Utilitariste dans les Sciences Sociales), not only draws its
inspiration from Marcel Mauss’s (1969) anti-utilitarian account of gift
exchange, but also from the work of Durkheim, Bataille and Karl Polanyi, all
of whom sought to place modern views of society, economics and religion
in a broader historical and anthropological perspective. This broader per-
spective, which drew upon studies of ‘primitive’ or ‘archaic’ societies, served
to demonstrate the partiality, reductionism and insufficiency of economic
models of human beings and their vision of society as marketplace for pleas-
ure-maximising individualists (Kurasawa, 2003: 20). Indeed, while Polanyi’s
(2001: 47) critique of market societies was titled The Great Transformation,
like Durkheim, Mauss and Bataille, his sensitivity to the specific character-
istics of modern societies did not lead him to adopt a ‘discontinuist’ view of
history in the manner of writers such as Giddens, but to recognise the fact
that differences between societies and peoples have often been ‘vastly exag-
gerated’, especially by economists. Indeed, what characterises the work of all
these writers is the recognition that society, though emergent from human
relationships, is a necessary and unavoidable reality grounded in human
embodiment, and that many of the dangers facing the modern world stem
from a failure to acknowledge this fact.
Consequently, in developing an account of some of the necessary dimen-
sions of society, the works of these writers are particularly important. The
first part of this chapter is focused on the analysis of taboo, which, despite
the postmodern concern with transgression, can be considered as a central
manifestation of the impact of society as a sui generis reality upon individu-
als, in the sense that taboos express some of the obligatory aspects of hyper-
spiritual dynamics. While there is a great deal of ambiguity about the nature
and social implications of taboo in the anthropological and sociological lit-
erature devoted to its study, its capacity to challenge a purely utilitarian or
contractarian view of social relationships is striking. Following this, Mauss’s
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Forbidding society
As Radcliffe-Brown (1952) has noted, the term ‘taboo’ is derived from the
Polynesian term tapu, meaning ‘forbidden’, though the concept has a num-
ber of associations, including prohibition, sacredness, uncleanness and con-
tagion (Morris, 1987: 130). Radcliffe-Brown’s emphasis upon the emotional
foundation of taboo is developed on a Durkheimian basis, and, for him,
taboos express ‘social’ rather than ‘natural’ dangers. In a similar vein, Steiner
(1956: 20–1) has suggested that ‘taboo deals with the sociology of danger’,
in the sense that it is concerned with restrictive behaviour in dangerous sit-
uations, with the protection of individuals in danger, or with the protection
of society from dangerous forces or persons. In the French sociological tra-
dition, in particular, these dangers were often understood in terms of ‘con-
tagion’ or ‘infection’. In the work of Lévy-Bruhl (1926), for instance, the
concept of contagion expresses the social character of danger, and thus the
necessity of a collective response to a threat to the social body (Steiner,
1956: 114). Beyond this tradition, however, others have also understood
taboo as a response to a perceived threat of contagion. Freud’s (1950: 21)
understanding of taboo also emphasises its connection to danger, noting how
certain prohibitions are perceived to be necessary ‘because certain persons
and things are charged with a dangerous power, which can be transferred
through contact with them, almost like an infection’.
It has been recognised that taboos continue to be of immense social sig-
nificance in (post)modern societies. Robert Hughes’s (1994) critique of the
phenomenon of ‘political correctness’ discusses how a discourse of liberal
permissiveness coexists with a whole series of prohibitions, many related to
speech, covering issues such as race, gender and sexuality in contemporary
American society; an insight also evident in the work of Bloom (1987) and
Hunter (1991). Aside from such distinctively late modern taboos, however,
prohibitions of a more long-standing nature continue to be significant, such
as the incest taboo. James B. Twitchell (1987), in a study of the incest taboo
in modern culture, explores the challenging of this taboo in a wide range of
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ties, and it is in this context that he places the incest taboo: the taboo exists
as an example of humans cooperating in order to ensure the survival of the
group (Leavitt, 1989: 117). Jonathan H. Turner (1996), however, has offered
a radically different view of humanity and sociality. Putting forward what he
calls a ‘Darwinian–Durkheimian’ analysis of the evolution of emotions, he
challenges the widely held sociological assumption that humans are inher-
ently social beings. Drawing on Maryanski’s (1987, 1992, 1993, 1994)
analysis of the social behaviour of apes, and the implications of this for how
‘human nature’ is conceptualised, Turner (1996: 24) argues that the emo-
tional capacities of humans in relation to sociality only developed very
slowly, and had to counter a genetic disposition towards a less social, if not
anti-social, attitude. Turner (1996: 1) distinguishes his analysis, however,
from those of rational choice theorists who see humans as ‘ego-centered-
resource-maximizers’ (Coleman, 1990; see also Hechter, 1987) and socio-
biological theorists of ‘selfishness’ as ‘the underlying genic pressure behind
sociality’ (see Lopreato, 1984; Van den Berghe, 1981). Turner (1996: 24–5)
adopts Durkheim’s concept of the homo duplex, arguing that humans have
embodied predispositions towards sociality (collective life), but anti-social
(individual) dimensions also. What Turner is proposing, then, is taking
Durkheim’s basically ahistorical concept of the homo duplex and historicis-
ing it within an argument about the slow evolution of human society.
The tension between conceiving of ‘primitive’ human societies as basi-
cally simpler forms of enduring, universal patterns of sociality, or as signifi-
cantly different forms of social life in a broad evolutionary schema, has run
throughout much sociology and anthropology. It can be found, for example,
in Durkheim’s (1995) sometimes ambiguous use of the term ‘primitive’ in
order to illuminate the origins of religion: he concentrates on ‘primitive’ reli-
gion because it is a ‘simpler’ manifestation of universal characteristics
(Durkheim, 1995: 6), but also incorporates evolutionary assumptions into
his argument (Durkheim, 1995: 236). This ambiguity is reflected in the dif-
fering interpretations of those anthropologists influenced by Durkheim.
Lévy-Bruhl (1926), for example, associates primitive society with an emo-
tionality and mysticism he believes to be entirely alien to modern societies.
Lévi-Strauss (1996: 251), however, has taken a different view, and has crit-
icised Lévy-Bruhl’s arguments. Viewed in this context, Turner’s (1996)
attempt to place Durkheim’s concept of the homo duplex in an evolutionary
framework, in order to describe how human sociality, and therefore human
society, became possible, has much in common with earlier sociological the-
ories of taboo. Basically, however, these theories are attempts to account for
recurrent patterns of social inclusion, order and security, while simultane-
ously recognising elementary patterns of exclusion, disorder and danger.
Without endorsing an evolutionary framework, it is possible to see in them
an attempt to grapple with some of the most elementary social processes
that bind individuals into societies through the imposition of obligations.
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Inclusive/exclusive society
For Durkheim (1995: 304), the phenomenon of the ‘taboo’ can best be
understood as a form of prohibition that, together with others, constitutes a
‘negative cult’ regulating contact with the sacred. Prohibitions can have the
purpose of separating one form of the sacred from another, but are more
extensively characterised by the purpose of separating all that is sacred from
the profane. The negative cult thus serves as ‘the precondition of access to
the positive cult’ (Durkheim, 1995: 313). Durkheim notes that the ‘primary
taboos’ are characteristically prohibitions of contact, covering not only
touching, but also looking, speaking, hearing and tasting (Durkheim, 1995:
308–9). The negative cult is therefore often composed of rules governing
what people are allowed to see or not see, what they can or cannot say or
hear, and others governing when they can or cannot eat, the types of food
allowed to particular social groups, and all sorts of other regulations gov-
erning labour, washing, nakedness and sexual relations. Taboo is, therefore, a
thoroughly embodied phenomenon.
Hertz’s (1960) analysis of the widespread prohibitions governing the use
of the left hand develops from this basis, noting how certain objects and
beings are ‘impregnated’ with sacred or profane characteristics. The purpose
of taboos is to prohibit any contact or confusion of beings and things belong-
ing to each category, provoking emotions of fear and aversion in order to
preserve social order (Hertz, 1960: 7). Prohibitions arise from the emotions
evoked by the sacred and, despite the fact that certain magical or supernat-
ural consequences are sometimes understood to flow from the breaking of
taboos, they are essentially collective, human phenomena involving, at the
very least, blame and public disapproval (Durkheim, 1995: 304–5). This col-
lective character does not imply, however, that such rules apply equally to
all sections of a society. For example, certain ritual functionaries, such as
priests, are commonly understood to have a special authority regarding the
sacred and can interact with sacred objects in a manner prohibited for oth-
ers, whose contact with the sacred is mediated through such priests. In
broader terms, however, embodied differences between men and women
can be, and often are, taken up and elaborated upon within the negative
cult, investing these differences with a sacred or profane character and thus
providing a religious basis for the authority of one gender over another. It is
such processes that help us comprehend the difficulties women face in
seeking to overcome their oppression and marginalisation in so many soci-
eties: in the vast majority of societies the negative cult has provided the
principal means through which women have been subordinated to men; a
subordination evident in the greater number of prohibitions directed
towards women. As Hertz (1960: 9) expresses it, ‘In general, man is
sacred, woman is profane’.
Discussing the Maori, Hertz (1960: 12) notes how left/right polarities
are not only associated with the sacred and the profane, but also with men
and women. The right side, which is the male side, is associated with the
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sacred, goodness, creativity, strength and life. The left, the female side, is
associated with the profane, maleficent powers, weakness and death. Such
polarities both express and stimulate men’s fear of women, and consign
them to an inferior social status: if all that is good is associated with men,
then women must be seen as sources of danger. Many of the prohibitions
concerning women in some societies, however, relate specifically to aspects
of female embodiment. The Hebrew Bible, for example, rules that a woman
is ‘unclean’ for seven days and must ‘not touch anything consecrated nor go
to the sanctuary’ during her monthly periods. After giving birth to a boy she
is also ‘unclean’ for seven days, though her blood will not be ‘purified’ for
another thirty-three days; after giving birth to a girl she is unclean for four-
teen days, and her blood ‘purified’ after sixty-six days (Leviticus, 12: 1–8).
While a woman is in a state of ‘menstrual pollution’ she makes ‘unclean’
anything she touches, and anyone who touches anything she has touched
must wash their clothes and their body and will be unclean until the
evening. Furthermore, ‘If a man goes so far as to sleep with her, he will
contract her menstrual pollution and will be unclean for seven days’
(Leviticus, 15: 24).
As Davies (1982: 1034–5) observes, these taboos on certain kinds of con-
tact between men and women are part of a broader insistence on the sepa-
ration of categories; a separation that establishes and reinforces the identity
of the Jewish community over and against the other cultures that surround
them. Such prohibitions are evident in a variety of cultural contexts too.
Durkheim gives numerous examples in Native American and Australian
Aboriginal religions where men are associated with pollution, and thus
denied contact with the sacred, only if they are ‘uninitiated’, but where
women are denied such contact permanently, purely on the basis of their
gender (Durkheim, 1995: 125, 132, 137, 138, 288, 308, 395). For
Durkheim, the separation of categories, such as ‘men’ and ‘women’, can be
related back to the fundamental opposition between sacred and profane. It
is the category of the sacred that provides the symbolic focus for order in
the face of what would otherwise be what Davies (1982: 1035) calls ‘utter
confusion’ (see Berger, 1990). Mike Gane suggests that ‘what is universal is
the application of the sacred/profane dichotomy to human blood and sex-
ual practices, and sexual relations are deeply affected by this tendency’
(Gane, 1983a: 248). Blood becomes identified with the sacred forces unify-
ing a group, and thus the subject of taboos repulsing any contact with it.
Since women naturally bleed, a ‘vacuum’ is created between men and
women since they now threaten impure contact with the sacred substance
(Durkheim, 1963: 83; Gane, 1983a: 248).2
In this context, prohibitions can exclude women from the fundamental
constitution of society itself, since the negative cult is the precondition for
the positive cult through which society symbolically represents itself to
itself through its conceptualisation of the sacred (Durkheim, 1995: 138,
313). In other words, women are excluded, or at least marginalised, with
regard to human social order on the basis of their embodiment.3 The con-
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Transgressing society
Toffler’s (1970) notion of the ‘throwaway society’ made a link between the
throwing away of produced goods and the throwing away of values, rules
and received ways of acting and being (Harvey, 1989: 286). Hawkes’s
(1996) account of the emergence of the ‘permissive society’ makes a further
link between these processes and the reduction of sex to a consumer prod-
uct (or, rather, an increasingly diverse range of products) to be dreamt about,
pursued, acquired and discarded. Noting Bauman’s (1989: 165) vision of a
culture where ‘for every human problem there is a solution waiting some-
where in the shop’, Hawkes (1996: 115) observes that the promise of liber-
ation, choice and self-development ushered in by this consumerisation of
sex actually concealed an oppressive obligation to submit human desires to
capitalist regulation. Like many cultural critics, however, Hawkes’s (1996:
126) response to these empty promises is not to question the logic of the
‘permissive society’ per se, but to argue for its radical extension, eulogising
the ‘disruptive possibility’ of sexual pleasure freed from all social regulation,
taboos and any procreative association. For those contemporary writers who
share such ‘disruptive’ desires, the radical claims of Bataille’s sociology/phi-
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losophy seem to anticipate and legitimate the unrelenting assault upon the
societal taboos, rules and moral codes that seek to regulate human desire. In
short, Bataille has been embraced as the postmodern era’s ‘prophet of trans-
gression’ (Noyes, 2000).
While the ambiguities of Bataille’s work mean that there is some justifi-
cation for interpreting his project in these terms, such readings also simplify
his arguments a great deal. In this respect, it is especially worth noting that
the adoption of Bataille by post-structuralists and postmodernists tends to
ignore the influence of Durkheim and emphasise the influence of Nietzsche
and de Sade. Foucault (1998: 25), for example, emphasises the importance
of the concept of ‘transgression’ in Bataille’s work, which he defines as ‘prof-
anation in a world which no longer recognises any positive meaning in the
sacred’. In some respects, however, Foucault’s understanding is entirely alien
to Bataille, since the profane cannot mean anything at all apart from the
sacred. In fact, for Bataille, where profanation is pursued without reference
to a need to revitalise the sacred it tends to encourage patterns of individu-
alism that weaken society further. In fact, Caillois (1988b: 35), Bataille’s
early collaborator, notes that ‘the greatest individualists’, such as de Sade
and Nietzsche, were actually ‘weak men’ precisely because they cut them-
selves off from the social and its substratum in the sacred. Similarly, Bataille
(1988a: 20) emphasises the inescapable weakness of the ‘isolated individ-
ual’, and suggests that Nietzsche’s will to power condemns the individual to
madness unless it is connected to collective energies. Consequently, people
should ‘concentrate not on profaning but making sacred’ (Caillois, 1988b:
36). Indeed, contrary to Noyes’s (2000: 95) claim that ‘for Bataille trans-
gression is an impulse that is irreducible to religion’, the reverse is true:
transgression is only meaningful with reference to the sacred. For him, just
as the profane is only meaningful in relation to the sacred, transgression can-
not be considered apart from taboo.
For Bataille, taboo and transgression have a dichotomous but mutually
enriching relationship that mirrors that of the sacred and the profane: ‘the
profane world is the world of taboos. The sacred world depends upon lim-
ited acts of transgression’ (Bataille, 1987: 67–8). Here, his argument essen-
tially restates Durkheim’s (1995: 414) view that all contact with the sacred
implies a kind of sacrilege, which is why contact is often simultaneously
sanctifying and polluting. It also endorses Caillois’s (1950: 227) account of
the violence and excesses of feast days, an apparent profaning of what is
sacred, as an effervescent revitalisation of the sacred itself. For Bataille, then,
the sacred cannot simply be associated with order: it orders but it also
destroys, confusing the categories and distinctions created by profane life
(Hollier, 1998: 65). For Bataille (1987: 68), taboos bind humans together
through fear, but also through a compelling fascination for the sacred object.
It is this tension between fear and desire that is the essence of social life. The
categories, distinctions and boundaries of normal social life are always vul-
nerable to a disruptive encounter with ‘heterogeneous’ elements. As
Habermas (1998: 168) comments, Bataille applied the concept of the het-
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erogeneous to social groups, the outcast and the marginalised, who suggest
the presence of elements beyond the boundaries of normal social life and
thus become the objects of taboo: prostitutes, untouchables, the insane, the
bohemian. These groups become objects of fear, but also fascination and
even desire, because they suggest a world of intoxication, excess and the
transcendence of day-to-day rules and boundaries. The logic of this, contrary
to Hegarty’s (2000: 33) association of taboo with homogeneity and trans-
gression with heterogeneity, is that a state of heterogeneity is one of trans-
gression and taboo, since it is characterised by a strong sacred/profane
polarity, in contrast to the dominance of utilitarian concerns and ‘weak’
forms of religion in a state of homogeneity.
