Religion, Realism and Social Theory

Philip A.
Mellor
Religion, Realism
and Social Theory
Making sense of society
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Religion, Realism and Social Theory
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Theory, Culture & Society

Theory, Culture & Society caters for the resurgence of interest in culture
within contemporary social science and the humanities. Building on the her-
itage of classical social theory, the book series examines ways in which this
tradition has been reshaped by a new generation of theorists. It also pub-
lishes theoretically informed analyses of everyday life, popular culture, and
new intellectual movements.
EDITOR: Mike Featherstone, Nottingham Trent University
SERIES EDITORIAL BOARD

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Mike Hepworth, University of Aberdeen
Scott Lash, Goldsmiths College, University of London
Roland Robertson, University of Aberdeen
Bryan S. Turner, University of Cambridge
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Recent volumes include:
Critique of Information
Scott Lash
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Stephen P. Turner
French Social Theory

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The Body and Social Theory, 2nd Edition

Chris Shilling
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Making sense of society
Philip A. Mellor
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© 2004 Philip A. Mellor
First published 2004
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Contents
Acknowledgements vi
1 Introduction: Real Society 1

2 Complex Society 27
3 Contingent Society 53
4 Necessary Society 80
5 Temporal Society 108
6 Tacit Society 133
7 Resurgent Society 160
8 Conclusion 182
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
The purpose of this book is to develop a theoretical account of society that

will not only help illuminate important dimensions of the transformations
and developments that are shaping many contemporary forms of social life,
but will also make a contribution to broader debates about the general char-
acteristics of human societies. Contrary to those who argue that ‘society’ is
now an outmoded basis upon which to develop sociological analysis, the
argument of this book is that the idea of society needs to be re-examined,
and developed, rather than abandoned. It may be an exaggeration to say, as
Anthony Giddens (1987a: 25) has done, that ‘society is a largely unexam-
ined term in sociological discourse’, but it is clear that there has been a lack
of theoretical clarity about the term, that the significance of historical and
religious influences on notions of society has rarely been grasped fully, and
that there has often been a failure to address ontological questions about
social life directly. A sociological tendency to overemphasise the unique fea-
tures of modern and postmodern social life has exacerbated these problems,
as have those ‘post-societal’ and ‘post-social’ sociologies, philosophies and
cultural theories that urge the abandonment of ‘society’ as an abstract,
archaic and arbitrary construction of sociological discourse. Against these, a
systematic reassessment of the nature of society, which illuminates its key
dimensions and characteristics, can help reconnect contemporary social the-
ory to its classical tradition, draw more creatively and constructively from
developments in other disciplines, and refocus the sociological project upon
real human beings in their embodied being-in-the-world.
This reappraisal of society is built on a form of social realism: contrary
to some influential forms of the ‘cultural turn’ in sociological theorising it
takes seriously the reality of people, society and the world. Postmodernism
has been particularly influential in promoting the idea that any notion of
reality is arbitrary and culturally specific, but such an implication is evident
in a broad range of sociological and cultural theories. In fact, Berger and
Luckmann’s (1966: 14) argument that sociologists cannot possibly remove
the quotation marks from ‘reality’, since the meaning of this term is always
socially and culturally constructed in specific contexts, seems to have
become a widespread norm in sociological theory, even if, like Berger and
Luckmann, an appeal to ‘empirical evidence’ is often used to forestall a slide
into complete cultural relativism. Taken to their logical extreme, such argu-
ments severely limit the possibility of understanding any society or culture
other than our own, and certainly deprive us of any solid ground on which
to challenge social or cultural practices that seem to us oppressive, immoral
or dehumanising. They also suggest a wildly dualistic view of humans: on the
one hand, humans are incapable of having any contact with, or grasp of, any-
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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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Polanyi (2001) emphasised in his magisterial account of the inhuman con-

sequences of trying to obliterate society in the name of free market eco-
nomics, questions about the nature and reality of society have unavoidable
moral dimensions. It is in this sense, at least, that Durkheim’s sociology
remains of immense value for contemporary social theory. For him, society
is the necessary context for the development and flourishing of human
potentialities, a view that reflects his vision of sociology as a moral project.
In a world increasingly characterised by the imperialism of market forces,
dehumanising technological developments, global conflicts and religious
violence, questions about a common human basis for the emergence of soci-
ety look more, not less, important today than in the periods in which
Durkheim and Polanyi sought to explore them. It is in the light of these con-
cerns that the four main arguments developed throughout this book origi-
nate. These are as follows.
First, social theory must be built on sound ontological arguments con-
cerning the human beings who populate those social forms that social the-
orists seek to understand and explain. In postmodern thought in particular,
but also in other areas of social theory, there is a tendency to argue that
humanity (along with ‘society’ and more or less everything else) is a cultural
construction with no essential characteristics or potentialities. This ignores
the fact that a common human species exists across different social and cul-
tural contexts, characterised by the same embodied condition, even if
human embodiment is engaged with through a multiplicity of different
social and cultural forms. The specific argument developed here is that
humans are endowed with embodied capacities for an emotional, cognitive,
moral and religious engagement with others and the world, and that these
capacities constitute the embodied basis upon which the emergence of dis-
tinctively social realities, and the development of humans as social beings,
occurs. In the light of this argument, ‘society’ cannot be evacuated from
social theory any more than human beings can, since human embodiment
not only acts as a medium for its emergence but, in a sense, necessitates this
emergence: humans’ practical engagement with the world stimulates the
collective development of emotional, cognitive, moral and religious capaci-
ties, gives rise to collective representations of human ideas and experiences,
and produces collective social arrangements for the satisfaction of human
needs and desires.
Second, however, as an emergent phenomenon, society has sui generis
qualities and powers that cannot be reduced to the individuals who consti-
tute it or be understood simply as the aggregate of its individual con-
stituents. This is not simply because all individuals confront an already
existing social reality, or that the shape of the social reality we help to con-
stitute bears a tangential, or even contradictory, relationship to our goals,
projects and intended actions (Archer, 1995). Rather, a society has qualities
and powers all of its own because human relations stimulate and develop
distinctively social forces that have the power to reshape individual and col-
lective actions, identities and experiences in specific ways. Reflection upon
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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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Western world, I shall argue for a non-reductionist understanding of the

social significance of religion. Although Durkheim (1995) went on to
develop his arguments about the sui generis aspects of society in his account
of the fundamental importance of the ‘sacred’ in all societies, it is possible
to move beyond his view that religions are simply symbolic expressions of
social energies, and to understand that religion, as a phenomenon emergent
from but not reducible to the hyper-spirituality of society, also expresses a
broader human engagement with what Zygmunt Bauman (2002: 53–4) has
called the ‘transcendental conditions of human togetherness’. In this regard,
a social realist approach can establish a rapprochement with those forms of
theological realism that have, more than many forms of social and cultural
theory, grasped the significance of chaos and complexity theories for illumi-
nating the ontologically stratified nature of the world, where ‘an immanent
structure comprises a hierarchy of levels of reality which are open upward
but not reducible downward’ (Torrance, 1998: 20). From a sociological
point of view, this approach opens up the possibility of engaging with the
real significance of religion for society rather than ‘explaining’ it as an
epiphenomenon of, or mask for, something deemed to be more important,
such as economics, power interests or psychological needs.
This focus on religion may look odd to those who have come to take
modern assumptions about ‘secularisation’ for granted (even if the post-
September 11th world suggests the need for a more complex picture of the
relationship between religion and society), but, as Charles Lemert (1999:
240) has commented, ‘It is possible that social theory’s troubles are, in part,
due to its refusal to think about religion.’ What I shall argue, in fact, is that
many of the social and cultural conflicts of the present, including those sur-
rounding the ‘decline’ of society, can properly be understood as religious
conflicts, despite their apparent secularity. In this regard, I build on
Kierkegaard’s suggestion, dating from the revolutions of 1848, that ‘What
looks like politics and imagines itself to be politics, one day will show itself
to be a religious movement’ (Hollier, 1988: xxv). Indeed, I shall suggest that
while Western societies, following the Reformation, became post-
Christendom societies, they have never become fully post-Christian.
Secularisation theorists tend to concentrate their arguments upon factors
such as the decline in church attendances (Bruce, 2002), the disappearance
of certain types of Christian discourse (Brown, 2001) or, more broadly, pat-
terns of structural and functional differentiation, wherein religion becomes
restricted to a socially insignificant ‘sub-system’ of contemporary societies
(Dobbelaere, 1999). What such studies do not engage with satisfactorily is
the fact that social realities are complex, multi-layered phenomena with
religious aspects that are so deeply rooted that they not only tend to be
unacknowledged, but may also be expressly denied (Durkheim, 1977;
Taylor, 1989; O’Donovan, 1999; Siedentop, 2000). In Western societies,
these roots have a specifically Christian character and I shall argue that this
not only helps make sense of many contemporary characteristics of, and
conflicts within, these contexts, but also throws fresh light upon conflicts
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with those Islamic social movements that appear to manifest an endemic

hostility to Western societies.
Throughout this book a large number of different visions of society,
together with various ‘post-societal’ or ‘post-social’ theories, will be exam-
ined critically in relation to the four core arguments outlined above. The
purpose of the rest of this chapter is to introduce these core arguments in
more detail, and to establish the theoretical necessity of focusing on society
as a real phenomenon. This necessity is evident not only with regard to the
wide range of sociological perspectives (considered in detail in the follow-
ing chapter) that see society as, in various senses, an ‘inhuman’ or ‘hyper-
real’ phenomenon, but also with regard to some broader sociological
misconceptions about the nature of society. These include the tendency to
identify society with the historically and culturally specific phenomenon of
the nation-state, and, at another extreme, the tendency to reify ‘Society’ as
something independent of all human beings. A brief account of some of the
problems with these views can help establish the importance of focusing on
society as a real, human phenomenon.
(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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these contemporary social theories are succumbing to a broader tendency

evident within Western societies where, as Slavoj Zizek (2002) has sug-
gested, the inability to grasp any sense of the real apart from specific cul-
tural constructions of it seems to have become a defining feature of
contemporary life. In its sociological form, this involves unmasking the
social realism of writers such as Durkheim as a myopic cultural imperialism
that confuses historically and culturally contingent modern phenomena
with general social characteristics. In self-consciously ‘post-societal’ forms of
sociology, and others that attempt to grapple with some of the social and
cultural changes that are central to the arguments of post-societal
approaches, this is narrowed down further to a mistaken identification of
society with the nation-state.1
Norbert Elias (1978: 241) may have been correct in noting that ‘Many
twentieth century sociologists, when speaking of “society”, no longer have in
mind … a “bourgeois society” or a “human society” beyond the state, but
increasingly the somewhat diluted ideal image of a nation-state’ (see Billig,
1995: 52–4). Although Urry (2000: 8–9) builds on Elias’s insight by draw-
ing attention to the historical and cultural specificity of this particular asso-
ciation, he then compounds the problem identified by Elias in linking their
mutual decline. Amongst other things, this identification of society with the
nation-state robs it of any reality independent of this historically specific
form or, at worst, simply reduces it into modern sociological imaginings
about that form. Bauman (2002: 43), for example, associates Durkheim’s
emphasis on the reality of society with an act of imagination supported by
the empirical data of the time (‘the threshold of the now bygone century’).
Aside from the fact that this reduction of society to an imaginative act
serves to endorse the individualistic rhetoric of Thatcher’s attack on the
notion, which would surely make Bauman uncomfortable, it also depends
upon some questionable assumptions concerning the contemporary and
historical development of society. Here, two points are particularly worth
noting.
First of all, arguments concerning the decline of the nation-state,
which see it as being ‘eroded from without’ by globalisation and ‘eroded
from within’ by pluralism, tend to have a highly speculative character
(Habermas, 1996). Giddens (1987b: 256) has noted that nation-states
have, for a long time, been reflexively constituted through a global sys-
tem of relations, while Robertson’s (1992) influential account of global-
isation balances recognition of the continuing significance of
nation-states with an analysis of global developments transcendent of
them. A number of recent detailed studies of the changes wrought by
globalisation have also emphasised the continuing importance of the
nation-state rather than its decline (for example, Albrow, 1996; Fulcher,
2000), while Tiryakian’s (2003) Durkheimian account of the efferves-
cent revitalisation of the post-September 11th USA suggests the still
powerful emotional, symbolic and moral vitality of the nation-state for
many. It can also be noted that the USA’s current, unparalleled global
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political influence is hardly suggestive of a world in which nation-states

are no longer important.
With regard to ‘internal’ threats to the nation-state, which see its decay
as a result of increasingly diverse ethnicities, religions, values and lifestyle
choices, it can also be noted that these are often wildly overstated. It is now
customary to refer to Britain, for example, as a ‘pluralist’, ‘multicultural’
society, or even as a ‘loose federation of cultures’ (Commission, 2000; see
Beckford, 2003: 91). Such views, however, are often expressive of commit-
ments to a post-Christian and post-national vision of how Britain ought to
develop, rather than an objective account of what it currently is. In fact,
according to the Office of National Statistics (2001), nearly 70 per cent of
the population of England and Wales defines itself as white and Christian,
while 71 per cent of black people also define themselves as Christian. In the
light of this data, the limits of claims about the decline of the nation-state
because of pluralism look fairly clear and, indeed, it is not surprising that
studies have shown how, globally, pluralism within societies is often more
apparent than real (for example, Hjerm, 2000; Gvosdev, 2001). It is also
easy to leap to the conclusion that immigration weakens nation-states, but,
again, there is little evidence for this so far. In a detailed empirical study of
immigration and multiculturalism in Britain and Germany, Koopmans and
Statham (1999), for example, found little to support arguments about the
decline of the nation-state and found that immigrants and ethnic minorities
had to adjust to specifically national models of citizenship. From such stud-
ies it is not unreasonable to conclude that the nation-state remains an
important institutional expression of society (see also Alexander, 2001;
Beaman, 2003; Beyer, 2003).
A second point worth noting, however, is that, regardless of the strengths
or weaknesses of nation-states, the sociological focus on society cannot be
tied inextricably to these particular forms anyway. Contrary to the post-
modernist idea that sociology simply invented its object of study, it has to
be acknowledged that reflections upon society predate modern sociology:
they are found in the writings of Plato and Aristotle (Frisby and Sayer,
1986), for example, and form a significant component of medieval theology
too (Beckwith, 1993). Indeed, Milbank (1990) has suggested that theologi-
cal reflections upon, and attempted radical reconstructions of, society pre-
date, and will postdate, modern, sociological interpretations with their focus
on ‘secular’ and political dimensions of social life. More radically, Bossy
(1985), Taylor (1989) and O’Donovan (1999) have illuminated how mod-
ern conceptions of society actually have their origins in theological visions
of social life rather than representing a clear break with a religious past. The
Protestant assumptions also lurking behind Thatcher’s prioritisation of indi-
viduals above ‘society’, perhaps reflecting her Methodist upbringing, are of
significance in this regard. None the less, it is also important to note that
premodern reflections on the nature of society are not specific to Western
social and cultural contexts. Thousands of years ago Indian religious philos-
ophy also became engrossed with the nature of individuals’ commitments
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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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empirical existence of the coercive power of the modern nation-state