In the light of this account of Bataille, it is clear that, rather than hailing
him as a postmodern ‘prophet of transgression’, he can be acknowledged as
a writer who offers a damning critique of the ‘anything goes’ mentality of a
consumerist society that imagines obligation, sacrifice and taboo to be things
of the past. Essentially, his argument is that an interest in transgression with-
out recognition of the importance of taboo condemns individuals either to
a de-humanised existence in a ‘world of utility’, such as one where all value
and meaning are reduced to market forces, or, in extreme cases, to a state of
madness such as the one that engulfed Nietzsche. Contrary to Foucault’s
interpretation of his project, for Bataille the urgent necessity for modern
societies is the revitalisation of the sacred, not the profaning of everything,
since the sacred represents those hyper-spiritual social energies which
underpin societies yet also threaten their tendencies to reduce human
potentiality to utilitarian considerations. Following Durkheim, the ‘hetero-
geneous’ society Bataille desires is therefore a society with a strong sense of
the sacred/profane polarity, and of the sacrificial and obligatory actions that
lead us from an individualistic focus on self-interest into an encounter with
the inter-relational wholeness of life.
In the course of his critique of Durkheim’s influence upon sociology’s
focus on society as an object of study, Urry (2000: 26-7) contrasts what he
believes to be Durkheim’s concern with a ‘fixed and immutable’ structure
lurking beneath the flux of social life with Derrida’s (1987: 27) focus on dif-
férance, which implies a dynamism incompatible with the concept of struc-
ture. For Bataille, whose core arguments are very much dependent on
Durkheim, however, it is a close attentiveness to the dynamic circulations of
social energies that illuminates the reality of a structure beneath the mani-
fest, observable features of society. In so far as a society respects this struc-
ture, and the heterogeneous reality emergent from it, then human
potentialities and powers can flourish: if this underlying structure, and its
sacrificial logic, are ignored, then societies will become de-humanising and
vulnerable to decay and corruption. It is the latter set of processes that can
be identified in those consumerist societies that have ‘grown far more com-
fortable with the unreal than the real’ (Ritzer, 1999: 180), however much
they might play around with religious dynamics in a superficial way. For
Bataille, at least, these processes could also be associated with a relativistic
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valorisation of différance for its own sake, since this implies the lack of any
grounding in a substratum of collective social energies. It is only in Bataille’s
(1988a) image of himself as the ‘sorcerer’s apprentice’, perhaps, unleashing
forces over which he has little understanding and control, that he might be
said to exemplify the spirit of ‘postmodern’ times. What he helps illuminate,
however, are the dangers facing those contemporary societies where indi-
viduals imagine themselves to exist in a world without limits, and where
everything can be the object of choice, reinvention and market forces. In this
respect, his work has much in common with Virilio’s account of the con-
temporary valorisation of transgression.
As Virilio (2002: 10) suggests, many of the dangers facing humans in the
twenty-first century inevitably follow from the fantasy that humanity can
actually live in a world without limits. He notes that, in contemporary
Western societies, our cultural heroes are often those who spectacularly
flout ‘any prohibition’, from the scientists who intervene into the concep-
tion of life itself through to the serial killers and gangsters who become
‘charismatic’ objects of fascination for newspapers, books, films and televi-
sion (Virilio, 2002: 23–4). Although he argues that the only prohibition is
now the ‘prohibition to prohibit’ (Virilio, 2002: 25), however, he also draws
attention to a paradox at the heart of contemporary society. He notes, for
example, that the portrait of the child murderer Myra Hindley in the
Sensation exhibition at the London Royal Academy appeared in the same
year that the British government passed the Sex Offenders Act, aimed at
curbing paedophilia and the industrialisation of the sex trade (Virilio, 2002:
75). Virilio does not develop any thoughts on this paradox, since it becomes
lost in his relentless interrogation of a world that has completely lost its
moral, religious and human bearings. It is nevertheless significant, perhaps,
because it indicates a society that is losing, rather than has lost, its connec-
tion to an identifiable moral and religious substratum.
The cultural fascination with taboo-breakers noted by Virilio is a real
enough phenomenon, but the limits of the ‘anything goes’ interpretation of
contemporary societies are indicated very clearly by the fact that we are not
yet ready to accept phenomena such as paedophilia as ‘lifestyle choices’. On
the contrary, certain taboos remain fiercely powerful, even if some in the art
world and the media appear to exploit the iconography of evil for utilitar-
ian purposes. One of the reasons for this enduring power is the fact that the
world we inhabit is not one of our construction, but an already existing real-
ity, where our choices and actions are structured by a hyper-spiritual sub-
stratum that necessarily imposes certain obligations upon us. These
obligations are not only evident with regard to taboos, however, but also
with regard to the ‘embeddedness’ of economic forces and structures within
society. Mauss’s (1969) influential study of the social significance of gift
exchange illuminates key aspects of these deeper patterns.
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Obligatory society
The purpose of Mauss’s Essai sur le don (The Gift)(1969) is to refute the
idea that human action and social order can be explained with recourse to
the notion of individuals seeking to maximise their self-interest in contrac-
tual forms of social, political and economic arrangements. He argues that, at
the very foundations of human society, there are powerful social dynamics
that attract us into relations with others, and he seeks to illuminate these
dynamics through his analysis of patterns of gift exchange. According to
Mauss, the apparently voluntary character of gift exchange disguises how it
creates, nurtures and expresses allegiances between different individuals and
groups. These allegiances encompass gift exchange within a complex series
of rules and moral obligations. Much of the discussion of these gift
exchanges, obligations and allegiances is focused on premodern societies,
specifically Polynesia, Melanesia and the tribes of North West America,
though Mauss also touches upon Roman law, ancient Hindu texts and prac-
tices, and modern social contexts.
An important part of the book’s argument is that much classical eco-
nomic theory is wrong. This theory supposes that economic activity
between individuals seeking to achieve their self-interest through some
form of market is universal. It is assumed that all individuals, and all soci-
eties past and present, are focused on self-interest in this way, despite the
fact that particular market forms may vary. Mauss argues that this view of
economic man is specifically modern, however, and has never existed in the
past or in contemporary ‘archaic’ societies. The modern prioritisation of
economic factors is, therefore, culturally and historically specific. This speci-
ficity is also evident, furthermore, in the modern separation of economics
from other areas of life, such as the religious. It is in this context that Mauss
emphasises the significance of what he calls total social facts. Building on
Durkheim’s (1982a) emphasis on sociology as the study of ‘social facts’,
Mauss’s notion of ‘total social facts’ centres on those phenomena that
encompass a range of religious, economic, political and psychological factors
within a society. As Gofman (1998: 65) suggests, Mauss had a general inter-
est in notions of totality, talking of the ‘total human being’, the ‘totality of
the body of society’ and ‘total prestations’, as well as ‘total social facts’. He
rejected the idea that human phenomena could be divided into distinct cat-
egories. In this regard, he developed Durkheim’s homo duplex conception of
humans to offer his own view of l’homme total, encompassing sociological,
psychological and biological aspects of humans within one inter-relational
whole.
The ‘total’ approach to human phenomena involves interpreting each
phenomenon in relation to others within a society, investigating interde-
pendencies and interconnections (see also Gurvitch, 1964, 1971). This
approach is an epistemological and methodological strategy on Mauss’s part,
but he also credits total social facts within an ontological reality distinct
from other social facts (Gofman, 1998: 67). Total social facts are those social
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these cases, at least, it is possible to see a confusion of the two things Sennett
(1977) believes to be separate, since the pentimento phenomenon involves
an obligation to convey personal authenticity within what are clearly highly
ritualised exchanges. Furthermore, although these exchanges are apparently
of a very specific sort, given Italy’s particular problems with the Mafia, they
do have a broader significance. This is so not simply because various other
types of lawbreakers, from petty criminals to religious terrorists, are often
participants in similar exchanges, but because the gifts of the former Mafiosi
involve information.
From Bell’s (1980) announcement of a new ‘axial principle’ of modern
societies with the rise of information technology through to Virilio’s
(2000) notion of the ‘information bomb’, it has become conventional to
see information exchange as destructive of society and social relationships.
As Moss (2001: 303) observes, however, the pentimento phenomenon not
only turns information into a commodity that can be exchanged, but also
turns it into something that forges new forms of solidarity, integrating
criminals (and their interrogators) into new patterns of social relationship
through rites of reconciliation. These rites of reconciliation, however, are
evident in many Western societies, where confessions, apologies and
expressions of remorse have come to be a significant feature of public life;
they are evident, for example, in relation to injustices towards minorities,
the legacies of the Holocaust, and the ostensibly ‘therapeutic’ gloss given
to confessional rituals enacted on certain television talk shows (Moss,
2001: 329; see Schwan, 1998).4
As in the case of other forms of consumerist appropriations of social
dynamics for utilitarian ends, the highly commercialised and ‘mediatised’
pattern of much contemporary gift exchange points towards a deeper oblig-
atory structure in the substratum of society, though without engaging with
it fully. None the less, the potent social forces unleashed by gift exchanges
can ‘electrify’ social relationships and impose significant obligations, even in
crassly commercialised festivals such as Christmas. What Mauss was trying
to get to grips with are the obligations, compulsions and rituals that order
social life. The dynamic, exuberant effervescence that Durkheim associates
with the origins of sacred symbols is, in Mauss’s analysis, translated into a
vision of society based on expenditure, consumption and obligation, rather
than an economistic vision of humans saving, producing and interacting on
the basis of self-interest. Mauss’s insights in this regard become central to
Bataille’s attempt to rewrite what we understand as ‘economics’.
Accursed society
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that belong to the restricted economy. In short, it could be said that hyper-
spiritual forces are being manipulated for monetary purposes. If these
hyper-spiritual forces manifest the real substratum of society, however, or, in
Bataille’s terms, if the restricted economy is ultimately dependent on the
general economy, then below the sacrificial demands of consumer culture
there will be deeper patterns of obligation and sacrifice with much greater
significance than the money economy, and with a social power that will
always elude utilitarian attempts to control it. Mayfair Mei-hui Yang’s
(2000) study of the Wenzhou region of south-eastern China, where patterns
of ritual expenditure have been revitalised alongside the emergence of new
capitalist developments, testifies to the importance of the ‘general econ-
omy’. With regard to Western societies, however, what Bataille’s analysis
suggests is that consumerist impulses towards the elimination of all obliga-
tions except the obligation to choose, while immensely powerful, must ulti-
mately meet the resistance of those hyper-spiritual dynamics that confront
self-interests with social and moral obligations. Karl Polanyi’s (2001) magis-
terial analysis of the dehumanising fictions, misconceptions and moral dan-
gers of the market mentality emphasises this point in a particularly
comprehensive and challenging manner.
Economic society
It has been noted that ‘Polanyi exposes the myth of the free market: there
was never a truly free, self-regulating market system’ (Stiglitz, 2001: xiii).
Furthermore, he not only argues that this system has never existed, but that
it cannot exist without destroying humanity and the earth’s natural
resources (Block, 2001: xxiv). What he examines, therefore, is the attempt to
impose a particular kind of economic vision upon human beings, and the
disastrous social and moral consequences that have flowed from this. His
arguments have a moral dimension, since he illuminates how all societies
other than modern ones have attributed a sacred dimension to nature and
human life, but, through a detailed economic and historical analysis, he also
demonstrates how the inevitable and persistent interventions of states into
the running of economies expose the aim of disembedding the economy
from society as a utopian, anti-realist project (Block, 2001: xxv). More than
that, he stresses how the notion of a free market depends upon a completely
fallacious view of humanity’s ‘natural propensities’ (Portes, 1994: 432), and
that a study of ‘primitive’ and ‘archaic’ economies alongside those of moder-
nity reveals the unavoidable fact that the economy is always embedded in
society, and that religion can be just as important to the structure and func-
tion of the economy as monetary institutions (Polanyi et al., 1971: 250). In
this respect, his arguments build upon views expressed by Durkheim:
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onymous with a ‘market society’ (Polanyi, 2001: 60). Within this market
society, labour, land and money become commodities to be traded for profit.
This serves to ‘subordinate the substance of society itself to the laws of the
market’, because ‘labour’ actually refers to human beings, and ‘land’ refers
to our natural surroundings and they ‘are obviously not commodities’, since
they have not been ‘produced for sale’ (Polanyi, 2001: 75). Money is not a
commodity for similar reasons: it is a symbolic token of exchange that is not
produced for sale. Consequently, the commodity description of labour, land
and money is not only ‘entirely fictitious’, but also robs human beings of
their physical, psychological and moral substance (Polanyi, 2001: 76). The
inevitable consequence of subjecting humans to market economics in this
way is, ultimately, the annihilation of ‘organic’ forms of existence, and the
reduction of human relationships to the principle of ‘freedom of contract’:
‘non-contractual organisations of kinship, neighbourhood, profession and
creed were to be liquidated since they claimed the allegiance of the indi-
vidual and thus restrained his freedom’ (Polanyi, 2001: 171). In this respect,
Giddens’s (1991a: 89) picture of how even intimate relationships are now
socially disembedded, in the sense that they are increasingly free of tradi-
tional bonds and are subject to an essentially contractarian balancing of
individual needs, can be seen to reflect broader patterns of market-oriented
utilitarianism that arose with industrialisation. In each case, the liberation of
the individual is the liberation from society, even if it is also notable that
Polanyi’s account of the de-humanising suffering of industrialised labour in
early modernity is to some extent mirrored in Beck’s (1992: 49) suggestion
that, in today’s ‘risk society’, one of the last remnants of real solidarity peo-
ple experience is that which arises from a ‘commonality of anxiety’.
Contrary to many such accounts of modernity, however, Polanyi, in
emphasising the complexity of the contemporary world, also draws attention
to the fundamental significance of forces that challenged and limited such
de-humanising attacks on society. As he argues, alongside this utilitarian
project aimed at deconstructing social bonds through the subjugation of
economy and society to the market, there developed, from the beginning of
industrialisation, ‘a deep-seated movement [that] sprang into being to resist
the pernicious effects of a market-controlled economy’: in short, ‘society
protected itself’ through a series of collectivist interventions into economy
and society. Of particular note in this regard, is that this resurgence of soci-
ety spread throughout Europe, cutting across divisions between Catholics
and Protestants, Christians and atheists, Conservatives and Liberals, as
‘almost exactly the same measures’ were enacted ‘under the most varied
slogans’ (Polanyi, 2001: 154). Furthermore, in a direct challenge to Marxist
attempts to relate these changes to class interests, Polanyi (2001: 161)
emphasises the general interests underpinning them, in the sense that peo-
ple are not just members of a particular class, or producers and consumers,
but mothers, lovers, commuters, hikers, gardeners, sportsmen and so forth.
In other words, the resurgence of society, manifest in the regulations and
limitations imposed upon free market economics, was the resurgence of
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what Durkheim had called the real human beings, who could not be
reduced for long into the fictional egoists of classical economic theory
(Durkheim, 1970: 85). This is not to say, however, that the resurgence of
society was an unambiguously desirable phenomenon. Indeed, a further key
connection between Polanyi and Durkheim is that both of them are sensi-
tive to some of the ambiguities that characterise complex social realities.
It has been noted that one of the more blatant failings of rational choice
theory, the current sociological incarnation of utilitarian philosophy, is its
inability to account for altruism, which implies a constraint of self-interest
by morals or values transcendent of individuals (Collins, 1993). Coleman
(1990), for example, like many other rational choice theorists, talks of
apparent altruism that can be ‘unmasked’ as self-interested action (Wrong,
1994: 199). Following this model, it is possible to argue, as Stark (1997) has
with regard to religion in general, that all sorts of ‘sacrifices’ can be inter-
preted as rational, self-interested decisions to seek some sort of ‘compen-
sator’ (for example, Heaven or Paradise) to outweigh the apparent loss
incurred by the sacrifice. Intriguingly, this utilitarian pursuit of ‘compensa-
tion’ can include even the sacrifice of life in the case of martyrdom. One of
the problems with this type of interpretation, however, like Giddens’s anal-
ogous emphasis upon reflexive decision-making, is that all sorts of different
types of action are reduced into one model. Clearly, there are certain actions
that can be interpreted as the results of self-interested actions by individu-
als, but others appear to resist such interpretations very strongly. This is so,
for example, not only with regard to altruistic actions that benefit others
without, in any obvious way, benefiting the altruistic actor, but also with
regard to certain obligatory forms of ‘altruistic suicide’ evident in a range of
cultures, such as the Japanese example of seppuku (suicide by ritual disem-
bowelling) and the Indian example of suttee (where a widow burns herself
on her husband’s funeral pyre) (Davies and Neal, 2000: 38; see Durkheim,
1952). Further to this, utilitarian explanations also look deficient with
regard to religiously-inspired ‘suicide bombings’ which are not characterised
by an altruistic desire to help others or, simply, by individuals enacting their
own deaths. On the contrary, suicide bombers only accept their own deaths
as a by-product of their desire to kill and maim others. For both Durkheim
and Polanyi, such phenomena would not be explained in terms of utilitar-
ian choices, but in terms of social forces manifest as barbarism.
A significant feature of Durkheim’s account of society is the recognition
of an ambiguity at its heart: social energies may be the stimulus for height-
ened moral sensibilities, self-sacrifice and even heroism, but they can also
provoke barbarism, violence, oppression and fanaticism (Durkheim, 1995:
213, 417). Polanyi’s (2001: 265) account of the resurgence of society against
the dehumanising utilitarianism of the market economy expresses an analo-
gous sense of ambiguity, in that he observes that this resurgence can be man-
ifest in the form of a heightened sense of moral responsibility for others, but
also in the fascist obliteration of freedom and morality as the individual
becomes totally subsumed into society. Indeed, he argues that this ambigu-
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ity is now firmly established at the heart of the modern world, where free
market economics still pushes towards the obliteration of society in the
name of individual freedom, while the inevitable reassertion of society
against this always threatens to turn into a fascist obliteration of freedom
(Polanyi, 2001: 266). Bauman’s (1993) attempt to fashion a ‘postmodern
ethics’ in a situation characterised by individualistic consumerism on the
one hand, and a resurgent, violent tribalism on the other, testifies to the con-
temporary relevance of Polanyi’s analysis. Contrary to Bauman’s general
antipathy to the association of morality with the notion of society as a sui
generis reality, however, Polanyi argues that it is with the recognition of this
reality that an engagement with the morality inherent to the human condi-
tion must begin.
Free society
Bauman (1993: 231) has noted that the way in which the world economy
now operates depends upon the fact that the state cannot effectively impose
constraints upon the economy, since ‘the economic assets crucial for the
daily life of its population are “foreign” – or, given the removal of all con-
straints upon capital transfers, may turn foreign overnight, in case the local
rulers naïvely deem themselves strong enough to meddle. The divorce
between the political autarchy (real or imaginary) and economic autarky
could not be more complete; it also seems to be irrevocable.’ While Bauman
(1993: 237–9) identifies an ‘explosive sociality’ that emerges in opposition
to this disembedding of the economy, however, he fears the ‘pathogenic’
social and moral consequences of this resurgence of society, and pins his
hopes instead on the capacities inherent to the ‘autonomy of the moral self’
which, in so far as they can resist contemporary attempts to ‘anaesthetise’
them, can offer greater chances of ‘safeguarding human lives against cru-
elty’. Thus, while he shares Polanyi’s sensitivity to the immense cruelties
inflicted upon humans in the name of disembedding the economy from
society, he does not relish the idea of a resurgent society either.
For Polanyi (2001: 267), however, to resist the reduction of society to the
market while also counteracting the slide into fascism involves grappling
with the ‘moral and religious’ aspects of social life, and therefore with the
specifically Christian influences upon the development of Western societies.
Consequently, he argues that the study of economy and society must be
attentive to ‘three constitutive facts in the consciousness of Western man’:
the first, knowledge of death, was revealed in the Old Testament; the sec-
ond, knowledge of freedom, was ‘revealed through the discovery of the
uniqueness of the person in the teachings of Jesus as recorded in the New
Testament’; and the third, knowledge of society, was revealed through the
complex, disruptive and far-reaching processes associated with the emer-
gence of modernity, and remains ‘the constitutive element in modern man’s
consciousness’ (Polanyi, 2001: 268). While the recognition of the signifi-
cance of death for the social, cultural and psychological aspects of human
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and Chabal (1995) have emphasised this in their illumination of how mar-
ket-oriented philosophies have distorted human values, and how, in the
name of a ‘free society’ they have made us slaves to global economics. In this
context, contrary to Mauss’s account of how, in ‘archaic’ societies, the con-
fusion between the person and the thing invests the thing with some of the
qualities of the person, persons now simply become things. It is this ten-
dency towards dehumanisation that explains Polanyi’s (2001: 248) point
about the intimate connection between fascism and market economics: they
are poles apart in terms of the reality of society, but both obliterate moral
responsibility and both, therefore, dehumanise people. In this respect, it is
also worth noting that Virilio’s (2002: 10) argument that many of the dan-
gers facing humans in the twenty-first century inevitably follow from the
fantasy that humanity can actually live in a world without limits also res-
onates with much of Polanyi’s analysis. In both cases, it is recognised that
dehumanisation begins with a ‘double denial’; namely, the denial of individ-
ual and collective moral responsibilities.
Like Polanyi, however, Temple and Chabal (1995) also recognise the per-
sistence of a social substratum that always resists such economic reduction-
ism. Consequently, in challenging free market economics, and the liberal
philosophy underpinning it, they propose that we embrace the human and
environmental benefits that would flow from the extension of the reciproc-
ity that exists within families and small communities into the states and
those global relationships that are currently dominated by economic think-
ing. What such studies demonstrate, along with the works of Durkheim,
Mauss and Bataille considered in this chapter, is that the engagement with
society as a necessary reality is essential to any proper grasp of humanity’s
social, economic and cultural lot, and that a failure to do this can have some
dire social and moral consequences. The issues raised by the anti-globalisa-
tion marchers and rioters who took to the streets of cities across Europe and
America at the turn of the twenty-first century testify to the popular recog-
nition of these consequences, contrary to sociological visions of contempo-
rary youth as reflexive individualists only interested in their own lifestyle
options (Stiglitz, 2001: vii).
None the less, to understand contemporary social trends and conflicts
fully involves a proper engagement with the temporal processes through
which Western societies have developed. Indeed, the fact that society is a
thoroughly ambiguous phenomenon in much sociological theory, modern
philosophy, politics and economics is no accident: the attempt to obliterate
society in the name of individual freedom and the contrary reassertion of
society that always threatens to turn into a totalitarian denial of freedom
reflect a deep fissure in Western views of social life that has a long history.
What is important to understand, however, is that this history has a specif-
ically religious character. Durkheim, Mauss, Bataille and Polanyi all recog-
nised that many of the key characteristics of a society, including its key
conflicts, were of a religious origin, even though such arguments have been
underplayed in many appropriations of their arguments. In developing the
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Notes
1. Thus, his notion of ‘confluent love’ expresses the idea that modern relationships are
entered into, and sustained, purely as the result of individuals’ reflexive assessment of their
needs, desires and overall life plans, and judgements about whether another person can assist
in the achievement of these ends (Giddens, 1992). In this perspective, the transience of many
modern relationships reflects their inherently contractarian, utilitarian character, combined
with the individualistic impulse of late modern life. Contracts can be made, and broken, as we
seek to pursue our own individual goals and desires. In this view, love may have emotional and
sexual dimensions but these are contained within a reflexive framework centred on the utili-
tarian calculation of different life options. Relationships are always contractual and until-fur-
ther-notice: they are not characterised by any sort of necessity, only a contingency that is rooted
in lifestyle decisions rather than embodied powers and potentialities.
2. The association of women with blood has given rise to conflicting interpretations of male
circumcision rituals. Bettelheim (1955), for example, has offered a psychoanalytic theory of cir-
cumcision centred on the idea that male envy of female bleeding produces this ritual of cut-
ting and bleeding (see Douglas, 1966: 116). Beidelman’s (1973) study of the Kaguru in East
Africa, on the other hand, sees in these rituals not an envy of women but a desire by men to
disassociate themselves from bleeding female bodies. Discussing the ritual circumcision of
young men, he notes the difference in colour of the glans before and after circumcision. Before
the ritual the glans is soft and moist in contrast to the brown/black colour of the rest of the
body, but after circumcision, and the healing of the wound, the glans takes on the dark colour
of the rest of the body. Beidelman (1973: 160) suggests that circumcision removes feminine
‘wetness’, but also a feminine ‘redness’ with its implications of blood. In Durkheim’s terms, we
can read this transformation of the male body as an attempt to harden up sexual differences in
order to avoid the confusion or intermingling of sacred and profane.
3. Van Gennep’s (1909) and Schurtz’s (1902) studies of rituals of male initiation, which
explore the creation of a male culture antagonistic to women (see Van Baal and Van Beek,
1985: 127), are also supportive of this view.
4. A strong account of the ability of television to act as a channel for such religious, moral
and social forces is also evident in the works of Featherstone (1991), Dayan and Katz (1988),
Lundby (1997) and Martín-Barbero (1997). Contrary to Mestrovic’s (1997) view of televised
spectacles as ‘postemotional’ parodies of real religious and social dynamics, Martín-Barbero
(1997: 111), for example, interprets even the cult of celebrity as an emotionally charged man-
ifestation of religious energies, rites and myths in contemporary societies.
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5
Temporal Society
One of the characteristics common to many of the assessments of society, or
its disappearance, considered in the previous chapters is the belief in some
sort of radical, epochal transformation in Western social and cultural life.
Accounts of the nature, temporal location and sociological implications of
this transformation are extremely varied and often contradictory, but
embrace claims about the ‘death’ of God, tradition, humanity, history and
the social, and arguments concerning the appearance of modernity, post-
modernity, radicalised modernity, the information age, hyper-reality and so
forth. The persistent references to contingency, uncertainty, unpredictability
and risk evident within many of these accounts reflect a sense that, in the
words of Bauman (1992a: xxv), we have been ushered ‘into an as-yet-unex-
plored world’ where all the maps and signposts from the past are now
redundant. It is on this basis that sociologists can come to view classical the-
orists such as Durkheim as naïve explorers of a ‘lost world’ (Lemert, 1995:
48), that studies of tradition, memory, history and religion come to be
focused on the disappearance or deconstruction of their subject matter
(Fukuyama, 1992; Heelas et al., 1996; Hervieu-Léger, 2000; Bruce, 2002),
and that even some theologians and priests can come to view belief in God
as a quaint relic of a more gullible era (Boulton, 1997: 9). Indeed, Touraine
(1989: 5) has argued that sociological interpretations of social life must
change along with the phenomena they are trying to grasp, but, since these
phenomena seem to change so radically and so often, then we should not be
surprised if the ‘rules of sociological method’ need rewriting every week.
A major problem with many of these accounts of radical, epochal
change, however, is that arguments about historical change are actually used
to limit the degree to which sociologists should take history seriously. This
results in self-contradictory claims about modernity giving way to an age of
postmodernity marked by the end of metanarratives such as ‘history’
(Lyotard, 1984), but also in sociological arguments that marshal all social
and cultural phenomena into two compounds marked ‘premodern’ and
‘modern’, locating much of what is ‘historical’ in the former and defining
modernity against it (Giddens, 1990, 1991a). In some recent sociological
studies, this highly questionable use of ‘history’ is reinforced and extended
by the problematisation of the notion of time. Harvey’s (1989) notion of
‘time–space compression’, Augé’s (1992) account of the acceleration of his-
tory, Fukuyama’s (1992) vision of the end of history, and various postmod-
ern notions of the ‘death of the past’ share a common vision of the radical
reconstruction of temporality ushered in by postmodernity (see Jameson,
1992: 307–11). As Lyon (2000: 122) has aptly expressed it, what such
accounts express is the idea that the arrival of postmodernity or ‘radicalised’
modernity does not simply herald a ‘time of crisis’ but a ‘crisis of time’.
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that chaos and complexity theories reinforce the need for social organisa-
tions of time to be assessed in relation to the broader natural contexts out
of which societies emerge (Adam, 1990: 154–5; Urry, 2000: 119–20).
As Bauman (1992b) has noted, in fact, one of the essential aspects of
what it is to be human is the tension between ‘time-binding’ minds, which
allow us to conceptualise in diverse ways human life, destiny and experi-
ence, including the various temporal dimensions of the human lot, and the
‘time-bound’ fact of humanity’s mortal condition. Heidegger’s (1962) view
of the fundamentally temporal character of human beings also took full
account of this mortality. Urry (2000: 116), again following Adam (1995:
94), notes that feminists have challenged such views as signifying an essen-
tially ‘masculine’ approach that ignores the ‘time-generating capacity of pro-
creation’, but the recognition that all humans are embodied beings who
eventually die is an undeniable anthropological fact transcendent of gender
issues. It is a fact, furthermore, that means the human experience of time is
inherently embodied: we are ‘bodies in time’ in terms of our individual exis-
tence, while humanity as a single species populating different historical
periods within the longue durée of biological and social evolution also has a
fundamentally temporal character (Mellor and Shilling, 1997: 18; see
Braudel, 1972). Indeed, it is possible to elaborate upon Bauman’s (1992b)
vision of the tension between time-binding minds and time-bound flesh by
noting that societies also have the capacities to ‘bind time’ in various ways,
but are, ultimately, time-bound in the sense that they are embodied phe-
nomena of their time (see Gurvitch, 1963: 174; 1964; Adam, 1990: 122).
Consequently, the disembodied vision of ‘instantaneous time’ might make
sense of how computers operate, but cannot account satisfactorily for the
general temporal dimensions of human social life, however conscious we
become of the logistics of speed, the fragmentation of particular social
organisations of time, and the spread of short-termist values and practices in
public and private lives.
A further point to make is that, rather than revealing the redundancy of
a ‘before-and-after’ temporal distinction between cause and effect, such
developments are likely to illuminate its value: as Bauman’s (2002) account
of contemporary society demonstrates, a key dimension of social and cul-
tural experience is the sense that events are often completely out of our
control, rather than the idea that everything can be instantaneously recon-
structed according to our current whims. This is not to say that everything
is out of our control, unless we adopt the sort of technological determinism
characteristic of some information society theorists, which would effectively
deny the possibility of human agency. Rather, it is to say that we cannot
avoid what Archer (1995: 2) calls the ‘vexatious ambivalence of social real-
ity’ because humans are beings in time who exercise their agency in situa-
tions that are not of their own choosing, let alone of their own creation, even
though society is, ultimately, of human constitution. It follows from this, of
course, that sociology ignores history at its peril, since, as Auguste Comte
expressed it, the majority of actors are the dead (Archer, 1995: 148).
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history. Hastings (1997) has drawn attention to this fact, and the very sig-
nificant role of Christianity in shaping this history, while Rémond (1999:
109) has also claimed that ‘In Europe, the birth of a nation often coincided
with the transition from paganism to Christianity’. This long historical link
between Christianity and the idea of a nation has biblical origins: the Bible
presented, in Israel, the model of what it meant to be a nation: ‘a unity of
people, language, religion, territory and government’ (Hastings, 1997: 18).
From the twelfth century onwards, bearing in mind the immense influence
of the Bible in its Vulgate and vernacular forms, the vast multitude of texts
in the Bible that used the word ‘nation’ served to establish a clear sense of
its meaning as relating to a people united by common language, custom,
laws and habits (Hastings, 1997: 16–7). For Hastings and Rémond, it is this
biblical understanding of nations that has a formative influence over
Western societies in the longue durée of their development. Building upon
this, it is possible to see that the relative rather than radical discontinuity of
modern and premodern views of the nation also has religious origins: in the
Middle Ages, the biblical legitimation of a diversity of ‘nations’ was balanced
by the universalism of the Catholic Church, and it was only with the
Protestant Reformation that national churches and nation-states, in their
modern form, started to emerge.
Such reflections on the religious origins of notions of the nation-state,
aside from complicating suggestions that its origins can simply be located in
the early modern period, also raise broader questions about the historical
significance of the religious dimensions of Western society. One of the most
important of these concerns how we can make sense of the influence of
Christian ideas in the longue durée of Western history when the past few
hundred years of this have so often been conceived in terms of a process of
secularisation. One way of attempting to deal with this is to focus on the
relationship between religion and the hyper-spiritual substratum of society.
In the first chapter of this book it was argued that religion is a phenomenon
that expresses a collective engagement with the possibilities of transcen-
dence emergent from the hyper-spiritual dimensions of society as a sui
generis reality, and that this engagement allows the development of forms of
philosophy, theology and ritual mechanisms that can then have causal
power over the subsequent development of societies. A notable characteris-
tic of Christian theology is its attentive engagement with these social
processes. Thus, historically, the highest Christian calling has been the nur-
turing of the ‘social miracle’, where salvation and social solidarity were
inseparably linked (Bossy, 1985: 57), while contemporary theology’s great-
est challenge can still be found in the illumination of ultimate truth through
the emergent convictions and experiences arising from ‘the social sub-struc-
ture of knowledge’ (Torrance, 1985: 112; Williams, 2000). Common to
these views is not only the recognition that social reality has religious
dimensions alongside others that have a different character, but also the
belief that these different dimensions are, ideally at least, interactive with
each other.
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Christian society
Something akin to the distinction between the temporal and the spiritual is
evident in pre-Christian as well as post-Christian thought. Indeed, although
post-societal theorists tend to see ‘society’ as a modern construct of socio-
logical discourse, the Western origins of the notion of society, and an engage-
ment with what Christianity deemed its temporal and spiritual dimensions,
can be traced back to Aristotle, at least. Aristotle does not simply offer an
account of the manifest structure of his society, but a philosophical vision of
the potentialities inherent within social dynamics. Thus, he offers a vision of
the good life and the good society, which locates human action in various social
domains that can nurture, sustain and organise human dispositions in such
a way as to establish good habits in human relationships (Levine, 1995: 116-
17). Aristotle’s reflections centre on the notion of fellowship or community
(koinonia), and the belief that human beings are distinct from animals
because of our ability to tell good from evil, the just from the unjust.