ignores the fact that his greatest book concerns Aboriginal societies, not
nation-states (Durkheim, 1995). Consequently, while it is one thing to
acknowledge that the sociological focus on society (and what it has under-
stood as society) emerged out of a specific historical, social and cultural con-
text (Shilling and Mellor, 2001), it is another thing entirely to suggest that
it is meaningless to talk about society outside this context.
While challenges to the idea that sociology is the study of society have
focused on the contextual specificity of Durkheim’s account of society,
however, they have also offered the (somewhat contradictory) argument
that he promotes a ‘reified’ vision of society (Lukes, 1973: 20–23). Here,
rather than the sociological vision of society being too context-specific, it is
deemed to be far too general. Touraine (1989, 1995), Lemert (1995) and
Urry (2000) single out this reification of society as the most influential
source of sociology’s ‘anachronistic’ concern with society. In each case it is
understood as something insensitive to the dynamic patterns of contempo-
rary change. For Touraine (1989: 7), Durkheim’s understanding of society
crystallises the classical sociological concern with integration and order. For
Lemert (1995: 48), Durkheim’s vision of an organic, ordered society ignores
the divisions and differences of modernity: it is, simply, ‘a lost world he con-
structed in his sociological imagination’. Similarly, Urry argues that the cen-
tral organising principle of sociology has been Durkheim’s identification of
an autonomous realm of the ‘social’, distinguished from the ‘natural’, as the
core object of sociological analysis (Urry, 2000: 10). For Urry (2000: 26), the
fluidity, sensuousness and positive embrace of différance characteristic of
contemporary social life render the ‘static’ Durkheimian concept of society
redundant.
Yet the Durkheim such writings reject is often something of a sociologi-
cal parody, wherein his arguments are characteristically reduced to a neo-
Parsonian concern with the Hobbesian ‘problem of order’ (see Mellor, 1998,
2002; Morrison, 2001). This understanding of Durkheim appears to be an
established part of sociology’s collective memory, but is unsustainable on
the basis of a direct and detailed reading of his work. Contrary to the view
that Durkheim identifies society as a realm entirely autonomous from
nature (Urry, 2000: 10), he actually, for example, argues for sociology being
focused on society as ‘a specific reality’, but also notes that this has to be
contextualised within a recognition that ‘man and society are linked to the
universe and can be abstracted from it only artificially’ (Durkheim, 1995:
432; see Jones, 1997: 154). Furthermore, it can be noted that, in his inau-
gural lecture at Bordeaux in 1887, he emphasised that an abstract, reified
conception of ‘Society’ (such as he associated with Comte) should not be
the focus for sociological analysis (Durkheim, 1974c: 197; Strenski 1997:
158–9). Instead, sociology should concern itself with the constitution and
development of societies in the dynamic interrelationships of people in their
everyday lives and across time; an understanding reflected in a wealth of
sociological, anthropological and philosophical works by his followers, many
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of which demonstrate a good sense of the complexity, dynamism and fruit-

fulness of his conception of society (for example, Caillois, 1950; Hertz,
1960; Mauss, 1969; Turner, 1969; Bataille, 1991, 1992; Maffesoli, 1996).
In fact, although Durkheim is often accused of promoting an abstract
conception of society, it is the post-societal view, with its dissipation of ques-
tions about embodied being into cultural processes and flows, that tends
towards an abstractionism Durkheim can help prevent. In particular, it is the
Durkheimian tradition that expresses most forcefully the idea that being
part of society is inextricably tied to our humanity, offering a vision of the
irrepressibly vital social energies that characterise human encounters and
relationships, nurturing and sustaining solidarities, bonds, moral obligations
and collective symbols. It is on this basis that it is possible to see how a crit-
ical engagement with this tradition can prove an invaluable source of assis-
tance if we are to continue to study what societies really are.2
Human society
As Margaret Archer (2000: 2) has observed, constructing a social theory that

takes sufficient account of the actions, cares and concerns of embodied
human beings has become a defensive project in an academic environment
where modernity’s ‘Death of God’ has now been matched by postmod-
ernism’s ‘Death of Humanity’. This death has been announced, and often
celebrated, in a broad range of post-structuralist and postmodern philoso-
phy (Foucault, 1970; Baudrillard, 1983; Rorty, 1989; Derrida, 1991), but is
also apparent in many other influential forms of social theory. Manuel
Castells’s (2000: 21) account of a contemporary ‘culture of real virtuality’,
for example, where the ‘autonomous ability to reprogramme one’s own per-
sonality’ becomes the dominant mode of identity-construction, exemplifies
the implicit evacuation of the human from sociological theory. A similar
evacuation is evident in Urry’s (2000: 40–1) ‘post-societal’ presentation of
the Internet as the principal metaphor for the fluid character of contempo-
rary social life, and in Donna Haraway’s (1991) promotion of the biotech-
nological image of the ‘cyborg’ as a liberating way of making sense of social
life in an age of global networks constructed through systems of electronic
communication.
Turner and Rojek (2001: 228) have challenged such dehumanising per-
spectives on the empirical grounds that their appeal for certain social theo-
rists is not matched by their relevance for the majority of people. A more
crucial challenge, however, rests on the question of ontology, the theory of
being underpinning them. Often, the most basic of ontological questions –
are human beings really like this? – is not even addressed directly. Rather,
Richard Rorty’s (1991) argument that we must avoid the ‘embarrassments’
of foundational claims about the inherent, natural characteristics of human
beings seems to have been widely accepted. In particular, the epistemologi-
cal focus of postmodernism, which precludes the possibility of access to a
real world or to truth because of its overriding concern with culturally spe-
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cific constructions of meaning, renders basic ontological questions pointless.

None the less, such perspectives manifest what Bhaskar (1979) has called
the ‘epistemic fallacy’, where epistemology (the theory of knowledge)
becomes conflated with ontology. Against this fallacy, it can be emphasised
that while human knowledge, meaning and identity may indeed be charac-
terised by a great deal of contingency, it is an entirely different thing to say
that this means there is no real world (and real human beings) of which we
can have any knowledge. This is important for two reasons.
First, despite cultural differences, our embodied being-in-the-world
means that all humans share certain basic capacities to feel hunger, pain, joy,
desire and a broad range of other emotional and sensual phenomena. We
also have the capacity to act, to do things, and to think reflexively about our-
selves, our actions and the world around us. It is clear, of course, that the
development of these capacities, the individual and collective experience of
them, and the theories we construct to account for them can all vary signif-
icantly between different cultures. Even so, the failure to take them seri-
ously, along with the unavoidably mortal character of humans, does not look
like a very sound basis for social theory. Even in the global information age
envisaged by Castells, it may be the case that a ‘global elite’ can imagine
itself as inhabiting ‘cyberspace’, and that it has the cultural and financial
resources to minimise the territorial identifications, economic burdens and
social commitments that might otherwise constrain its life-projects
(Bauman, 2002: 235), but the ability to access computers, use satellite infor-
mation systems and build ‘virtual communities’ depends on a physical body
that feels pleasure and pain, that has cognitive capacities, and that, at some
point, will inevitably die. The reduction of humanity and society to virtual-
ity by writers such as Castells and Baudrillard seems to ignore this.3
Second, and following from this, an attention to ontological issues is
important because, without it, visions of the endlessly constructible charac-
teristics of humans encourage moral concerns to lose all substance. In his
discussion of environmentalist ethics, for example, Urry talks about the
extension of rights from humans to animals, but does not explain how such
rights can be ‘extended’ if humanity, as he claims, has no essence, inherent
potentialities or emergent powers worth respecting and protecting (Urry,
2000: 169). More broadly, Bauman’s (1993: 243) suggestion that the vocif-
erousness of contemporary appeals to ‘human rights’ often masks what is
simply a self-interested appeal to ‘the right to be left alone’, illuminates the
dissipation of moral concern into cultural relativism that tends to accom-
pany a failure to ground notions of rights in anything real. Furthermore, as
Turner and Rojek (2001: 109) note, ‘Arguments about cultural relativism
can be, and have been, manipulated and abused by authoritarian govern-
ments to justify various forms of state violence under the banner of cultural
authenticity.’ As they suggest, a vision of universal human rights must start
with the ontological reality of the body, otherwise there is no solid basis
upon which to challenge the violence, degradation and oppression inflicted
upon people across different cultures.
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The grounding of social theory in a satisfactory account of what it is to