Society, as an embodiment of human friendship, exists not simply for utili-
tarian reasons but to nurture and uphold justice (Frisby and Sayer, 1986:
14). For Bauman (2002: 53–4), Aristotle illuminates ‘the transcendental
conditions of human togetherness’ that have haunted social thought ever
since: virtue can be a property of the individual, but justice necessitates a
society where all the contingencies and limitations of particular forms of
human co-habitation are measured against the inherent potentialities for a
‘just order of shared living’. This understanding of society as a moral, rather
than simply a sociological phenomenon, is also evident in the Christian the-
ological understandings of social life that have had a marked effect upon the
development of modern notions of society.
In the New Testament, the Greek term koinonia is used to refer to the
early church, signalling that human society should be marked by the love
and reciprocity that is characteristic of the Christian relationship with God
(Torrance, 1985: 119). This Christian fellowship was manifest, sociologi-
cally, as a communion, where individuals were ritually incorporated into the
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church through the eating and drinking of Christ’s body and blood in sacra-
mental form, now commonly referred to as the Eucharist (Hastings, 2000).
In this conception there is a strong sense of the capacities of individuals with
regard to different aspects of human embodiment: they are endowed with
cognitive faculties and the free will to choose between good and evil, but it
is also recognised that it is through bodies as well as minds that Christian
conversion is able to take place (Miles, 1989: 31). In medieval Catholic rit-
ual, the powers and potentialities of human embodiment in this broad sense
became intimately entwined within a strong theological and liturgical focus
upon the constitution of a Christian society. Through the ritual incorpora-
tion of individuals into its structures, and the generation of theological rep-
resentations of human life and destiny, the church promoted the idea that
the fully Christian form of being is inherently social: humanity’s full moral
and spiritual development, as desired by God, comes through participation
in the fellowship and communion embodied in the church. In Europe in the
Middle Ages, where the church held a powerful influence across a vast plu-
rality of social, geographical and cultural domains, incorporation into the
communion of the church through the Eucharist was supplemented by
other sacraments relating to life stages (birth, marriage, death), the nurtur-
ing of ‘confraternities’ offering fellowship and support, and the spread of
ideas and ritual practices emphasising a ‘communion of saints’ uniting the
living and the dead (Mellor and Shilling, 1997).
These developments, most obviously in the case of sacraments relat-
ing to life stages and in the construction of chains of interdependence
between the living and the dead, recognised a distinction between the
temporal (pertaining to the world) and the spiritual (pertaining to the
church), but served to orient the temporal towards the eschatological.
This orientation is evident in Beckwith’s (1993: 66–7) account of how
medieval texts, such as Nicholas Love’s Mirrour, sought to link individual
and social time with liturgical time and with the temporal sequencing of
Christ’s Passion, so that ‘the crucifixion structures the time of everyday
life’. It is often said that time in the Middle Ages was thought of in much
more cyclical terms than in modern societies, often connected with the
seasons (Régnier-Bohler, 1988: 380), but it was also very much tied in
with patterns of human togetherness nurtured by the church, where
embodied community, symbolic orders of meaning and the ritual struc-
turing of temporal life were all understood to be interrelated (Beckwith,
1993: 53). Thus, church bells provided the rhythm for passing hours,
days, nights and a broad range of other events, including births, deaths,
accidents and holidays (Rémond, 1999: 68), but did so in a way that
sought to connect individuals to a specifically Christian vision of the spir-
itual dimensions of society, and through that to connect people to God
and to the unfolding drama of universal history under the sign of the
Cross.
In the medieval view, then, the ‘transcendental conditions of human
togetherness’ were expressed in explicitly theological terms: society was a
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human, temporal phenomenon, but was also an arena for the development
of human sociality and morality that was infused with the divine grace
mediated through the ‘spiritual estate’ of the church. Politically, this was
expressed through temporal and spiritual forms of authority that came to
define ‘Christendom’: kings and emperors exercised their temporal powers
in what was regarded as a state of ‘equilibrium’ with the spiritual power of
the Church (O’Donovan, 1999: 204). Although the legitimacy of various
forms of temporal authority was accepted by the church, there was also a
recognition that the spiritual dimensions of society were ultimately the
most important, since the ‘Kingship’ of Christ far transcended that of secu-
lar rulers (O’Donovan, 1999: 205). The church itself, none the less, also had
temporal and spiritual aspects: it was both a sociological reality (constituted
by embodied human beings with all their faults and virtues), and a mystical
reality (the Incarnate Christ continuing in sacramental form), and thereby
offered a model of community life that could transform society as a whole.
This, then, was how the inherent hyper-spirituality of collective life was har-
nessed to explicitly religious ends: the church’s self-defined mission was the
development of what Bossy has called the ‘social miracle’, the transfigura-
tion of a familiar social universe into fellowship with God and man through
‘charity’, which, in this period, meant solidarity (Bossy, 1985: 13).
With the Protestant Reformation, however, the inherently social nature
of the Church’s self-identity, and its productive engagement with the hyper-
spirituality emergent from human embodiment, was replaced by a sceptical
view of the relationship between ‘religion’ (now defined in terms of correct
belief) and human society, and a new stress on the importance of individual
belief rather than collective ritual that rejected the traditional distinction
between the temporal and the spiritual, or transformed it into a psycholog-
ical rather than a sociological phenomenon (Cameron, 1991; Luther, 1995;
O’Donovan, 1999). Here, in some forms of Protestantism at least, even
Churches, aside from societies in a broader sense, were seen as profane asso-
ciations of individuals with shared beliefs, and any attempt to sanctify them,
as the Catholic Church did, was seen as, at best, misguided, and, at worst,
idolatrous (Wilson, 2002).
In this regard, it is instructive to look at Bossy’s (1985) account of how
Protestantism’s emergence affected what is meant by ‘religion’ and ‘society’.
Bossy suggests that, from 1400, the word ‘religion’, which had been revived
from classical Latin by Christian humanists, signalled an attribute of indi-
viduals and communities centred on a worshipful attitude to God or a
respect for holy things. After 1700, however, the Christian world was full of
competing ‘religions’, marked out from each other, with clearly defined
belief systems and rules of inclusion and exclusion, alongside vague, abstract
notions of religion in general: ‘Above their multiplicity planed a shadowy
abstraction, the Christian Religion, and somewhere above that, in an upper
region of the classifying system, religion with a capital ‘R’, planted in its new
domain by people who did not usually feel or believe in it’ (Bossy, 1985:
170). The development of what was understood by ‘society’ was intimately
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Post-Christendom society
One of the ironies of the West’s religious history is that the end of
‘Christendom’, where society had been envisaged in explicitly Christian
terms, was nurtured not by waning religious enthusiasm but by revolution-
ary religious fervour (Ozment, 1992). This Protestant ‘revolution’ does not
signal the end of Christianity’s social significance, however, but provides the
religious context for the emergence of distinctively modern views of society.
Here, from the start, society is a problem, not least because many Christians
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no longer saw it in Christian terms. As Bossy (1985: 154) notes, the divorce
between the religious and the social was given a constitutional warrant by
Martin Luther’s doctrine of the two kingdoms, which ‘appeared to mean
that the social world was in any case the province of the Devil’. Early mod-
ern attempts to construct and make sense of the interrelationships between
notions of ‘political society’, ‘civil society’ and ‘ human nature’ arise from
this divorce, and, rather than seeing society in terms of ‘the transcendental
conditions of human togetherness’, often tend to envisage it as a necessary
evil.1 The Protestant influence upon notions of civil society can be examined
further in relation to some of the basic assumptions evident in the British
social contract theories of Hobbes and Locke.
In Hobbes’s (1957) Leviathan societies are necessary in order to regu-
late, through contracts and the power of the state, the competitive inter-
ests of individuals that would otherwise result in a war of everyone
against everyone. As Rist (2002: 53) notes, humans are understood to be
endowed with little in the way of natural powers and properties, while
society is necessarily coercive: Hobbes invests humans with a ‘minimal
rationality that will enable the subject to do an unavoidable deal in
favour of despotism’. Consequently, although it has been noted that there
remains a ‘moral’ dimension to Hobbes’s vision of society, this is reduced
to a coercive strategy for ‘the conservation of men in multitudes’ (Frisby
and Sayer, 1986: 19); a strategy not dissimilar to the mixture of religious
individualism and societal totalitarianism in Calvin’s Geneva (Roper,
1994). In contrast, it has been suggested that Locke’s Protestant ideal of
the autonomous individual was ‘embedded in a complex moral ecology
that included family and church … and a vigorous public sphere in which
economic initiative grew with public spirit (Bellah et al., 1992: 265). It
has nevertheless been suggested that full membership of Locke’s ‘civil
society’ was limited only to those capable of a ‘voluntary obligation to the
law of reason’, identified as men of property (Frisby and Sayer, 1986: 20).
This view of humans and society does not rest on the brutality inherent
in Hobbes’s view of human nature, but it also endorses the view that
humans are, for the most part, deficient in terms of a capacity for social
existence: the ‘natural rights and powers’ of all individuals (with regard
to self-preservation and the ownership of property) are, in society,
handed over to a propertied elite who govern on the basis of a rational-
ity the masses lack (Macpherson, 1962: 256). Furthermore, rather than
challenging Hobbes’s view of humans with a focus on their positive qual-
ities, Locke only emphasised that they can have benign dispositions, and
that selfish dispositions can have benign social consequences (Levine,
1995: 130).
What is quite clear from a close reading of Locke’s work is that belief in
God is absolutely central to his view of society, since it is this that guaran-
tees a proper commitment to moral foundations of social order, a commit-
ment he believed to be impossible for atheists (Waldron, 2002: 225). In
contrast, it has been argued that Hobbes sought to construct a ‘purely secu-
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lar rational ethic’, even though he defined the ‘laws of nature’ as commands
of God (Levine, 1995: 124), and that it is possible to remove the theology
without substantively altering his theory (Plamenatz, 1963: 21). This does
not indicate the unimportance of this theology, however, only its tendency
to conceive of society in exclusively temporal terms and associate spiritual
values with individuals. Just as many of the Protestant Reformers came to
see ecclesial communities as purely human constructions to foster the reli-
gious commitments of individuals (Cameron, 1991: 145), so too Hobbes
and Locke envisaged societies as artificial constructions to preserve individ-
ual interests. These ‘interests’, however, tend to reflect a diminished view of
the embodied characteristics and potentialities of humans compared to the
medieval view. Indeed, Hobbes’s view of nature and Calvin’s view of ‘natu-
ral man’ shared a similarly bleak view of the essential character of human
beings (Hill, 1966; Chatellier, 1989; Colas, 1991). Societies, like churches in
the Protestant view, needed to be constructed (only deviant forms could
arise spontaneously) to promote self-interests and constrain the more
depraved dimensions of humans, rather than to offer a social context where
a broader range of human potentialities could flourish. For all their appear-
ances as ‘secular’ theories, then, these conceptions of society clearly owe a
great deal to a particular set of religious beliefs and perspectives.
A similar debt, though taking a significantly different form, is evident in
relation to early modern theories of society in Germany. Here, Kant’s con-
ception of moral value lying not in nature or society but in self-determining
individual subjects was influenced by Luther’s (1957: 24) argument that
good works do not make a good person, but that a ‘person himself [must]
be good before there can be any good works, and that good works follow and
proceed from the good person’ (Levine, 1995: 182). Thus, Kant’s focus on
duty has nothing to do with natural impulses, social rules and dynamics or
the inherent qualities and consequences of particular actions, only the
rational capacities of individuals to ascertain moral imperatives subjectively.
While Herder focused on sentiment rather than rationality , he also endorsed
a concern with ‘nature-transcending and self-determining subjects’ (Levine,
1995: 187–9). Similarly, Hegel’s vision of society drew on both Kant and
Herder, but also added a partially secularised vision of humanity’s progress
throughout history towards universal freedom manifested through self-
made laws (Levine, 1995: 191). Marx’s later ‘reversal’ of Hegel’s idealism
also retained this Judaeo-Christian eschatological vision of human destiny
within his materialist account of history, though Marx’s work has a focus on
social dynamics and forces that distinguish him significantly from much of
the German philosophical tradition.
Contrary to the philosophical emphasis on self-determining individual
subjects, which he saw as an ideological legitimation of capitalism endorsed
by Protestantism, Marx insisted on recognising the collective and social bases
of human action. For him, humans can individuate themselves ‘only in the
midst of society’, while the idea of individuals being able to survive eco-
nomically outside society ‘is as much of an absurdity as is the development
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Supra-individual society
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Individualised society
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Transcendent society
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underlines his general view that religion is an ‘eternal’ feature of social life,
and that the history of societies is always, therefore, in some sense, the his-
tory of religions. In consequence, he was prepared to accept that many of
the beliefs and practices that had most meaning and value for him were of
Christian and Jewish origin, despite his avowed atheism and his conviction
that these religions were dying (Pickering, 1993: 53).
Comte’s arguments also informed Durkheim’s view of society as a real-
ity transcendent of individuals. For Durkheim (1974c), it was Comte who
had given sociology ‘a concrete reality to know’ and who, though he saw
society as real, recognised it could not exist apart from individuals.
Durkheim criticised Comte, however, for focusing on ‘Society’ rather than
‘societies’, and for using the words ‘humanity’ and ‘society’ interchangeably
(see Lukes, 1973: 82). In other words, he found Comte’s notion of society
too abstract, and too prone to conflate different aspects of human experi-
ence into one overarching narrative. Durkheim’s attempt to be more pre-
cise, and more attentive to the complexity of human societies, is indicated
in his reassessment of Rousseau’s work, which he had earlier dismissed for
what he took to be the ‘ferocious individualism’ of its argument that soci-
ety was an artificial construction of humans contrary to their real natures
(Durkheim, 1974c).
Robert Alun Jones’s (1999: 272–5) study of Durkheim’s social realism
offers an account of this reinterpretation of Rousseau. Emphasising that
Rousseau’s ‘state of nature’ was a psychological rather than a historical con-
struct, Durkheim saw in this notion an attempt to distinguish the things we
owe to society from the things that are part of our psychological nature. He
argued that the harmony of Rousseau’s natural man with his physical envi-
ronment was a reflection of the fact that he lived only in a world of sensa-
tions but, as the physical world put obstacles in the path of humans,
intelligence evolved beyond instinct and sensation, the value of cooperative
action became recognised, and individuals formed into groups that then
gave rise to social inclinations, rules and ethics. As Jones (1999: 300) notes,
what Durkheim found support for in Rousseau’s work was the idea that
society was not only a real, natural phenomenon, but also ‘a particular, dis-
tinctive part of nature, a reality sui generis’. This helped him establish the
idea that the sociological study of society should be focused on ‘social facts’,
which he defined as ways of acting characterised by external constraint, gen-
erality and independence of their individual manifestations (Durkheim,
1982a: 59). These ‘facts’ are, in other words, distinctively social in that they
cannot be reduced purely to individuals, but they are also natural in the
sense that the social world is not an artificial imposition upon nature, but a
specific development within it.
Durkheim’s view of society also built on the work of Montesquieu,
whose interest in ‘what was real and concrete rather than ideal and abstract’
challenged Enlightenment rationalism and appealed to Durkheim’s sense of
the complexity of social life (Jones, 1999: 237). It might also be said that
Montesquieu’s conception of the ‘general spirit’ (esprit général) of a society
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appealed to him more than Rousseau’s notion of the ‘general will’ (volonté
générale). As Watts Miller (1996: 48) has noted, for Durkheim social facts
are independent of will. The notion of a ‘general spirit’, on the other hand,
is close to Durkheim’s idea that each society is characterised by a specific
hyper-spirituality. In this respect, Durkheim’s work also builds on Comte’s
interest in the ‘spiritual’ power of society, however, which Comte identified
with the non-rational foundations of social orders, and which he sought to
nurture through his ‘Religion of Humanity’. For Comte, this would com-
plete the social transformation begun by medieval Catholicism, but would
do so in a human, sociological form, stripped of theological beliefs in super-
natural forces (Lévy-Bruhl, 1903). In this French sociological tradition, then,
society continues to be associated with a kind of ‘social miracle’, which is
why religion and society are inextricably entwined rather than separate as
for Weber and Simmel. This ‘miracle’, its hyper-spirituality, expresses expe-
riences of transcendence, felt obligations and patterns of recognition and
interdependence, but emphasises the human rather than the divine sources
of these phenomena.
None the less, Durkheim had to confront the problem (central to the
German sociological tradition) that, in modern societies, the hyper-spiritual
dimensions of social life appeared to be in decline, and he sought to deal
with this in two ways. First, in Durkheim’s early work there is a sense of the
loss of some of the ‘spiritual’ energies that attract individuals into social
wholes, analogous to the secularisation narratives arising from the German
tradition. This is evident in his account of the shift from ‘mechanical soli-
darity’ to ‘organic solidarity’, mirroring Tönnies’s Gemeinschaft/Gesellschaft
distinction to some extent (Durkheim, 1984). What is notable, however, is
that he continues to emphasise solidarity, refusing to accept that social rela-
tionships can be reduced to contracts between individuals. Consequently,
after The Division of Labour, Durkheim adopted a second position, aban-
doning the mechanical/organic distinction altogether, and seeking to orient
his sociological project towards an illumination of a hyper-spirituality con-
stitutive of all societal forms: specifically with regard to the modern West,
he came to express the view that post-Christian religious forms would
emerge out of this hyper-spirituality (Durkheim, 1974b: 34; 1995: 429).
Here, however, it can be argued that Durkheim dismissed the continuing
significance of Christianity too readily, failing to appreciate its continued
influence upon Western societies. This argument can be supported, ironi-
cally, by looking at his account of aspects of Christian history, wherein he
draws attention to divisions at the heart of Christianity that can illuminate
analogous divisions in contemporary Western societies.
Divided society
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within medieval Christendom did not, however, cease with the develop-
ment of modernity. Giddens (1987b: 263) has noted that the development
of modern nation-states has, from the beginning, depended on a reflexively
monitored set of international relations that have, since the beginning of the
twentieth century, taken on an increasingly globalised character (see also
Robertson, 1992; 55). In this regard, it is possible to see the increasing
importance of institutions such as the European Union as evidence of a
resurgence of something akin to medieval Christendom. Hastings (1997:
122), for example, has noted that all the influential figures in the creation
of the EU, such as Schuman, Adenauer, Delors and Santer, have been
‘socially minded’ Catholics committed to moving beyond the nationalisms
that supplanted Christian internationalism in the late Middle Ages (see also
Siedentop, 2000). Even those ‘global networks and flows’ discussed by Urry
amongst others, however, suggest that a return to something closer to a
medieval universalism may be emerging. Falk’s (1995: 35) vision of a devel-
oping ‘global civil society’, endorsed by Urry (2000: 211) despite his post-
societal orientation, suggests just such a movement.
Alongside such developments, of course, there is also an evident increase
in the importance of factors such as ethnicity for the construction of societies
in certain parts of the globe, especially in Africa and the former Yugoslavia,
which suggests a resurgence of a local, rather than a universalist, orientation
that is to a large extent hostile to those dominant modern notions of a
‘nation’ able to embrace different ethnicities (Hastings, 1997). Furthermore,
within Western societies other processes of fragmentation have developed
alongside those globalising forces that point towards an emergent ‘global
civil society’. The collapse of many traditional religious, social and political
groupings into increasingly expansive ‘culture wars’ is significant here
(Hunter, 1991). Yet ethnic conflicts in places such as the former Yugoslavia
and cultural conflicts in Western Europe and the USA can be characterised
as a resurgence of religion rather than the ongoing process of societal mar-
ginalisation implied by secularisation theorists. With regard to ethnic con-
flicts, for example, the recent hostility and bloodshed between different
ethnic groups in Yugoslavia is rooted in conflicts between Catholic
Christians, Orthodox Christians and Muslims that have centuries of vio-
lence and distrust underpinning them (Hastings, 1997: 137). With regard to
Western Europe, it is also too easy to confuse the lack of churchgoing with
the irrelevance of religion (Davie, 2000). It has to be acknowledged, of
course, that there have been significant changes in the character and role of
Christian beliefs and practices over time, and that some of the more recent
of these changes appear to be of a radical sort. None the less, these radical
changes need not simply be associated with ‘secularisation’, where this sig-
nals the increasing societal irrelevance of religion. In this regard, de Certeau
and Domenach (1974: 11–12) have made the interesting suggestion that
Christian influences continue to play a very significant role in Western soci-
eties, but that these have become uncoupled from the churches: what we
are witnessing, they argue, is the disintegration of the ‘ecclesiological con-
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Notes
1. In fact, the term ‘civil society’, which was first used in a sixteenth-century text by Luther,
reflects underlying Protestant assumptions about the need to base social orders on the interests
of individuals rather than the spiritual dynamics inherent within collectives (Hill, 1966;
Ozment, 1992).
2. With regard to the anti-clericalism of modern France, the French Revolution is usually
held to represent a key moment in the movement towards a ‘secular’ society and away from
the beliefs and practices of Catholic Christianity. Van Kley (1996), however, has argued con-
vincingly that the French Revolution has religious origins, specifically in the development of
notions of political liberty amongst Jansenist Catholics. What he emphasises is that it was only
as the Revolution progressed that a Catholic endorsement of absolutism against Jansenists and
Protestants helped fan the flames of anti-clericalism and thereby divide France into ardent sec-
ularists and ultramontanist Catholics, both of whom were eager to interpret the Revolution as
an assault on France’s Christian past.
3. Given this significant dependence on Catholic concepts, and his very strong antipathy to
Protestantism, it is easy to see how Comte’s religion has come to be referred to as ‘Catholicism
minus the Christianity’ and ‘positivist wine poured into medieval bottles’ (Nisbet, 1993: 58).
None the less, as Lévy-Bruhl (1903: 16) expresses it, Comte was confident of fulfilling the
Catholic programme of the Middle Ages better than Catholicism itself did. Thus, contrary to
Bossy’s (1985: 171) account of the rupture of ‘religion’ from ‘society’ after the Reformation,
for Comte they were still a totality: the recognition and reinforcement of this (intellectually
and liturgically) was to be the mission of sociology.
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6
Tacit Society
In previous chapters, it has been argued that sociological theories that place
a particular emphasis on the decline of society tend to deal unsatisfactorily
with the fact that it is not simply an idea, but a real, complex and tempo-
rally grounded phenomenon which, while contingent upon human poten-
tialities, none the less imposes significant obligations upon people, even in
contexts that appear to be thoroughly individualistic or utilitarian. In devel-
oping this argument, it is possible to reveal further problems with post-soci-
etal perspectives by expanding upon one of the central themes of the last
chapter, namely the covert persistence of specifically Christian ways of
viewing humanity and the world. As Charles Taylor (1989: 104) has
observed, even in ‘the most secularist quarters of our lay civilisation’,
Christian imagery, concepts and moral assumptions are present, despite
ostensible denials of the Western religious heritage. While the last chapter
touched on these with regard to the Christian historical context out of
which modern philosophical and sociological conceptions of society have
emerged, the concern of this chapter is to make sense of the continuing,
covert presence of Christian influences within various strata of contempo-
rary Western societies. The key to making sense of these influences rests on
the development of a satisfactory understanding of how society becomes
embedded within the consciousness of individuals.
Michael Polanyi’s (1967) notion of a ‘tacit dimension’ in society is rele-
vant in this respect. This notion refers to a substratum of knowledge that can
elude our conscious, rational formulations and theories about the nature of
the world, but which nevertheless shapes the meanings and understandings
of ourselves and the social realities within which we live. It is a notion, how-
ever, that goes against the grain of much social and cultural theory. In both
Europe and the USA, some influential ways of attempting to deal with
questions about the embedding of society within individuals have not
focused upon unconscious or tacit phenomena, but upon the importance of
reasonable or rational dialogue for nurturing individual commitment to a
social order characterised by consensus (Habermas, 1987, 1989b; Rawls,
1971, 1993). Habermas’s notion of ‘communicative rationality’ and Rawls’s
vision of an ‘overlapping consensus’ grounded in public reason are influen-
tial examples of such theoretical approaches. In each case, however,
assumptions about the inherent or potential rationality of individuals, and
the possibilities for some sort of ‘pure’ rational communication, lean these
theories towards abstract and idealist visions of society rather than a critical
investigation of how things really are. This is evident with regard to
Habermas’s discussion of the ‘ideal speech’ situation (Delanty, 1997), but
also with regard to Rawls’s account of a ‘well-ordered society’ (Rawls, 1999:
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Representing society
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tions, Durkheim (1982a: 34) argues that social life is ‘made up entirely of
representations’. In the latter, he argues that society as a sui generis real-
ity is expressed through the collective representations emergent from
human relations: again challenging philosophical arguments that reduce
social life into individuals or individuals into social life, he argues that
collective representations express ‘an immense cooperation that extends
not only through space but also through time’ (Durkheim, 1995: 15).
This social realist view of representations has not gone unchallenged in
sociology. Urry (2000: 5), for example, observes that it is common for soci-
ologists to acknowledge there is something ‘more’ in social life than indi-
viduals, or the aggregation of individual actions, but suggests that the nature
of this ‘surplus’ is hard to define. He notes that society has been conceived
of in various forms, from a functionally integrated social system to institu-
tionalised forms of alienated consciousness, but that none of these defini-
tions has reflected a common consensus or achieved a general acceptance.
According to him, however, it is only Durkheim’s view of society as a spe-
cific and autonomous realm of facts separate from ‘nature’ that has achieved
some sort of general consent, despite the lack of agreement about what
these ‘facts’ are. Yet, for Urry (2000: 26), following Game (1995), this view
rests on an erroneous attempt to impose cognitive order on the ‘fluidities of
sensuousness’ that blur the boundaries of ‘society’ and ‘nature’. The glob-
alised ‘mobilities’ affecting bodies, ideas, images and institutions in contem-
porary societies make Durkheim’s error explicit, and demand ‘new rules of
sociological method’ (Urry, 2000: 210).
According to Urry, Durkheim’s error rests on his understanding of soci-
ety as a conceptual order underpinning the apparent fluidity and flux of day-
to-day life. Associating Durkheim’s notion of collective representations with
concepts, which are ‘authoritative’, he argues that Durkheim’s dismissive
view of ‘sensuous representations’, which are ‘non-authoritative’, condemns
sociology to a process of abstraction where the analyst must seek out the
conceptual order lurking underneath the apparently random flows of time
and space that seem to characterise social life.2 In short, sociology, as the ‘sci-
ence of society’, must, in the Durkheimian view, commit itself to an ahis-
torical, static and cognitive view of social life, insensitive to the dynamism
of fluid, sensually experienced change. If this was ever valid, suggests Urry
(2000: 27), and he implies it was not, it is certainly not so now: the increas-
ing adoption of metaphors of movement, liquidity and flux characteristic of
much recent social and cultural theory demonstrate how such an approach
is now anachronistic (Bachelard, 1983; Deleuze and Guattari, 1986;
Braidotti, 1994; Game, 1995).
Nevertheless, this argument misrepresents Durkheim in three ways. First
of all, Durkheim (1995: 15) does not associate ‘collective representations’
simply with concepts: the representations through which a society expresses
itself are emergent from a dynamic, inter-relational combination of ideas and
feelings, and they can take various symbolic forms that include the concep-
tual, the iconic and the mythological.
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ing themata are simply assumed in any culture, and can take the form of
beliefs, maxims or categories; second, some of these themata have a ‘core’
character that means they pattern other beliefs and ‘maintain the stability of
the network of communicated knowledge’; third, various types of ‘argu-
ments’ (classifying, topical and performative) reinforce and replicate sys-
tems of social representations through systematically relating concepts,
images and emotions to core themata (Moscovici, 2001: 31). Thus, the belief
that ‘all people are equal’, for example, is something many people in
Western societies share, and, after being present in the Western system of
representations for many centuries, has now become a ‘core’ element of
modern culture. Nevertheless, even though it is now, to a large degree, taken
for granted by many, it is still the subject, directly or indirectly, of various
types of arguments concerning issues such as gender, race and class, which
relate topical concerns back to this core way of representing human reality.
A key point to bear in mind, however, is that, much of the time, such rep-
resentations are not only accepted without the benefit of a reflexive and rea-
soned engagement with their intellectual, moral or political merits, but can
allow for the emergence of philosophical arguments that deny the grounds
of their own production.
Moscovici (2001: 27) gives an interesting example of a social represen-
tation that denies the grounds of its own emergence when he refers us again
to Margaret Thatcher’s claim that ‘There is no such thing as society. There
are only individuals.’ As Moscovici suggests, Thatcher ostensibly denies
what, in reality, she affirms: her notion of the ‘individual’ is a collectively
constructed representation that is tied to specific notions of humanity, and
to specific accounts of the nature of human association. These representa-
tions have a long history in certain forms of Protestant theology and liberal
political philosophy, as well as being elaborated in the neo-classical eco-
nomic forms that influenced her arguments directly. Without this collective
context for her words, Thatcher’s statement would have been meaningless.
Thus, it might even be said that when Urry (2000: 12) suggests that ‘maybe
Thatcher was oddly right when she said there is no such thing as society’,
he is acknowledging the symbolic force of the system of representations she
drew upon, and contributing to the cultural elaboration of these represen-
tations through his own, reconstructed vision of sociology, even though he
argues that Durkheim’s notion of collective representations is now an out-
moded tool for social analysis.
Where Moscovici seems to agree with Urry (2000) and Castells (2000),
however, is in his rejection of Durkheim’s emphasis on the universal socio-
logical significance of religion. For Durkheim (1995: 34–6), the social
processes through which collective life is constructed have a religious char-
acter symbolically represented in the ubiquitous and absolute distinction
between sacred and profane. Moscovici’s view of this argument is ambigu-
ous. On the one hand, he endorses Durkheim’s arguments as a ‘unique and
impressive achievement’ expressing something fundamental about human
society (Moscovici, 1993: 37; 2001: 24). On the other hand, he associates
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history. In this regard, the distinction between ‘public’ and ‘private’, which
has been hailed as a ‘core sociological dichotomy’, is particularly worth dis-
cussing as it represents one of the ‘core themata’ of modernity (Jenks, 1998;
Slater, 1998). Finally, it has to be noted that Western representations of non-
Western cultures not only have characteristics that endure over large
stretches of time, and are often resistant to reflexive construction, as Said’s
(1978) account of ‘Orientalism’ has demonstrated, but also manifest the
continuing significance of Western society’s religious substratum. These
three problems relate to different social strata, from face to face interactions,
through representations of public life within one type of society, to inter-
societal relations, but all of them raise issues that demand some sort of
reflection upon Western societies’ tacit dimensions. The following three sec-
tions of this chapter explore them in greater detail.
Everyday society
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such as Lefebvre (1971), Habermas (1981, 1987) and Heller (1984), has
focused on the ‘colonisation’ of everyday life by patterns of instrumental
rationalisation. Owing a significant debt to Weber’s (1991) vision of mod-
ern rationalisation processes, this tradition of interpretation, although it
invests value in everyday life, nevertheless sees it as increasingly suffering
under the impact of broader social, political and economic forces, and,
therefore, in a sense, increasingly less significant sociologically. Here, the
‘macro’ dimensions of society shape, transform and threaten the ‘micro’
interactions of individuals, implying that rationalisation has a ‘self-propelling
momentum and universalising force which turns it into a logic of history
beyond human intervention’ (Featherstone, 1992: 62). Such analyses offer a
characteristically fatalist reading of everyday life, where the tacit, taken-for-
granted dimensions of society are gradually being obliterated by more pow-
erful social forces.
Focusing on the ‘micro’ rather than the ‘macro’ dimensions of social life,
however, Schutz’s (1962) phenomenological account of everyday life and
Goffman’s (1969) sociological study of interaction rituals have also offered
influential accounts of everyday life, as has Geertz (1983) through his analy-
sis of ‘common sense’. In each case, there is an emphasis on the complex,
but usually unacknowledged, rules that structure human interaction in con-
text-specific ways. As Scheff (1990: 37), noting the development of Schutz’s
work in Garfinkel’s (1967) ‘ethnomethodology’, has suggested, the conclu-
sion that can be drawn from such work is that ‘the meaning of all human
expressions is contextual’. Here, abstract notions of vast social and historical
changes, such as Habermas’s concept of the ‘colonisation of the life-world’,
and his equally abstract vision of resistance to it in the ‘communicative
rationality’ of an ‘ideal speech situation’ (Delanty, 1997), are avoided in
favour of a detailed examination of specific situations and their representa-
tional meanings. In this regard, it is notable that Garfinkel’s more recent
work (2001) has explicitly detailed his debt to Durkheim, and that Anne
Rawls (2001: 65) has used him as an example of how Durkheim’s concern
with enacted social practices can give rise to fine-grained empirical work.
Ethnomethodological and phenomenological studies can, for all their
attention to context, exhibit a fundamentally cognitive view of meaning con-
struction. Howes (1991: 6) has noted this bias in Geertz’s work, exempli-
fied by his view of cultures as ensembles of ‘texts’, while Levine (1995: 282)
has noted Schutz’s emphasis on the subjective meanings of individual
actors. This subjectivist concern with the cognitive construction of meaning,
typically through conversation, is also evident in the sociology of religion
developed by Berger (1990), whose debt to Schutz is significant. Contrary
to Rawls’s suggestion that such studies might fruitfully build on Durkheim’s
work, the danger of this approach is that it can reinforce sociology’s ‘fallacy
of misplaced abstraction’, by prioritising ideas and beliefs in the manner of
the ‘cultural turn’ she rejects, thereby endorsing the idea ‘that there is no
escape from the relativism of competing sets of beliefs, and competing sets
of meanings, each of which defines a competing reality’ (Rawls, 2001: 63).
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In fact, Bauman (1992a: 40) has suggested that the development of rela-
tivistic forms of postmodern sociology was encouraged by Garfinkel and
Schutz, through their exposure of the brittleness and endemic fragility of
society, which is dissolved ‘into a plethora of multiple realities and universes
of meaning’.
Although de Certeau (1984) and Maffesoli (1989, 1996) have also been
identified with postmodern theory, however, they avoid the extremes of rel-
ativism and macro-level abstractionism through their accounts of everyday
life in terms of a powerful sociality that resists rationalisation processes.