be human has to extend further than paying attention to the body in a nar-
row sense, however, and must also involve an engagement with the collec-
tive contexts that humans, as social beings, live and develop within. Urry’s
(2000: 187) discussion of the obligations and duties of contemporary citi-
zenship recognises the importance of collective contexts, but he does not
associate them with ‘society’, only with patterns of ‘global homogenisation,
consumerism and cosmopolitanism’. Leaving aside the question of how
extensive and influential such processes actually are, it is clear that Urry is
denying society any ontological reality. In fact, although there is some ambi-
guity about what he means by ‘society’ (he sometimes implies it existed in
the past), he tends overall to refer to it as a ‘metaphor’ for social patterns
and processes that should now be abandoned in favour of metaphors of flu-
ids and flows. When Urry (2000: 22) seeks to resist relativism through his
argument that the ‘productivity’ of various metaphors can be assessed in
relation to empirical evidence, however, he proposes an essentially anthro-
pocentric view of the world, despite his rejection of the idea of an essential
humanity. The conflation of the empirical with the real is, as Bhaskar (1998:
42) states, anthropocentric in that it equates what humans experience with
what actually exists. As Archer (1995: 69) notes, however, the reality of
some things might only be established by the effects they have on other
things. It is in this regard that Durkheim’s notion of society as a sui generis
reality is particularly important and useful.
Sui generis society
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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Durkheim’s argument is that the simple aggregation of the biological and

mental components of an individual human cannot account for the distinc-
tive consciousness, predispositions and personality of that individual: rather,
these distinctive characteristics are aspects of an individuality emergent
from the processes and interactions, in totality, of all the different compo-
nents of individual life. Anticipating twenty-first century philosophies of the
mind (Sawyer, 2002), Durkheim argued that these sui generis characteris-
tics constitute the particular ‘psychic life’, or ‘spirituality’, of the individual.
By analogy, he argues that society, as a sui generis phenomenon emergent
from relations between individuals, has its own specific hyper-spirituality
and that this represents the distinctive object of sociological study
(Durkheim, 1974a: 27–8, 34). In short, what we call ‘society’ is not simply
an empirical or pragmatic phenomenon constructed with the aim of meet-
ing certain economic, political or philosophical needs, but a sui generis
‘enhancement of being’ that imbues social life with its transcendent charac-
ter (Freitag, 2002). Consequently, the notion of hyper-spirituality is of fun-
damental sociological importance because it helps illuminate the ontological
depth of social reality, pointing towards a holistic context for human action,
belief and experience that escapes empirically focused sociologies.
Georges Gurvitch (1964, 1971) expanded upon Durkheim’s work in this
regard by developing a form of ‘depth level analysis’ that aimed to study
observable social phenomena in relation to what Korenbaum (1964: xiii)
calls ‘the very deepest, most obscured and veiled layers of social reality’.
These deepest layers were found in emergent forms of collective conscious-
ness, characterised by an inherent dynamism that shaped societies in subtle
but far-reaching ways (Thompson, 1971: xvi). In more contemporary stud-
ies such a systematic approach to these deeper layers of social reality is
notably absent, though there are some intriguing suggestions that such phe-
nomena remain significant. Indeed, a useful way of expanding upon the
importance of Durkheim’s notion of hyper-spirituality is to note the pres-
ence, in a range of social theories, of an under-theorised reference to a holis-
tic substratum of social energies or forces that underpin a society’s more
institutionalised dimensions. Virilio, for example, identifies a subterranean
‘social drama’ within everyday life that often eludes institutionally focused
forms of sociology (Armitage, 2000: 43). This idea is also found in the work
of de Certeau (1984: xi), who talks of ‘the obscure background of social
activity’, as well as in the Durkheimian arguments of Maffesoli (1996) con-
cerning the ‘social divine’. Bauman (2001: 3–4), in fact, also refers to the
‘life-juices’ of society, which provide a sort of ‘metacapital’ that binds indi-
viduals into particular social orders. In each case, the nature and significance
of this social substratum are not articulated in a developed way, and in
Bauman’s work, in particular, this substratum appears to be of decreasing
sociological significance.
While Gurvitch’s (1964: 1) focus on the ‘pluri-dimensional’ charac-
teristics of social phenomena is a great deal more systematic than many
of these more recent studies, however, and clearly focused upon their
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enduring sociological importance, what his work lacks is a detailed

engagement with the moral and the religious implications of these
‘veiled’ layers of social reality. More helpfully, though, the philosopher
of science Michael Polanyi (1958, 1967) has also talked of a social sub-
stratum of knowledge, a ‘tacit dimension’, that not only shapes human
thought but also projects it beyond the empirical towards a fuller grasp
of the nature of reality. Here, as Torrance (1985: 113) suggests, it is pos-
sible to appreciate how human life has an inherently social and moral
character that reveals to us the world in its ontological depth. Our human
embodiment, which enables us to transcend the limits of individual exis-
tence through our interactions with others in society, integrates us within
a ‘spiritual reality’ that thereby builds an open-ended transcendent rela-
tion into our personal and social reality (Polanyi, 1967: 53ff.; Torrance,
1985: 111; see also Bossy, 1985, Williams, 2000).
Polanyi’s notion of an emergent, tacit ‘spiritual reality’ and Durkheim’s
notion of an emergent societal ‘hyper-spirituality’ have a great deal in com-
mon, as is clear in relation to Durkheim’s account of the homo duplex char-
acter of humans. He emphasises this homo duplex nature in two senses: first,
human identities have individual and collective sources; second, their
‘rational’ dimensions arise out of a ‘non-rational’ stimulation and circulation
of social energies within the sui generis reality of society (Durkheim,
1974b). The causal significance of hyper-spirituality within his vision of
societal complexity is manifest in this power of society to suggest, and,
indeed, impose, certain ways of acting and thinking upon individuals
(Durkheim, 1982b: 248). It is also manifest, however, in the fact that this
fundamental ‘coerciveness’ of society co-exists with the stimulus to an
open-ended investigation of social reality in all its ontological depth. It is in
the context of this duality that sociology, which is rooted in the attempt to
investigate this ontological depth, becomes possible: it is itself emergent
from hyper-spirituality, but comes to explore this hyper-spirituality system-
atically (Durkheim, 1953; Lukes, 1973: 416).
Postmodernist theories, however, even if they do not reject the idea of
the social per se, tend to reject the idea of any holistic dimension to social
relations, focusing on processes of fragmentation or segmentation. Deleuze
and Guattari (1988: 208), for example, return to Durkheim’s fiercest con-
temporary critic, Gabriel Tarde, to help emphasise their key principle of the
segment taking precedence over any notion of an organic whole (Gane,
2003: 148). None the less, it is important to note that, for Durkheim
(1974b: 24), the hyper-spirituality of collective life is not only manifest in
the relations between individuals and a ‘total society’, but between individ-
uals and ‘secondary groups’ within a larger social whole. This is evident even
in relation to small-scale social groupings such as families, where enduring
social relations can produce distinctively collective realities which have a
profound effect upon the consciousness and actions of the individuals
within them, for good or ill.7 The notion of hyper-spirituality is not, there-
fore, meant to refer to one form of overarching collectivism that contains all
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individualities within its vast embrace. On the contrary, it refers to a quality

of human relations emergent from our embodied being-in-the-world, facil-
itating the birth and flourishing of the distinctively social aspects of our
humanity at various emergent levels that embrace intimate relations, small
groups, nations and even global relations.
This is not to say that such a flourishing is in all respects desirable, how-
ever, since social energies and forces have an ambiguous quality. This helps
us understand how it is that social forces can promote heroism, loyalty and
self-sacrifice as well as racism, fascism and barbarism (Durkheim, 1995:
213; Fields, 1995: xlii). As something that arises from the hyper-spiritual
dimensions of society, religion too has often manifested this ambiguity, stir-
ring up violence and war as well as nurturing profound insights into the
nature of life and human destiny. Even so, as an emergent phenomenon con-
cerned with the transcendental conditions of human togetherness inherent
within humanity’s embodied being in the world, religion is a uniquely
important social phenomenon worthy, as Durkheim recognised, of very seri-
ous sociological attention.8
Religious society
There has been a recent upsurge of academic interest in a range of phe-

nomena that have been labelled ‘religious’. In fact, many writers are now
beginning to draw attention to the spread of religious factors across many
social and cultural domains, including ‘techno-science’ (Virilio, 1996),
everyday social interactions (Maffesoli, 1996), consumerism (Featherstone,
1991; Ritzer, 1999), communications media (Lyon, 2000) and postmod-
ernist philosophy (Wernick, 1992). The fact that many studies of these new
religious phenomena draw on Durkheim’s work suggest the continuing
value of his view that ‘the religious life of a people is a manifestation of its
profoundest being’ (Hertz, 1983: 87). Like Luckmann’s (1967) notion of
‘invisible religion’, however, these uses of Durkheim tend to work with very
broad conceptions of what can count as ‘sacred’, so that more or less any-
thing can be seen in ‘religious’ terms. This has the advantage of illuminating
common features between apparently ‘secular’ phenomena and more tradi-
tional religious forms, and of highlighting the hyper-spiritual context from
which both forms emerge. Maffesoli (1996: 73), for example, using
Durkheim’s notion of the ‘social divine’, associates the effervescent solidar-
ity exhibited in sexual networks, Internet groups and various sporting and
musical groupings with the Christian concept of the ‘communion of saints’.
The disadvantage of such approaches, however, is that a focus on com-
mon features can ignore fundamental differences: sexual networks come
into existence with the utilitarian purpose of facilitating the gratification of
specific desires, and do not tend to look further than that; the notion of the
‘communion of saints’, on the other hand, embraces all sorts of beliefs, argu-
ments and experiences developed over centuries, concerning issues of life
and death, human potentiality and limitations, and the nature of the uni-
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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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tions about secularisation for granted, it is worthwhile introducing two

key points, to be developed later in this book, concerning the specifically
Christian influence upon Western societies.
First, assumptions about contemporary Christian decline can all too eas-
ily encourage a failure to take seriously the Christian influence upon the his-
torical evolution of Western societies, resulting in a general, and
unsupportable, neglect of the immense importance of religious issues. As
Trigg (1998: 5) suggests, ‘the instant dismissal of the beliefs on which our
Western civilisation was founded is neither very sensible nor very scholarly’.
In contrast to such short-sightedness, which rests on a simplistic under-
standing of historical development, writers with a broader grasp of history
have demonstrated the central significance of Christianity for the develop-
ment of Europe (Rémond, 1999), the natural sciences (Torrance, 1984), the
social sciences (Shilling and Mellor, 2001; Gane, 2003), and even of moder-
nity itself (Kumar, 1995).
Second, however, the Christian influence upon social life is not only his-
torical but evident in the present too, even if this influence is to a large
degree concealed by a discourse of secularity. As Oliver O’Donovan (1999:
247) notes, although the modern liberal technological society appears to be
thoroughly ‘secular’, and often seems to operate as a ‘quasi-mechanical sys-
tem’ devoid of specific moral and religious dimensions, this ostensible secu-
larity rests on a ‘false self-consciousness’: the distinction between the
religious and the secular has a specifically Christian character, expressed his-
torically in the separation of the spiritual and the temporal and notions of
‘two realms’ or ‘two cities’ (see Taylor, 1989). Further to this, even some of
the most distinctive manifestations of modern Western secularity have been
underpinned by specifically Christian beliefs. Thus, the First Amendment to
the US Constitution, which enshrines the principle of the separation of
church and state, ‘can usefully be taken as the symbolic end of Christendom’
(O’Donovan, 1999: 244). None the less, this doctrine was shaped by ardent
Christians who believed that the First Amendment would facilitate the
development of ‘authentic Christianity’, rather than by self-conscious secu-
larists (O’Donovan, 1999: 245).
The sociological significance of the Christian influence upon modern
notions of ‘secular’ society is apparent when we consider that, in contrast to
Christianity, Islam, for example, does not have a distinction between ‘two
realms’, which is why Muslims do not tend to see Western secularity as reli-
giously neutral in the way that Westerners tend to (see Rémond, 1999: 196;
Siedentop, 2000: 208). This underlines the importance of specifically reli-
gious differences for the development of society, and points towards some of
the dangers in trying to explain away religious factors through forms of eco-
nomic or political reductionism. In this regard, it is notable how, in post-
September 11th assessments of conflicts between Islam and the West,
Turner (2002), Fukuyama (2002) and Kellner (2002), following the exam-
ple of Barber (2001), can all underplay distinctive elements of Islamic belief
and practice, and concentrate instead on economic and political issues relat-
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ing to relative poverty and the global spread of Western consumerism. As

Huntington’s (1996) ‘clash of civilisations’ thesis suggests, however, reli-
gious differences can have very deep roots within, and immense influence
upon, societal forms that are civilisational in scope. Ignoring the religious
assumptions underpinning our own ‘secular’ accounts of society cannot
put sociologists in a good position to comprehend societies outside the
modern West.
In the light of these arguments, it is possible to appreciate the wisdom of
Durkheim’s (1995) contention that, at an elementary level, society is always
a religious phenomenon, though it also necessary to reject his reductionist
understanding of religion as a symbolic expression of social forces, just as he
rejects the idea that the sui generis reality of society can be reduced into its
individual constituents.11 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 appreciated. Although emergent from hyper-spirituality, an idea that
has traditionally been addressed by theologians through the subject of ‘nat-
ural theology’ (see Trigg, 1998: 175–182), religion’s capacity to engage pro-
ductively with the orientation towards transcendence that characterises
social relationships not only ensures that religion is always ‘a fundamental
and permanent aspect of humanity’ (Durkheim, 1995: 1), but also ensures
that religious influences are located at the heart of all societies rather than
in the private or epiphenomenal ‘sub-systems’ envisaged by secularisation
theorists. Further to this, a non-reductionist understanding of religion helps
clarify the meaning of MacIntyre’s (1955: 260) claim that different religions
offer ‘mutually exclusive ontologies’, since the reality of the world’s onto-
logical depth is not only revealed in, but inseparable from, the social and his-
torical specificity of particular traditions of belief and practice (see Moore,
2003).12
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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that this transcendence can be conceptualised as a distinctive ‘hyper-spiri-