Thus, for de Certeau (1984: xi), in contrast to the emphasis on discourse and
conversation characteristic of many social and cultural theories, everyday
life has to be understood in terms of tacit ‘ways of operating’, or doing things,
rather than patterns of reflexive or rational negotiation. In this regard, he
notes the ‘clandestine’ incorporation of products of the dominant patterns
of rationalisation and utilitarianism into forms of life centred on the subter-
ranean sociality that Durkheim identified with the hyper-spiritual substra-
tum of society (de Certeau, 1984: 31). What is particularly notable about de
Certeau’s work, however, is that he not only addresses the religious dimen-
sions of society in general terms, but also directs our attention to the specif-
ically Christian undercurrents within Western societies, though he does so
in a highly ambiguous fashion.
As Torrance (1998: 85) has pointed out, throughout the history of
thought, various accounts have been offered of that self-subsistent reality
upon which contingent things and events depend, and on the way in which
they depend on it. De Certeau’s position is a distinctively Christian one, and
accords with von Balthasar’s (1982: 67) theological vision of a God who is
revealed through the apparently accidental and chaotic patterns of social
and natural life that none the less point towards a meaningfulness contin-
gent upon the incarnate Christ. For de Certeau, in his more optimistic writ-
ings, even in a society that understands itself to be secular as the
(post)modern world does, the ‘common life’ of believing, embodied beings
remains alive to emergent theological possibilities, regardless of how many
people attend churches, because Christ, for him, did not inaugurate a social
institution so much as a form of practice which, though it may have become
anonymous, is nevertheless working itself out in the ebb and flow of social
life (Ahearne, 1996: 500–1; see de Certeau, 1987; Buchanan, 2000). In
short, beneath the contingent patterns of day-to-day life a deeper contin-
gency, of humanity upon God, is revealed. On the other hand, de Certeau’s
picture of everyday life sometimes has a rather tragic dimension that to an
extent mirrors the work of Lefebvre (1971) and Heller (1984). Focusing
particularly on the immense social influence of phenomena such as the
media, in some of his writings he finds less room for the successful exercise
of the strategies of everyday life as it is increasingly colonised by the infor-
mation-driven banalisation of reality (de Certeau, 1984: 186). In contrast,
Maffesoli’s account of everyday life is consistently affirmative of its inherent
potentiality.
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its fundamental social significance, since the view of religion, society and
consensus offered by Rawls has particular, unacknowledged theological
roots. Similar comments can be made about European social theory. Grace
Davie (2000, 2001), for example, has noted the widespread ‘tacit under-
standing’ amongst large sectors of the European population that the
churches continue to have an important public role (see also Beckford,
2003: 54–5). Much European social theory, however, has an ostensibly sec-
ular character that tends to ignore such understandings. It is also arguable
that such theory can depend upon a specifically religious form of symbolic
classification, though this is even more covert due to a tendency to express
a more manifest antipathy to religion. Habermas, for example, has an
emphasis on the necessity of translating religious commitments into a com-
municative rationality appropriate to the public realm that is apparently
very similar to that of Rawls. For Habermas (1987: 77), however, the cre-
ation of the public sphere is dependent upon a post-Enlightenment com-
mitment to a secular polity (see Rochlitz, 2002). As Calhoun (1997: 83)
notes, for Habermas, the public sphere is an arena for ‘rational–critical dis-
course’. The private sphere is, in contrast, associated with individual inter-
ests, which is where he locates religion. Thus, this self-consciously secular
tradition of thought depends upon a notion of rational individuals, but
defines rationality in relation to a critical faculty that allows people to par-
ticipate in a public sphere where ‘the public good’ is distinct from private
interest, and defined on a collective, consensual basis that has no religious
dimension. Public life is an arena for rational–critical debate, not a place
where religious goals can be worked out.
This view has continuities with Protestant traditions of religiosity, in the
sense that religion is located in a representation of the private sphere that
arguably depends upon a Christian demarcation of ‘secular’ and ‘religious’
spheres of action. The difference with Rawls is that, for Habermas, the pub-
lic sphere is defined in relation to what Rawls would call a secular form of
‘comprehensive doctrine’. Here, the public sphere is not envisaged as a ‘neu-
tral’ space for the mediation of individual rights, but conceptualised in rela-
tion to a vision of secular liberation, ideally characterised by a dialogue
between free and equal individuals dominated only by the merits of argu-
ment. There are two further things worth noting about Habermas’s argu-
ment, however. First, it is utopian: he recognises that the contemporary
organisation of politics, bureaucracy and labour not only fails to embody this
ideal in practice, but also often serves to actively oppose it (Habermas,
1987). Second, this utopianism does not simply rest upon a failure to take
religion seriously (Lemert, 1999), but can be identified with the Kantian
tradition of Western philosophy, where Christian commitments to practical
benevolence, the recognition of ‘higher goods’ and the need for an ethic of
just and responsible social action become translated into an abstract and
rationalised form of secular philosophy (Taylor, 1989: 84–6). Given this
influence of Kant, which is also evident in the work of Rawls, insisting upon
the ‘translation’ of religious commitments into forms of ‘public reason’ or
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gested that many of the Orientalists’ claims about the ubiquity of religion
in Middle Eastern societies are correct, no matter how difficult the appreci-
ation of this fact might be for modern Westerners.
Said’s reluctance to credit Islam with the kind of social and cultural sig-
nificance he attributes to Christianity in the West stems from his self-con-
sciously ‘secular’ standpoint, which not only reflects his basic antipathy to
religion, but also serves to obscure the religious assumptions evident in his
own arguments. With regard to the former issue, he argues, for example, that
beneath the ‘veneer of religious cant’ in Jewish, Christian and Muslim tra-
ditions ‘a seething cauldron of outrageous fables is revealed, seething with
several bestiaries, streams of blood, and innumerable corpses’ (Said, 1993:
78; Kennedy, 2000: 78).5 This accords with his image of himself as a ‘secu-
lar critic’ (Said and Ashcroft, 2001: 279), and his belief that ‘the true intel-
lectual is a secular being’ (Said, 1994: 89; Hollis, 2001: 306). As Hart (2000:
10) has suggested, where, for Durkheim, religion is the moral force inherent
within social life, for Said it is something ‘immoral and demoniac’ because
it limits the free enquiry that is the essence of secular criticism.
Nonetheless, while this strong hostility to religion is clearly an impor-
tant element of Said’s ‘secular criticism’, his basic assumptions about the
desirability of the autonomy of politics and economics from religion, like
those of Rawls and Habermas, suggest a covert set of religious assump-
tions lurking beneath his ostensible secularity. Said, though born in
Jerusalem, had a Christian background and was educated in British and
American schools (Kennedy, 2000: 5), which might explain why his dis-
tinction between the religious and the secular is such a key element of his
thought. Asad’s (2002) argument that academic studies of religion tend
to take this specifically Christian dualism into the study of religions such
as Islam, is of note here, and perhaps helps explain Said’s tendency to
replicate problems he identifies in the scholarship of others.
Consequently, he can unmask the religious assumptions lurking in the
apparent secularity of writers such as Comte (Said, 1978: 115), but he
does not address the idea that this duality is itself religious. For Said,
indeed, this dualism is not simply a more or less useful way of studying
religion, but is a basic principle of his entire theoretical approach to the
study of society, culture and literature, and a key dimension of his self-
identification as an intellectual. Consequently, despite his critique of
what he regards as the pernicious Christian influence upon representa-
tions of Islamic societies, it can be said that Said’s own work is framed at
the most basic level by systems of symbolic classification rooted in
Christian history.
However, a further reason for Said’s inability to deal with the general
social significance of religion in a satisfactory manner relates to his inade-
quate theory of representations. It has been suggested that ‘Foucault is per-
haps the most important single theoretical source for Said’ (Kennedy, 2000:
25). In this respect, Foucault’s (1972) argument that that there is no such
thing as a ‘true’ representation of anything, since everything is constructed
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by discourse, is a key idea for Said, who argues that he is interested in ‘the
internal consistency of Orientalism and its ideas about the Orient’, and not
‘any correspondence, or lack thereof, with a “real” Orient’ (Said, 1978: 5).
The inverted commas around ‘real’ signal the purity of the Foucauldian
intent here, as does his account of how representations fabricate a sense of
the real that does not actually exist (Said, 1978: 23). His suggestion that
Orientalism is ‘basically an anti-essentialist book and I don’t really have any-
thing to say about an “Orient”’, reflects this debt to Foucault (Said and
Ashcroft, 2001: 277). Nevertheless, at times his post-structuralist decon-
structionism gives way to a form of secular humanism that offers an entirely
different understanding of representations. He argues, for example, that the
nexus of power that creates ‘the Oriental’ involves ‘obliterating him as a
human being’ (Said, 1978: 27, 231), and, at the end of the book, he talks
explicitly of a ‘human reality’ beyond ideological representations of the
Orient (Said, 1978: 326). Furthermore, he argues that, without the cor-
rupting influence of Western representations of the Orient, ‘there would be
scholars, critics, intellectuals, human beings, for whom racial, ethnic and
national distinctions were less important than the common enterprise of
promoting human community’: in this sense, he considers Orientalism’s fail-
ure to illuminate real human experience as a human failure as much as an
intellectual one (Said, 1978: 328).
This contradiction regarding the representations theory Said is using,
together with the problems that arise from his adoption of a ‘secular’
standpoint, mean that his account of the tacitly religious dimensions of
society is, ultimately, unsatisfactory. Indeed, despite his appeal to a fuller
understanding of humanity than Orientalist representations allow, his
own vision of the human constitution of social reality is limited by fail-
ure to engage with the hyper-spiritual dynamics, and their religious
expressions, that give rise to particular systems of representation. In con-
trast, Durkheim’s vision of representations as emergent from the embod-
ied patterns of relations between individuals and society not only looks
far more intellectually compelling, but also offers a more satisfactory
basis upon which to relate the particular characteristics of different soci-
eties to general human potentialities and characteristics. For Durkheim,
humanity was a product of the diverse cultures, histories and geographies
within which people live, but he was also interested in common elements
of human behaviour (Janssen and Verheggen, 1997: 296). For Moscovici
(2001: 14–15) too, one of the principal benefits of the social representa-
tions approach is that it focuses on the common patterns of meaning and
identity construction that find expression in the diversity of human cul-
tures. None the less, a further manifestation of the ‘post-human’ orienta-
tion of some contemporary social theories is evident in the focus on
‘post-representational’ forms of society. These would not only appear to
render redundant many of these questions about human particularity and
generality, but would also displace debates about the conscious and
unconscious dimensions of social reality in favour of questions about
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structures and are set free into the general flows’, and intersubjectivity
becomes mediated through technology (Lash and Featherstone, 2001: 17).
In Hayles’s (1991) terms, representation, grounded in human relationships,
no longer works in a ‘post-human’ world.
Lash and Featherstone’s arguments, which complement many of the
views of writers such as Urry (2000, 2003) and Castells (2000), exhibit
some of the characteristics discussed in previous chapters, notably the ten-
dencies towards technological determinism and grand claims about epochal
transformations in Western societies, allied to a false restriction of
Durkheim’s notion of society to the modern nation-state. What is of partic-
ular note, however, is their evacuation of the human from ‘the real’: here,
the human is identified with the realm of the symbolic, while the real is
identified with information flows. None the less, the theoretical sources they
draw upon in developing their account of this post-representational world
are often expressly hostile to such an interpretation. One of their sources,
Zizek (1989), for example, does not interpret the ‘excess’ of the real in a way
that lends itself to talk of informational flows and machine-mediated com-
munication. On the contrary, Zizek (2002) has recently argued in very clear
terms that using the notion of the ‘real’ in this sort of way actually obfus-
cates the reality of the human condition in the contemporary world. It is
also notable that Lash and Featherstone’s arguments rest on a misinterpre-
tation of Bataille’s notion of the ‘general economy’, which they define as ‘the
space in which the social bond had broken down’. Contrary to the sugges-
tion that Bataille was ‘Durkheim and Mauss’s most important opponent’
(Lash and Featherstone, 2001: 16), he actually followed Durkheim in his
argument that the general economy is not the space where the social bond
is absent, but where it comes into being, expressing the exuberance and
effervescence of life (Bataille, 1991: 10).6
Rather than offering visions of a post-representational world of ‘excess’,
what Bataille and Zizek share is a commitment to a fuller sense of what it
is to be human than that acknowledged in modernity, and in much modern
social theory. Indeed, while Lash and Featherstone (2001: 16) reference
Zizek and Deleuze together as advocates of a notion of the real ‘in excess of
Durkheim’s symbolic’, Zizek (2002: 30) attacks Deleuze’s ‘monotonous’
discourse on ‘the decentred proliferation of multitudes and non-totalizable
differences’ which occludes the real forces within society. What Lash and
Featherstone also miss is the fact that, for Zizek, this emphasis on real forces
raises religious questions, and brings him close to an implicit endorsement
of the kind of natural law basis for sociological theory offered by philoso-
phers such as MacIntyre (1984, 1988). For MacIntyre, the theology of nat-
ural law provides an essential foundation for the study of society since it
grounds emergent social realities in the inherent (God-given) capacities and
potentialities of human nature relative to notions of individual and common
good. While developing his arguments in an ostensibly different tradition of
social and cultural analysis, Zizek clearly recognises, and endorses, such
notions of the good. Thus, it is Zizek’s (2002: 29; emphasis in original) ‘love
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for humanity’ that leads him, following ‘Christ’s famous words about how he
has come to bring the sword and division, not unity and peace’, to oppose
the fascism, racism and economic and technological imperialism that tends
to be hidden by ‘the hegemonic liberal multiculturalist ideology’. In contrast
to this ideology, which talks of such ‘evils’ but can never engage with their
underlying causes because of its inability to look beyond a language of ‘dif-
ferences’, Zizek (2002: 65) offers an unashamedly universalist commitment
to the human grounded in theology.
In the light of this, and despite the differences in philosophical language
characteristic of their work, Bataille and Zizek are actually closer to the
attempts of Taylor (1994) and his colleagues to ‘re-think human values in
the context of particular cultures’, rather than to Lash and Featherstone’s
(2001: 1–2) starting point of ‘difference’ and not ‘universalism’. Indeed,
although they unfavourably contrast the universalism of the ‘hallowed halls
of Princeton’ with the poverty and ethnic diversity of the London borough
of Lewisham, it is the lack of a universalist concern for general, real features
of human society that limits their analysis (Lash and Featherstone, 2001: 2).
It is for this reason that the notion of a post-representational society tends
to lack a moral dimension, since, as Taylor (1989: 5) expresses it, morality
depends upon an ontology of the human. Such an ontology is, none the less,
evident in the renewed interest in rights, responsibilities and obligations that
has tended to develop alongside the processes discussed by Lash and
Featherstone. As May (2002: 159) suggests, ‘there is a growing notion of a
global civil society alongside, or perhaps within, the global information soci-
ety’, challenging some of the economic and technological processes that
would render the world ‘post-human’. This reassertion of society should not
be seen as a radical counter-movement to the epochal changes brought
about by information technology, however, but simply the continuance of
some of the elementary patterns characteristic of humans as social beings.
Indeed, as May (2002: 160) has commented, ‘The emergence of the infor-
mation society may change some of the forms in which our interactions take
place, but the substance of our lives will remain the same: the need for sus-
tenance, the need for companionship, the need to work to live’.
Beyond these ‘needs’ listed by May there are many other aspects of social
life that endure within the ‘information society’, even if these are often
identifiable only in the ‘tacit’ dimensions of society. Taylor’s (1989: 520)
attempt to uncover the Christian moral sources of modern notions of self-
hood buried under the language of secularism, utilitarianism, naturalism or
various kinds of rationalism is particularly significant in this regard, but the
broader influence of Christian orientations discussed in this chapter also
suggests the need for a further engagement with the religious underpinnings
of contemporary societies, and with questions about how these continue to
shape contemporary orientations, aspirations and needs. If, however, these
Christian underpinnings are not simply unacknowledged but firmly denied,
then this raises questions about the long-term consequences of this denial.
Castells (1998: 1) offers a clear manifestation of this denial when, despite
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Notes
1. This concept has formed the basis for a significant assault on the dominance of behav-
iourist and cognitive forms of social psychology (see Farr and Moscovici, 1984; Jodelet, 1989;
Guimelli, 1994; Chaib and Orfali, 2000; Deaux and Philogène, 2001). Just as Durkheim orig-
inally envisaged sociology to be a sort of ‘collective psychology’, so too Moscovici has
attempted to revitalise the social dimension of ‘social psychology’ through a fresh engagement
with Durkheim’s sociological vision (see Durkheim, 1974b: 34; Moscovici, 2001: 24).
2. His argument is as follows: ‘For science it is necessary to abstract from these flows of
time and space in order to arrive at concepts … Durkheim views concepts as beneath this per-
petual, sensuous, surface flux. Concepts are outside of time and change … They are fixed and
immutable and it is the task of science to reveal them’ (Urry, 2000: 26; see also Urry, 2003: 59).
3. In general, Moscovici’s reading of Durkheim is too subtle to associate the decline of the
sacred simply with the decline of institutionalised forms of religion. Like Bataille (1992), he
recognises that symbols of the sacred are representations of the passionate energies that flow
through collective life, and cannot be confined to those social forms that, in common usage,
denote ‘religion’ (Moscovici, 1993: 50).