tuality’ that offers a specific ecology within which the social aspects of our
humanity are nurtured and developed; and fourth, that the hyper-spiritual
aspects of social reality imbue it with an open-ended orientation towards
transcendence that allows for the emergence of those religious forms that
come to exercise a defining influence upon social life.
These arguments will be developed throughout the rest of the book with
reference to six dimensions of society that, properly explicated, can help
revitalise its sociological study, and reveal the over-hastiness of those who
seek to abandon it for post-societal forms of sociology. Each chapter is
focused on one of these dimensions, examining society as a complex, contin-
gent, necessary, temporal, tacit and resurgent reality.
Chapter 2 is concerned with society as a complex reality, and contains a
more detailed examination of post-societal perspectives, focusing upon how
the underlying ontological assumptions specific to various contemporary
social and cultural theories are able to deal with moral and religious issues
satisfactorily, and investigating the degree to which the ‘hyper-spirituality’
of social realities as emergent phenomena is dealt with adequately, if at all.
Through a critical discussion of various forms of postmodern theory, socio-
logical visions of the technological reconstruction of social and cultural life,
and contemporary theories of consumerism, individualism and market
processes, it is argued that many of these theories engage with social reali-
ties in a highly partial manner through various forms of reductionism that
take insufficient account of enduring human characteristics and potentiali-
ties. In contrast, it is argued that societies must be seen as complex, non-
reducible phenomena emergent from human relationships.
Chapter 3 extends these arguments further by focusing on the con-
tingent character of society. As Archer (1995, 2000) has emphasised, soci-
ety is not a self-subsistent reality, but one that is dependent for its
emergence upon the human beings who constitute it. In this regard, the
arguments constructed in this chapter emphasise the importance of
developing an embodied understanding of society, and seek to demon-
strate that the hyper-spiritual and religious forces that are key features of
social life are emergent phenomena contingent upon, but irreducible to,
human individuals who possess particular potentialities and powers. The
arguments of this chapter are developed through a critical discussion of
a broad range of theorists but are focused specifically upon the social the-
ories of Turner and Rojek (2001), Archer (1995, 2000), Durkheim
(1995) and Bataille (1987, 1991), all of which offer illuminating, though
sometimes problematic, accounts of the embodied basis of society.
Bringing them into dialogue, I suggest, offers a fruitful way forward for
developing a social realist account of the contingent relationship between
embodiment, society, hyper-spirituality and religion.
Chapter 4 complements the discussion of the contingent nature of soci-
ety by focusing on the fact that it nevertheless imposes itself as a necessary
reality. In contrast to theories focused on the plurality of choices and options
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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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icance of ‘everyday life’ are discussed in relation to what Bourdieu has

referred to as the ‘doxic’, or taken-for-granted knowledge enfolded in the
social habitus (Fowler, 1997: 2). Second, the presence of a tacitly Christian
way of structuring conceptions of social life within various modern notions
of ‘public’ and ‘private’ life is discussed as a key example of how a core soci-
ological dichotomy can rest on a religious substratum. Third, the role of tacit
assumptions in inter-societal relations is considered, looking at the different
role of Christian and Islamic representations in Said’s (1978) thesis on
‘Orientalism’. In conclusion, it is suggested that a focus on how the tacit
dimensions of societies continue to shape the consciousnesses of individuals
calls into question those sociological visions that too readily assume ‘a dis-
appearance of the social bond and value breakdown’ (Lash and
Featherstone, 2001: 17).
Chapter 7 is concerned with society as a resurgent reality. Through a crit-
ical discussion of the various strategies employed by contemporary social
theorists to ignore the specifically religious dimensions of contemporary
conflicts between Islam and ‘the West’, which are, for example, often
reduced to economic factors or debates about modernity and its discontents,
this chapter argues that a neo-Durkheimian form of social realism is best
placed to illuminate the real nature of these conflicts, and to help make
sense of the return of theological factors to the social theory of writers such
as Virilio. The key point stressed here is that, viewed within a ‘stratified
ontology’ sensitive to emergent hyper-spiritual and religious forces, a fresh
analysis of contemporary conflicts between Islam and the West can help us
to grasp some of the key challenges facing social theory today; challenges
that do not reveal the demise of society, but, on the contrary, its resurgence.
Following this, Chapter 8 draws together all the preceding arguments and
offers some concluding comments upon why sociology must remain focused
upon the study of society.
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
The purpose of this chapter is to examine some influential ‘post-societal’

and ‘post-social’ perspectives more closely, in order to assess the validity and
value of their claims in relation to the key arguments about social life at the
heart of this book. In this regard, I focus on how the underlying ontology
specific to each approach is able to deal with moral and religious issues, and
investigate the degree to which the ‘hyper-spirituality’ of social realities as
emergent phenomena is dealt with adequately, if at all. In so doing, it is not
my intention to deny that some of the traditions of interpretation discussed
here have some important and illuminating things to say about contempo-
rary social and cultural changes. My aim, rather, is to suggest that, even
where some valuable insights are developed, these are compromised by a
somewhat partial engagement with societal complexity. Consequently,
although this chapter explores various post-societal or post-social
approaches, it can be read as an attempt to elaborate upon Giddens’s
(1987a: 33) argument that ‘sociologists have failed to come to terms con-
ceptually with fundamental factors which make the societies they analyse
“societies” at all’, even if, as it will become clear, I disagree with him about
what these factors really are. Taken together, the diverse visions of society
considered in this chapter testify to the difficulties of grasping social com-
plexity, but a consideration of their underlying tendencies towards various
forms of reductionism also helps illuminate how a more satisfactory under-
standing of society might be possible. At the start, however, it is important
to be clear what is meant by a ‘complex society’.
Notions of ‘complexity’ are now increasingly popular in sociology,
though many of these are adaptations of ideas developed in the natural sci-
ences (for example, Byrne, 1998; Urry, 2003). Some of these are of poten-
tially great value in assessing the characteristics of social reality, and are
discussed later in this chapter. None the less, the notion of a ‘complex soci-
ety’ that informs much of this chapter draws principally upon a different
tradition of thought, though I believe it has much in common with recent
scientific perspectives. In Durkheim’s work, ‘complexity’ is an inherent fea-
ture of all societies and, therefore, a key concern for sociology. In fact,
although he often made distinctions between ‘simple’ and ‘complex’ soci-
eties, he nevertheless recognised that a society always manifests a ‘complex
reality’ wherein economic, political and philosophical factors have to be
grasped in their totality, and analysed in relation to the religious substratum
that allows for the emergence of their particular characteristics (Durkheim,
1953: 62; Gane, 1988: 104). For Gurvitch (1971) too, social reality is a com-
plex totality, composed of various ‘depth levels’ underpinning various forms
of sociality characterised by different degrees of institutionalisation, while a
Ch2 final.qxd 10/09/2004 14:53 Page 28
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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Complex Society
Archer (2000: 87) has discussed postmodernism in terms of the ten-