4. Indeed, Levine (1985: 11) emphasises that the attempt to portray such societies as
monolithic and inflexible reflects distinctively Western, post-Enlightenment myths rather than
sociological reality (see also Shils, 1981).
5. Consequently, however wronged or misrepresented he believes Muslims and Islam to be,
he is not about to endorse Islam as a valuable way of thinking and living. With regard to his
native Palestine, for example, Said was clear that he wanted a secular, rather than an Islamic,
future for it (Walhout, 2001: 250).
6. Even more than Zizek, Bataille’s thought appears to be entirely antithetical to any notion
of a machine-mediated reality: in fact, his notion of the general economy is developed in oppo-
sition to the commodification of the human that he saw as the consequence of modern indus-
trialism and the marginalisation of religion (Bataille, 1991: 129).
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7
Resurgent Society
One of Urry’s key arguments about contemporary social and cultural
changes is that what looks like ‘emergent global order’ is, in reality, better
characterised as ‘constant disorder and disequilibrium’. Referring to phe-
nomena such as the rise of religious ‘fundamentalism’ and the spread of
Western consumerism, he argues that national governments may seek to
‘dampen down’ some of the chaotic forces spreading across different social
contexts but their local powers can have little impact upon tendencies
towards disequilibrium that are global in character (Urry, 2000: 208–9; see
also Beck, 2000: 11). The implication here is that societies, which are local,
are relatively powerless and insignificant in relation to global flows and
forces, thus necessitating a post-societal form of analysis. Similar implica-
tions are evident in a range of other types of social, economic and political
studies, particularly amongst those that interpret global changes through
market models concerned with the free flow of capital (Stiglitz, 2001). It is
also notable, however, that this stress on the relative insignificance of soci-
ety in relation to global forces tends to co-exist with the view that religion
has become separated from particular societal contexts. In market-oriented
theoretical models, this takes the form of reducing religion to one more
global commodity to be bought and sold in an increasingly free market
(Iannaccone, 1997). Within more culturally oriented models, religious belief
and activity become symbolic of those global forces that render societies
insignificant. Thus, for Urry (2000: 209), jihad can be associated with the
‘identity politics’ of the new ‘global disorder’ rather than with particular
societal or traditional religious forms.
The aims of this chapter are to suggest that such views are misconceived,
and to propose a more productive way of assessing some contemporary
social and cultural conflicts. Within a sociological perspective that acknowl-
edges the contingency of social and cultural forms upon human characteris-
tics and potentialities, that takes sufficient account of the sui generis
dimensions of societies as emergent forms, and that seeks to engage with the
hyper-spiritual orientation towards transcendence built into social relation-
ships, the idea that social and religious forces can become entirely chaotic or
commodified phenomena, cut adrift from particular societal forms, looks
highly implausible because it ignores the specifically human basis of social
and cultural realities. Indeed, from a social realist point of view, the true
character of some of the contemporary global transformations that mark the
present can only be understood if they are analysed in relation to the
human, societal and religious contexts that facilitate their emergence. In this
regard, what looks like a post-human, post-societal or post-religious set of
global flows and markets to writers such as Urry and Castells can be, in real-
ity, understood as the resurgence of those phenomena such global transfor-
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mations appear to render obsolete. Further to this, there are three key argu-
ments developed throughout this chapter, all of which can help illuminate
the resurgent significance of societies and their intimate connections with
religions.
First, it is argued that Huntington’s (1993, 1996) ‘clash of civilisations’
thesis is of value in that it directs sociological attention to the fact that
between ‘national societies’ and ‘global disorder’ there are emergent civili-
sational forms that need to be taken seriously; second, it is argued that the
global resurgence of Islam can be understood as a resurgence of society,
rather than some sort of ‘fundamentalist’ rejection of modernity; and third,
it is argued that this Islamic resurgence provides a further stimulus to the
reassessment of the Christian legacy for Western societies. In relation to the
first of these arguments, the intention here is to establish the idea that some
of the most important global conflicts and problems facing the world today
may indeed be transcendent of particular societies but that this does not
render society redundant any more than participation in society renders
individuals insignificant: societies not only remain important because ‘civil-
isations’ are emergent from them, but also because civilisations necessarily
find their expression through particular societal forms. Further to this, and
building upon the arguments about the hyper-spiritual dimensions of soci-
ety discussed in earlier chapters, it is argued here that civilisations develop
specific characters through the influence of their religious substrata.
With regard to the second of these key arguments, it has already been
noted that a significant feature of Durkheim’s account of society is the
recognition of an ambiguity at its heart, in the sense that the social energies
that can be a stimulus for heightened moral sensibilities can also provoke
barbarism, violence, oppression and fanaticism (Durkheim, 1995: 213, 417).
Further to this, Karl Polanyi (2001: 265) has argued that, historically, the
resurgence of society against the dehumanising utilitarianism of the market
economy has taken a number of extreme forms, including those of fascism
and communism. Specifically, his argument is that in a world apparently
dominated by market forces two extreme options can impose themselves
upon people regarding the reality of society: the first, adopted by liberal phi-
losophy, is ‘to remain faithful to an illusionary idea of freedom and deny the
reality of society’; the second, expressed through fascism and communism,
is ‘to accept that reality and reject the idea of freedom’ (Polanyi, 2001: 266).
Originally written in the 1940s, Polanyi’s argument here helps throw new
light on the post-September 11th world: the first of these options reflects a
dominant view within certain sections of the Western world; the second
option is, arguably, close to that taken up by many contemporary followers
of Islam.
While Polanyi ostensibly focuses on these two options, however, he
implicitly offers a third: his concern for the uniqueness and autonomy of
individuals, balanced by an acceptance of the reality of society as a neces-
sary context for a life of freedom and justice, has, as he acknowledges,
Christian sources (Polanyi, 2001: 268). Polanyi’s critique of economic
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Hyper-national society
The term ‘clash of civilisations’ was first used by Bernard Lewis (1990) to
refer to the resurgence of conflicts between Islam and the West, but Samuel
Huntington’s development of this idea in an article (1993), and then a book
of the same title (1996) has proved a particularly influential, if much dis-
puted, contribution to political debates about emerging global conflicts.
While Urry’s (2000: 19) consideration of an emergent global level of social
and cultural relations focuses on its post-societal characteristics, in the sense
that various mobilities, flows and chaotic forces are presumed to circulate
independently of societies, Huntington’s arguments centre on a notion of
‘civilisations’ which sees them as phenomena transcendent of, but emergent
from, societies. His notion of ‘civilisation’ draws from a number of sources,
and includes a number of different features, though it relies heavily upon
Durkheim and Mauss’s (1971) focus on civilisation as an emergent ‘moral
milieu’ encompassing particular groups of nations or societies, and Braudel’s
(1980, 1994) idea that civilisations endure, and develop, over the longue
durée of human history (Huntington, 1996: 41–4). Although Huntington
considers a number of sources for different forms of civilisation, he empha-
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Muslim societies they tend to have a negligible impact upon religious ori-
entations: indeed, he argues that it is only modern Western arrogance with
regard to other societies, and Westerners’ ignorance about the basis of their
own civilisation, that leads to such assumptions about the power of con-
sumer-related economic and cultural processes (Huntington, 1996: 58). In
fact, the resurgence of Islam has been characteristically associated with
young, modern-oriented, well-educated urban populations, not conserva-
tive, backwards looking, older generations (Huntington, 1996: 101; see
Lannes, 1991; Esposito, 1992). Here, Huntington is acknowledging that reli-
gion can be very deeply embedded within societies, and that the Western
assumption that modernisation and secularisation necessarily go hand in
hand reflects a failure to grasp the real sources of the most powerful social
representations through which people make sense of society and the world.
In short, much of what is ‘modern’, including technological, scientific and
market-related processes, can have a significant impact upon certain strata
within societies, but does not necessarily reach down into the hyper-spiri-
tual and religious levels of social reality that shape societies as sui generis
phenomena.
A second factor Huntington emphasises, which builds upon his recogni-
tion of the deeply embedded power of religion, is that the contemporary
resurgence of Islam cannot be associated with an ‘extreme’ minority, but
with a general reassertion of Islamic beliefs and practices evident in personal
commitments and actions, as well as in the social, political and philosophi-
cal orientations through which Islamic societies structure their activities,
and in the increasing attempts by Muslim states to build international
Islamic coalitions (Huntington, 1996: 110; Hillal Dessouki, 1982: 9–13;
Esposito, 1992: 12). What is significant here is that Huntington resists the
modern sociological assumption that strong religious commitments are
characteristic of only a small, ‘deviant minority’ or those types of society
deemed to be somehow less sophisticated and knowledgeable than those of
the West (Berger, 1990). On the contrary, he not only challenges Western
arrogance in this respect, but also points towards the fundamental signifi-
cance of religion for contemporary social, political and cultural theory: what
he recognises is that strong Islamic commitments are not the preserve of
individuals or particular groups of individuals, but of societies and, beyond
them, of civilisations.
A third factor Huntington (1996: 217) emphasises, however, which is
particularly significant in terms of his claims about an Islamic ‘threat’ to
Western civilisation, and which follows from the two factors noted above, is
that the ‘underlying problem for the West is not Islamic fundamentalism’,
but Islam in general. Here, he is interested primarily in the subject of reli-
gion and violence. As Huntington (1996: 217) stresses, Western political
leaders have tended to state that violent acts in the name of Islam are per-
petuated by an ‘extreme’ minority, that Islam is in essence a religion of
peace, and that ‘moderate’ Muslims condemn such violence when it occurs.
He not only suggests that these claims lack evidence, however, but also
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for offering a view of inter-societal relationships that offers little hope for
any common sense of purpose or solidarity across religious divides, it never-
theless builds on a tradition of social theory that dates back to Weber, for
whom such differences were also of great significance. Viewed within a
social realist perspective, it is possible to mitigate the bleakness of
Huntington’s analysis by noting that differences in religion and society
emerge from common human conditions and characteristics, and that,
therefore, potentialities for mutual ‘recognition’ and emergent forms of sol-
idarity are always present (Taylor, 1994). This should not detract from the
fact that such differences are real, however, since, as emergent phenomena,
they continue to be of irreducible contemporary significance, and help us to
understand why it is that in those parts of the world where Buddhist,
Hindu, Sikh or other religions dominate, some of the same economic, polit-
ical and cultural resentments that mark Islamic societies have not resulted in
a ‘holy war’ against the West.
The arguments offered by Huntington have, of course, been subject to a
great deal of criticism. Skidmore’s (1998) comments are symptomatic of
many of these in that he suggests Huntington offers a too homogeneous pic-
ture of Islamic societies, and that, more broadly, he underestimates the sig-
nificance of economic forces and overestimates the significance of religious
ones. What is notable here, aside from the merits or demerits of
Huntington’s arguments about the specific character of Islam, is the reluc-
tance to accord religion any sort of fundamental social and political signifi-
cance. A similar reluctance is evident in Eisenstadt’s (2000) attempt to add
subtlety to Huntington’s analysis by agreeing that religions provide broad
civilisational frameworks for contemporary social and political develop-
ments, but none the less arguing, in the manner of Giddens (1990, 1991a),
that these religions have been reflexively reconstructed through modern
cultural, economic and political processes. In short, religion remains of sec-
ondary importance when viewed in relation to modernity, even if the resur-
gence of religion necessitates the development of a notion of ‘multiple
modernities’. Notably, these sorts of arguments have tended to prevail
amongst sociologists even after the Islamic terrorist attacks on the World
Trade Center in New York on September 11th 2001, as well as amongst
international relations theorists, who have been even more reluctant to
acknowledge the public vitality of religion (Philpott, 2002).
Violent society
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cant impact on recent American political science and foreign policy (see
McCormick, 1998; i e k , 2002: 109). Turner (2002: 107–8) emphasises
Schmitt’s Roman Catholic theological commitments in his account of how
Schmitt saw in Catholicism a defence against cultural relativism, and how
Schmitt developed a political theology that divides the world into ‘friend’
and ‘foe’. It is in these (Catholic) terms that Islam can be represented as an
enemy expressing religious values contradictory of those that underpin the
Western world. For Turner, rather than Islam representing a real threat to the
real underpinnings of Western civilisation, what Schmitt and Huntington
express are fears expressive of a long history of Christian misrepresentations
of Islam; these fears, furthermore, arise from a marginal (Catholic) religious
viewpoint rather than from the ‘liberal denominational Protestantism’ that
has an ‘elective affinity’ with capitalism in its relativism and consumerism
(Turner, 2002: 117).
Turner, like Habermas (1989a), is clearly unsympathetic towards
Schmitt’s arguments, seeing him as an essentially conservative figure, despite
acknowledging his influence upon both left and right in American political
science. Nevertheless, Schmitt, like Huntington, takes religious factors seri-
ously rather than reducing them into economic grievances, legitimations of
consumerism or culturally relative misrepresentations of other ‘more impor-
tant’ factors. In accusing Huntington, Fukuyama and Barber of ‘the recre-
ation of Orientalism’, Turner (2002: 112), in contrast, offers a highly
selective, and ultimately unconvincing, account of religion.
There are many aspects of Huntington’s arguments that Turner does not
engage with, including the point that young Muslims can combine a liking
for Coke, jeans and pop music with a devotion to Islam that can extend to
martyrdom (Huntington, 1996: 58), but the key problem with Turner’s cri-
tique is that he does not take religion seriously as an elementary feature of
society. Although Turner’s work in the sociology of religion has focused on
the relationship between religion and power, social control, economics and
historical development (see Turner, 1991), his location of the origins of reli-
gion in ‘unmediated inner experiences’ presupposes that religion and soci-
ety are fundamentally distinct phenomena (see Turner and Rojek, 2001:
131). There are two things to note about this. First, it reflects Turner’s debt
to Weber, who expressed a similar view, and it informs his argument that
jihad ‘refers primarily to an internal spiritual struggle’, and that its
social/military dimensions are ‘secondary’ (Turner, 2002: 112). Second,
however, Turner’s view of religion leads him to underestimate the sociolog-
ical significance of Islam as a historical reality.
In the past, Turner (1991: 32–3) has suggested that the pessimism of
Said’s analysis of Orientalism can be overcome by focusing on the essential
sameness of different cultures or religions, a focus exemplified by his sim-
plistic equation of jihad with the Crusades.3 Post-September 11th, seeking
to counter contemporary ‘misrepresentations’ of Islam, Turner (2002: 112)
also argues that Islamic and Christian forms of ‘fundamentalism’ are essen-
tially interchangeable, though he does not seem to take either very seriously:
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Virulent society
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Suicidal society
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tively. Also agreeing with Virilio, he rejects the notion that Islam has any
innate propensity to violence and, instead, interprets the ‘clash of civilisa-
tions’ as a clash within the one dominant civilisation of global capitalism
(Zizek, 2002: 41). Indeed, he suggests that ‘the Muslim fundamentalists are
not true fundamentalists, they are already “modernists”, a product and a
phenomenon of global capitalism – they stand for the way the Arab world
strives to accommodate itself to global capitalism’ (Zizek, 2002: 52). There
is an element of economic reductionism in Zizek’s argument here: he
explicitly says so, in fact (Zizek, 2002: 42), but his argument is also notable
in that, like Virilio, the events of September 11th are somehow deemed to
be the West’s own fault. Rather than locating this fault in the ‘Satanic’
temptations of techno-science, however, Zizek’s arguments are closer to
those of Barber in focusing on the destructive implications of global capi-
talism, though he goes further than Barber in the sense that jihad is not an
act of resistance to capitalism, but a further manifestation of the nihilism it
actively endorses. Leaving aside the fact that Zizek’s economic reductionism
effectively robs the Muslim terrorists of any moral responsibility for the
killing of thousands of people, such arguments at least have the merit of
directing our attention to questions about the sort of societies Western
democracies have become. Indeed, just as Virilio (2002: 79) talks of ‘our
enfeebled, senile democracies’, Zizek (2002: 64–5) discusses how European
and American societies are increasingly losing their grip on social reality
through the relativism, multiculturalism and solipsism encouraged by the
globalised spread of market forces. In this regard, Zizek is worth discussing
further since, while he resists the apocalyptic Christian Messianism of
Virilio, he none the less argues for the necessity of building on the West’s
Christian legacy, even in a society that understands itself as ‘multicultural’.
Although Huntington finds it difficult to imagine the Christian founda-
tion of Western civilisation disappearing completely, he criticises the domi-
nant ethos of ‘multiculturalism’ for actively denying the European religious,
philosophical and political heritage, and thereby promoting a cultural amne-
sia that will make the West vulnerable to internal decay and external threats
(Huntington, 1996: 305). While it is all too easy to dismiss such arguments
as ‘conservative ideology’ (Kellner, 2002: 148), it is notable that they are also
echoed in those more radical political writings cognisant of the fact that
multiculturalism emerged as the more progressive forms of politics associ-
ated with socialism fell into decline (Zaretsky, 1995: 245). Here, the real co-
existence of different religious and cultural orientations is not the issue:
what is subjected to criticism is multiculturalism as an ideology.