dency to see our social relations as so overpowering that human beings
become reduced to infinitely malleable forms that can be shaped according
to society. Here, however, the seeds of social constructionism sown by post-
modernism reap a whirlwind of arbitrary significations that destroy society
itself, so that postmodernism tends to follow a pattern whereby ‘society’ is
reduced into ‘culture’, and then ‘culture’ is reduced into ‘language’, which
becomes a game of significations detached from anything real. Not only
Baudrillard (1983, 1990a, 1990b), but also Deleuze (1979), Lyotard (1984)
and Derrida (1991) have all encouraged a deep scepticism about society fol-
lowing such a pattern, suggesting that society is simply a culturally relative
construction that masks the endemic plurality and indeterminacy of human
life. Baudrillard’s arguments concerning the ‘death of the social’ are partic-
ularly significant in this respect.
Baudrillard (1983: 4) notes that sociology depends upon a ‘positive and
definitive hypothesis of the social’, but considers three possibilities con-
cerning the social that illuminate its non-existence or current dissolution,
thereby marking the death of sociology as well as of the notion of the social.
These three possibilities are as follows: first, that things have never func-
tioned ‘socially’ but ‘symbolically, magically, irrationally’; second, that the
social is some sort of ‘residue’ now becoming absorbed into the administra-
tive machinery of society; and third, that the social might once have existed
but has now vanished into the simulations, circuits and networks of the
information age (Baudrillard, 1983: 68, 73, 83). Baudrillard’s own position
in relation to these three possibilities is not entirely free of ambiguity, but it
is generally accepted that the third position characteristically marks his
‘anti-sociology’ (Bogard, 2000: 240). Within this anti-sociology, the ‘social’
is displaced by a simulation of the social, just as the real has given way to the
hyper-real. Here, there is no ontological basis upon which to ground any
notion of the real, or any form of knowledge about anything, since there is
only radical, chaotic, meaningless contingency. As Gane (2003: 160) sug-
gests, within this condition of hyper-reality, ‘events and phenomena follow
a delirious course’ since the world is now characterised by ‘radical indeter-
minacy’ and ‘radical uncertainty’.
None the less, Baudrillard’s proclamation of the ‘death of the social’ in
the delirious simulations of the hyper-real implicitly offers some sort of
‘holistic’ vision of the contemporary world, even though he repeatedly
emphasises the impossibility of access to meaning, truth or the real. In this
regard, it is of note that he identifies theory with a form of ‘exorcism’ car-
ried out on the world, suggesting some sort of religious world-view lurking
underneath his apparent nihilism (Baudrillard, 1988a: 100). Indeed, it has
been noted that in Baudrillard’s thought, as in much postmodern thinking,
there is, arguably, a ‘submerged religious paradigm’ (Turner, 1990: 10).
Baudrillard’s work is characterised by a strong dose of nihilism, yet he also
aligns himself with the Jesuits of the Counter-Reformation. He argues that,
despite accepting the ‘death of God’, the Jesuits sought to use the glittering,
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seductive images of the baroque to offer the promise of redemption.

Similarly, he advocates a strategy of immersion in the seductive but mean-
ingless ‘simulacra’ of the hyper-real in an attitude that veers between an
‘immoral stoicism and the hope that something redemptive may yet appear’
(Wernick, 1992: 69). If this ‘submerged religious paradigm’ is really there,
however, and Baudrillard refuses to say whether it is or not, then it is an
extreme form of negative theology that hopes for religious illumination
through the deconstruction and rejection of everything that might offer a
source or route for it. ‘God’, ‘society’ and ‘humanity’ are just fictional ‘total-
isations’ imposed upon the meaningless flux of life, and none of them has
any inherent meaning or reality.
A ‘submerged religious paradigm’ that can be identified in Baudrillard’s
work, nevertheless, is what King (2000: 263) has referred to as a reworking
of Descartes’ ‘hyperbolic doubt’. As King suggests, Descartes (1994: 79)
imagined that he was in the power of ‘some malicious demon’ intent on
deceiving him through the reality of external things. To counter the demon,
Descartes considered all physical, biological and material phenomena in the
universe, and even his own flesh and blood, to be delusions, finding certainty
only in his own existence (Descartes, 1994: 79). In Fatal Strategies (1990b:
72), Baudrillard draws upon Descartes’ ‘First Meditation’, and the ‘epistemic
void’ it opens up, to talk of ‘The Evil Genie of the Social’, which, like
Descartes’ ‘malicious demon’, seeks to mislead Baudrillard by positing some
reality in social life (King, 2000: 263). Here, it might be said that Baudrillard
is not trying to get to grips with the complexity of the world at all, but sim-
ply avoiding it through a Cartesian strategy of assuming that all apparently
real phenomena are some sort of evil trick. Indeed, it is Baudrillard’s adop-
tion of this strategy for the elaboration of his notion of hyper-reality, along
with other epistemologically oriented forms of postmodernism that deny
the real, that leads King (2000: 270) to conclude that ‘These theories are not
serious but merely impose the uncritical sentiments of disillusioned intel-
lectuals onto the social process as a whole, assuming that their own obscure
doubts are widely experienced across the whole of society’ (see also
Bauman, 1988: 223; 1989: 2). A significant feature of these impositions and
assumptions concerns the peculiarly disembodied view of human beings.
Disembodied society
Despite the apparent prominence of the body in many forms of postmod-

ern theory, there are no ‘real’ embodied human beings only the ‘simulacra’
of being human, because there is no solid ontological foundation for any
emergent social and natural phenomena. Gilles Deleuze (1977), for exam-
ple, talks of the ‘affective foundations’ of thought, but what he means is that
the truth-value of ideas is determined by the level of emotional intensity
they stimulate. The embodiment of humans that makes such emotional
intensity possible is, however, only a ‘complex interplay of highly con-
structed social and symbolic forces. The body is not an essence, let alone a
biological substance; it is a play of forces, a surface of intensities: pure sim-
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Complex Society
ulacra without originals’ (Braidotti, 1994: 112). Theological advocates of

postmodern theorising often express similar views. Don Cupitt (1995:
117–20), for example, in attempting to outline a form of theology after the
‘end of Truth’, argues that the only thing left is language and the ‘scattering
energies’ of the body. Here, the ‘body’ is simply a site for language ‘to ride
upon or to modulate’, since the world is only a ‘stream of language-formed
events’. Consequently, theology, like philosophy, can only operate as a form
of poetry, employing ‘evocative metaphors’, myths and reflections upon
reflections in the eternal meaninglessness of everything. As for ‘humanity’,
it is simply a construction of language.
Rosi Braidotti’s philosophical ‘nomadism’, which embraces myth-mak-
ing and the generation of imaginative fictions that allow her to ‘think
through and move across established categories and levels of experience’, is
an influential example of this reduction of humanity into a theory of lan-
guage. ‘Nomadism’ is ‘thinking about thinking in a metadiscursive mode’, a
‘molecularisation of the self’ that reduces the body and society to fictional
constructs that can be played with endlessly (Braidotti, 1994: 4, 202, 16).
Here, given that all social (and even biological) forms are deemed to be
devoid of any reality or substance, the idea that a specific hyper-spirituality
could emerge and have a transformative impact upon individual identities is
clearly particularly unattractive, even if some such collective reality some-
times appears to lurk at the edges of this nomadic myth-making. The dim
suggestion of such as reality, along with a clear testimony to a lack of inter-
est in lived social realities, is indicated, in fact, by Braidotti’s (1994: 16) sug-
gestions that the ‘nomadic, polyglot writer despises mainstream
communication’, that notions of ‘common sense’ are a form of mental ‘pol-
lution’, and that the nomadic philosopher longs not for social bonds but for
the ‘radical nonbelonging’ of the desert.
The fact that such representations of humans, society and the world
exist is no doubt significant: as Giddens (1990, 1991a) has suggested, they
may reflect the sense of indeterminacy and insecurity associated with peri-
ods of rapid social and cultural change. None the less, how seriously should
we take them in their own terms? The answer to this appears to lie within
the inherent contradictions of postmodern theory itself. The non-viability of
a vision of a human existence free of collective ‘pollution’ in a state of ‘rad-
ical nonbelonging’, for example, is indicated, it can be noted, in Braidotti’s
(1994: 35) admission that ‘it was not until I found some stability and sense
of partial belonging, supported by a job and a permanent relationship, that
I could actually start thinking adequately about nomadism’. This type of
philosophical orientation does not seem able to make the theoretical link,
however, between theory and the real comforts and challenges of embodied
being. It simply endorses, and embraces with some enthusiasm, ideas about
the ‘atomisation’ of the social into ‘flexible networks of language games’
(Lyotard, 1984: 17; Deleuze, 1979; see also Baudrillard, 1983; Rose, 1996).
Similarly, Cupitt’s belief that we can choose a linguistically constructed fic-
tion to live by ignores the fact that this proposes someone able to make such
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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
Despite their disregard for what seem to be unavoidable ontological facts