The ideological aspects of multiculturalism have been discussed by a
number of writers (Vertovec, 1996; Hjerm, 2000; Alexander, 2001). These
aspects can take quite different forms, ranging from a commitment to a ‘rel-
ativising universalism’ that anticipates the development of an intercultural
global society, through to a valorisation of difference that appears to reject
any form of universalism (Alexander, 2001: 237). In each of these forms,
however, there is an ideological critique of existing or historical patterns of
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Charitable society
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social and cultural diversity cannot slip into a relativism that endorses moral
indifference or inaction. This is why, for both of them, tendencies towards
the deconstruction of society in forms of utilitarian or postmodern thought
have to be resisted: in the end, such approaches are thoroughly de-human-
ising, even if they appear in the garb of a celebration of cultural diversity.
Taken together, the arguments of Zizek, Walzer and Bauman also suggest
a productive way out of the ‘clash of civilisations’ considered in this chap-
ter. The analysis of the resurgence of religion and society offered here has
pointed towards the inadequacy of those sociological visions of contempo-
rary conflicts as ‘chaotic’ phenomena within post-societal ‘global flows’, and
found much to endorse in Huntington’s sensitivity to the importance of par-
ticular religious forms in understanding contemporary global conflicts. In
this respect, Huntington’s arguments that Islam can embrace modernity
without embracing Western institutions and values, that the Islamic resur-
gence cannot be identified with an ‘extreme’ minority, and that Islam offers
legitimations for violence not found in other traditions, should be taken seri-
ously by sociologists, even if some of these arguments demand qualifications
and raise further sets of questions. While the evidence of a number of assess-
ments of the events of September 11th suggest the continuing lack of a seri-
ous engagement with the fundamental sociological significance of religion
for society, however, the arguments of Zizek and Bauman, in particular, sug-
gest that a proper reassessment of the Christian foundations of Western
societies might provide contemporary social theory with some valuable
resources for engaging with contemporary global challenges and conflicts:
rather than accepting those visions of a dichotomous structuring of social
reality offered by either Huntington or by Islamic accounts of the ‘lands of
Muslims’ and the ‘lands of war’, what the Christian notion of charity
demands is a real attentiveness to irreducible difference and particularity
that cannot be separated from a sense of solidarity and moral responsibility
that is universal and inviolable.7 The necessity of further sociological reflec-
tion upon this notion can be illuminated by recalling Durkheim’s arguments
concerning the moral dimensions of sociology which, despite other differ-
ences, have much in common with the arguments offered by Zizek and
Bauman.
As Jenkins (1998: 91) has noted, for Durkheim, the sociologist expresses
and participates in the circulation of those social forces that are described
and analysed in sociological studies. In other words, since sociology ‘partici-
pates in these forces, it may contribute to them: the sociological vocation is
inescapably political and ethical, because it is a human practice’. This under-
standing of sociology departs from the naïve objectivism of positivist visions
of a ‘value-free’ social science, and from the extreme relativism of post-
modern philosophies (see Sayer, 2000: 174–5). It demands that sociologists
take responsibility for the arguments, implications and consequences of
their academic work, since these surely have some sort of an effect upon the
collaborative endeavour that is human life, however modest, contingent and
limited they might be. In this regard, shying away from difficult questions
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about the real challenges and conflicts emergent from different religious and
societal contexts is both sociologically unsustainable and morally irresponsi-
ble, as is that collective amnesia, widespread amongst sociologists, concern-
ing the specifically Christian foundations of Western societies. On the other
hand, however, allowing the recognition of difference to evolve into visions
of dichotomous civilisations that discount the common human characteris-
tics, potentialities and obligations that underpin divergent forms of society
is not only likely to provoke further conflicts, but is also sociologically ques-
tionable in that it ignores the complex human dynamics through which
social realities are consituted.
Further to this, Zizek’s (2000) invocation of the Christian understanding
of charity in order to grasp universal demands and obligations in a world of
real, unavoidable neighbours cannot be dismissed as simply a reflection of
his theological commitments. It is also thoroughly sociological, in
Durkheim’s sense of the term, in that it takes seriously the irreducible real-
ity of society and the moral responsibility of the analyst in seeking objective
meaning in a world of particularity and difference, thereby seeking to make
a positive contribution to the development of the social dynamics in which
all human beings participate. It is also sociological, however, in its recogni-
tion of the fact that a proper engagement with the emergent particularity
and difference that is contingent upon universal human characteristics and
potentialities necessitates a fresh engagement with the Christian legacy for
the Western world since, as Durkheim (1982b: 211) proposed, sociology
cannot ignore the historical contexts out of which particular forms of social
and cultural life emerge. To neglect such considerations, in favour of the sort
of ‘negative sociology’ offered by writers such as Touraine, would surely
prove fatal to any attempt to develop a satisfactory understanding of con-
temporary Western societies and the challenges they face in a context of
increasing global complexity, and might also stimulate further movement
towards the sort of ‘clash of civilisations’ discussed by Huntington. As
Polanyi’s analysis of an earlier period of history makes clear, an inability to
grasp the complex reality that constitutes a society, including its essential
religious dimensions, is liable to result in dangerous forms of counter-move-
ments. In view of this, contemporary sociology should avoid replicating the
errors of an earlier generation of liberal philosophers, and should, therefore,
resist the temptations of those ‘active’ and ‘passive’ forms of nihilism that
deny the reality of society and those religious forces that give a society its
particular characteristics (Zizek, 2002: 40).
Notes
1. The fact that the Qur’an legitimates violence against those who are deemed to be ene-
mies of Islam is surely incontrovertible: it urges Muslims to ‘fight in the way of God with those
who fight with you … And slay them wherever you come upon them’ (Sura 2: 186; see also
Sura 22: 40); it emphasises that, ‘Prescribed for you is fighting, though it be hateful to you’
(Sura 2: 214); it stresses that Muslims must ‘slay the idolaters wherever you find them, and take
them, and confine them, and lie in wait for them at every place of ambush’ (Sura 9: 5; see also
Sura 4: 90); it says ‘When you meet the unbelievers, smite their necks’ and make ‘wide slaugh-
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ter among them’ (Sura 47: 4); and it urges Muslims to embrace martyrdom, saying that ‘whoso-
ever fights in the way of God and is slain, or conquers, We shall bring him a mighty wage’ (Sura
4: 76; see also Sura 9: 125). The fact that the Qur’an is understood to be the unmediated Word
of God, rather than the Word of God mediated through humans (as in the case of the Christian
and Hebrew Bibles), and the fact that Muhammad himself spread Islam through military con-
quest, reinforce the seriousness with which these texts concerning jihad must be taken since
they limit the degree to which Qur’anic texts can be reinterpreted in the light of changed social
and cultural circumstances (see Rippin and Knappert, 1986; Lewis, 2002).
2. Bat Ye’or (1996: 40) argues that, in Islamic tradition, ‘Mankind is divided into two
groups, Muslims and non-Muslims. The former compose the Islamic community, the umma,
who own the territories of the dar al-Islam governed by Islamic law. Non-Muslims are harbis,
inhabitants of the dar al-harb, the lands of war, so called because they are destined to come
under Islamic jurisdiction, either by war (harb), or by the conversion of their inhabitants …
every act of war in the dar al-harb is legal and immune from censure’. For Ellul (1996: 21), in
the light of this historical study, Islamic ‘terrorism’ is not an ‘extreme’ perversion of this reli-
gion, but a return to its traditional policy (see also Pipes, 2003).
3. This equation ignores the fact that jihad was a feature of Islam from the start, manifest
in the examples of Muhammad and his early followers and legitimated by the Qur’an (Lewis,
2002). In contrast, all the New Testament Gospels agree that Christ admonished those of his
disciples who resorted to the sword when the authorities came to arrest him (Matthew 26: 47;
Mark, 14: 48; Luke, 22: 47; John, 18: 11), while, more generally, non-violence is repeatedly held
up as a Christian ideal (e.g. Matthew, 5: 9, 38). Furthermore, Christianity existed for over a
thousand years before the first Crusade, which itself cannot be considered apart from questions
about European reactions to Islamic military activity (Bat Ye’or, 1996: 89, 140, 49–50; Lewis,
2002: 4).
4. Fukuyama’s (2002) notion of ‘Islamo-fascism’ is a highly problematic one since, contrary
to Huntington, he not only believes that Islam and modernity are essentially incompatible, but
also equates modernity with essentially Western values to do with democracy and individual
freedom: in this view, the link between Islam and fascism is made in the sense that Islam is
deemed, like fascism, to be a dangerous but temporary reaction to the gradual universalisation
of these values.
5. It is also notable that Barber (1995: 293) presents Pat Buchanan’s critique of the myth
of ‘Economic Man’ as an embodiment of the new ‘American Jihad’ launched by conservative
Christians, but his own critique of the economic reductionism and imperialism of ‘McWorld’
has exactly the same intention, namely the constraint of economic forces by a robust ‘civil soci-
ety’.
6. The biblical text reads as follows: ‘If I speak in the tongues of mortals and of angels, but
do not have love, I am a noisy gong or a clanging cymbal. And if I have prophetic powers, and
understand all mysteries and all knowledge, and if I have all faith, so as to remove mountains,
but do not have love, I am nothing. If I give away all my possessions, and if I hand over my body
so that I may boast, but do not have love, I gain nothing … Love never ends. But as for prophe-
cies, they will come to an end; as for tongues they will cease; as for knowledge, it will come to
an end. For we know only in part, and we prophesy only in part; but when the complete comes,
the partial will come to an end … For now we see in a mirror, dimly, but then we will see face
to face. Now I know only in part; then I will know fully, even as I have been fully known. And
now faith, hope and love abide, these three; and the greatest of these is love’ (1 Corinthians 13;
Zizek, 2000: 146).
7. Anthropological research on Muslim charitable practices has noted significant common-
alities with Judaeo-Christian traditions, but also that Muslims are often reluctant to extend
charity beyond the confines of their own communities (Benthall, 2002: 2). This might reflect
the fact that the Qur’an endorses the importance of charity very strongly (Sura 107), but also
says ‘Let not the believers take the unbelievers for their friends, rather than the believers’ (Sura
3: 25, see also Sura 3: 113).
181
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8
Conclusion
In the course of this book, it has been argued that many theoretical critiques
of the notion of society have offered views of social life insufficiently sensi-
tive to the fact that human beings, even when they are postmodern social
and cultural theorists, cannot avoid what Archer (1995) has aptly called ‘the
vexatious fact of society’. For Archer, society is a ‘vexatious’ phenomenon
because it is of human constitution, yet resistant to individual and collective
efforts to transform it in accordance with particular ideals and projects, and
because it often changes in ways that no one wants. Furthermore, it con-
strains our actions even when we are reflexively aware of our roles in it
through our own activity (Archer, 1995: 1–2). While this understanding of
society’s ‘vexatious’ characteristics focuses on the stubborn resistance of
societal forms to particular human projects, however, Durkheim (1982a:
57) offers a more positive vision of society as a collective way of being emer-
gent from, and expressive of, what it is to be human. Common to both,
however, is the recognition that society is a real, unavoidable phenomenon
for human beings and, by implication, for social theory.
It is this recognition that has shaped the social realist arguments devel-
oped over the preceding chapters. In building these arguments, each chap-
ter has been structured around various representations of society within a
broad range of social and cultural theories. The principal focus of each chap-
ter, however, has been on the elucidation of one of six dimensions of society
that can help revitalise its sociological study, and reveal the over-hastiness of
those who seek to abandon it for post-societal forms of sociology. The
dimensions discussed here have not, of course, offered an exhaustive
account of all that society is. None the less, each dimension was chosen in
order to illuminate a distinctive and important aspect of society, and to
demonstrate the value of returning religious concerns to the centre of soci-
ological theory. The conclusions that can be drawn from each of these chap-
ters reinforce the sense that society is a ‘vexatious’ reality in several senses.
As I argued in Chapter 2, a characteristic of many forms of contempo-
rary social theory, and not only those that adopt notions of a ‘post-societal’
or ‘post-social’ age, is the resort to various forms of linguistic, technological
or economic reductionism. Because society is a multidimensional reality,
however, constituted as an inter-relational, sui generis totality, it is resistant
to such reductionism. This is not to say that such forms of social theory have
nothing to contribute to the analysis of contemporary social and cultural
life, only that they fail to deal with the complexity of society in a satisfactory
way. It is clearly the case that sociologies centred on technological or eco-
nomic changes, for example, capture something true about the way the
world is today, and that they can help illuminate some of the difficulties
inherent to the development of a satisfactory understanding of society.
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185
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186
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187
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188
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189
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Index
civil society 120, 172, 175 21, 42, 70–3, 102–3, 182, 190–1;
Cladis, Mark 123 anomie 111; collective efferves-
classification 135 cence 145; collective representa-
codification 72, 138–9 tions 23, 134, 135–7, 141, 155,
Cohen, Yehudi 84 156; complexity 27; Comte's work
collective effervescence 145 127; consumerism 41; death 56–7;
collective representations 23, 134, divided society 128–9; embodiment
135–7, 138, 140, 141, 155, 156, 54, 60–1; general spirit 127–8; het-
187 erogeneity 68, 91; homo duplex 17,
colonisation 143, 147 63, 73, 85, 93; individuals 62–3,
commodification 98–9 73–4, 99; language 140; political
communicative reality 133 economy 100–1; present 132; reali-
communion of saints 18 ty of religion 73; sacred/profane
communism 170 polarity 87–8, 90, 129, 139–40;
complexity theory 2, 9, 33–4, 49–51, sacred society 63–6, 189; social
182–3; contingency 53; Polanyi facts 93; social miracle 77; socio-
102; tacit society 137; time 112–13 logy 114; soul 58; symbolic classifi
complex society 22, 27–52 cation 135; taboo 86
Comte, A. 126–7, 128 dynamic society 61–3
confluent love 43, 44
constituted society 54–7 economic man 93, 101
consumerism 39–41, 42, 49, 99, 160 economic society 100–4
consumptive society 39–41, 49 economy 23, 93, 161–2; free market 3,
contagion 83 82, 100, 106, 170; general 97,
contingency 22, 53–4, 72, 80, 184; 98–100, 157; market society 45–7;
complexity 50, 51; sacred society restricted 97–8, 99–100
64–5; wonder 77 Eisenstadt, S. N. 166
contingent society 53–79 Elias, Norbert 7
continuity 68–9 Ellul, Jacques, 166, 181
cultural relativism 12–13 embodiment 3, 21, 30–1, 77; Christian
Cupitt, Don 31-2 society 117; contingency 53–4;
cybersex 37-8, 39 emergent society 59–61; enchanted
cyborgs 11, 183 society 71, 72–3; frail society 57–9;
handedness 55–6; Islam 165; prohi-
Davie, Grace 151 bitions 87–8; representation 137–8;
Davies, C. 84, 87 social constructionism 55; techno-
de Certeau, M. 16, 76, 144 society 37–9
deconstructing society 152–6 emergence 2, 3–5, 15, 19, 21, 34, 185,
de Coulanges, Fustel 111 191; complexity 50, 51; contin-
Deleuze, Gilles 30, 32, 33 gency 53; order 160
democracy 172 emergent society 59–61
depth level analysis 16 emotion evolution 85
Derrida, J. 91 enchanted society 70–4
Descartes, René 30 epistemic fallacy 12
determinism 36, 42 ethnicity 131
de Tocqueville, 172 Eucharist 117
de-traditionalisation 141–2 European Union 131, 188
dialectical model 111 everyday society 23, 135, 142–7
dialogical democracy 81 exclusive society 86–9
différance 91, 92 externalisation 110
disembodied society 30–2
divided society 128–32 family 145–6
doxic 23, 135, 146, 147 fascism 104–5, 170, 188
Duby, Georges 148 Faulkner, William 132
Dumont, L. 78, 148 Featherstone, Mike 32, 98, 142, 156–7,
Durkheim, Emile 2–5, 7, 9–11, 13–19, 158
212
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214
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Index
sacred/profane dichotomy 56, 66, 68–9, taboo 23, 81, 82, 83–5, 86–9, 90–1, 92,
86–8, 90, 129, 139–40 185; handedness 56, 86–7; obliga-
sacred society 63–6 tion 105
sacrifice 69, 88, 99, 103 tacit dimension 17, 23–4, 133, 156,
Said, Edward 24, 135, 142, 152–5, 187
166–7, 168 tacit society 23–4, 133–59
Scheler, M. 123 Taylor, Charles 133, 146–7, 156, 158
Schmitt, Carl 167–8 technology 11, 12, 159; virtual commu-
Schutz, A. 143 nity 183–4
secularisation 5, 20–1, 64, 129, 130, techno-society 35–9, 40, 48
148; divided society 131; Temple, D. 105–6
Orientalism 152, 154; supra- temporal power 126
individual society 122; temporal temporal society 9, 23, 108–32, 186–7
society 23 temporal/spiritual distinction 23, 109,
Seligman, A. B. 149 116, 118
Sennett, R. 96 Thatcher, Margaret 6, 7, 8, 139
September eleventh 7, 166-7, 171, 173, theodicy 54, 75
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