about human beings, however, postmodern forms of philosophy have been
incorporated into sociological analysis in various forms, and with varying
degrees of acceptance of their ultimate logic for sociology and for moral and
political critique. In general terms, they have tended to support the view
that there has been a proliferation of centrifugal social and cultural
processes that make the notion of an overarching society untenable, and that
any newly envisaged conception of sociology needs to account for the com-
plex and fluid configurations of peoples and identities that characterise the
current era (see Shilling and Mellor, 2001). While some sociological incor-
porations of postmodern theorising have accepted the whole package of lin-
guistically based relativism, however, more selective incorporations have
tended, rather, to draw on postmodern themes and arguments to account for
contemporary social and cultural changes. The changes are, however,
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Complex Society
deemed to be so radical that the ‘society’ of traditional sociological discourse

looks like an archaic remnant of an earlier age of nation-states and tightly
bounded social orders.
Smart (2000: 267) has noted that, although he repeatedly talks of the
‘death of the social’, the status of the term ‘society’ in Baudrillard’s thought
is thoroughly ambiguous and under-theorised. In contrast, he notes that
Touraine’s critique of the notion of society is far more systematic and his-
torically grounded (Smart, 2000: 268–9). None the less, Touraine’s (1989,
1995) focus on social movements that render the idea of ‘society’ meaning-
less, and Urry’s manifesto for ‘sociology beyond societies’, clearly arise out of
an engagement with postmodern philosophy. For Touraine (1989: 15), the
complex and changing fields of social relations that mark the present seri-
ously compromise any notion of an overarching totality to which individu-
als understand themselves to belong. Focusing on the need for a sociology of
change, Touraine (1989: 11) argues that ‘the very idea of society should be
eliminated’. For him, ‘individuals are increasingly determined by their
movements rather than by their belonging’ (Touraine, 1989: 15). Urry’s
(2000:1) ‘manifesto for sociology’ also makes the claim that sociologists
should abandon the concept of society. He argues that sociology should,
instead, be focused on the analysis of ‘global networks and flows’ since soci-
eties, as sociologists have conceived of them, no longer exist.
Urry (2000: 27–8) draws on the ‘nomadism’ of writers such as Deleuze
and Braidotti to reinforce his post-societal vision, but attempts to resist their
relativism: he believes that it is possible to clarify and evaluate the empiri-
cal claims implicit in such theories, and that the development of ‘nomadic
consciousness’ must depend upon ‘corporeal mobility’. For Urry (2000: 33),
however, this mobility renders ‘the metaphor of society as region’ useless: in
a world where even the ‘global’ cannot be conceived as a ‘region’ but as ‘net-
work’ and ‘fluid’, the idea of people being identified with, and studied in
relation to, a societal region makes no sense. Urry (2000: 36) argues that
these global flows produce a ‘hollowing out of existing societies’, producing
overlapping, disjunctive orders across time and space in ‘a kind of hyper-
textual patterning’. Consequently, we now ‘inhabit an indeterminate,
ambivalent and semiotic risk culture where the risks are in part generated
by the declining powers of societies in the face of multiple “inhuman” global
flows and multiple networks’ (Urry, 2000: 37).
It is within this essentially postmodernist vision of a ‘hypertextual’,
‘indeterminate, ambivalent and semiotic risk culture’ that Urry draws on
complexity theories developed in the natural sciences. In this regard it is
notable that he relies heavily on Reed and Harvey (1992), but does not fully
integrate their interest in emergent patterns of order into his own argu-
ments. For example, where he considers an ‘emergent global order’ he
immediately defines it as ‘constant disorder’ (Urry, 2000: 208). In fact, the
only real source of order he acknowledges within his account of complexity
is in relation to the notion of the ‘network’, in the sense that a ‘dynamical
net’ can serve to channel ‘the messy power of complexity’ into particular
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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
and duties he seems to believe is desirable: if everything is just a series of

technologically determined ‘flows’, and notions of ‘humanity’ and ‘society’
are simply outmoded metaphors, then who can say whether one set of social
and political arrangements is better than another, and why should we care?
Furthermore, it is notable that, although religious issues are hardly men-
tioned by Urry, his brief references to the Islamic jihad against the West sug-
gest that fundamentalist organisations should be seen as ‘virtual
communities’ constructed through cultural discourses and media images
(Urry, 2000: 43, 209; see Barber, 1995; Rose, 1996). Here, Al-Qaida is not
an embodiment of a radicalised interpretation of Islam, but a ‘chaotic’ phe-
nomenon representative of the ‘emergent global fluid of international ter-
rorism’ (Urry, 2003: 132). This easy association of social movements with
fashionable notions of virtuality and global ‘fluids’, which puts Muslim ter-
rorists on a par with New Age newsgroups, is surely a massive simplification
of the real social dynamics, and their distinctive hyper-spiritualities, that
lead people to identify with such forms. In denying a specifically human
agency, it also means that we cannot even begin to consider why such peo-
ple might be prepared to die, and to kill others, because of the religious val-
ues their membership of a particular community entails. Furthermore, such
easy associations tend to endorse those forms of social and cultural theory
that appear to engage creatively with scientific and technological develop-
ments, but effectively abandon any attempt to grapple with social complex-
ity by adopting forms of technological reductionism.
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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ily fluids, into a virtual exchange of information where physicality is

reduced to an act of ‘remote-control masturbation’ (Virilio, 1997: 104).
These ‘teletechnologies of remote love’ are, furthermore, harbingers of a
radical reconstruction of male/female relationships and patterns of repro-
duction. Changes in the relationships between men and women are evident
in the fact that ‘mutual repulsion is already winning out over attraction, over
sexual seduction’, as accusations of ‘sexual harassment’ and serial divorces
increasingly mark contemporary sexual relations, but the uncomplicated
pleasures of virtual sex, with a technologically created ideal man or woman,
threaten to push this divergence of the sexes further. The implications of
this for reproduction are immense, not simply in the sense that such devel-
opments can be read as ‘a furtive form of remote birth control’, but because
of their broader rejection of embodied human love, and the family descen-
dants it engenders (Virilio, 1997: 108–9, emphasis in original).
In broad terms, these developments signal a loss of faith in the social
and its hyper-spiritual dynamics; a loss of faith also exemplified, and some-
times celebrated, in the more nihilistic elements of postmodern philosophy.
This postmodern view, however, is strongly opposed by Virilio, who reasserts
the importance of the social in the face of Baudrillard’s nihilism, and rejects
the concept of ‘simulation’ in favour of that of ‘substitution’ (Armitage,
2000: 43). For Virilio, there is no collapse between representation and the
real, only the substitution of a virtual reality (with its own, technologically
mediated, representations) for the flesh and blood reality of human interac-
tion. This substitution is also, however, a religious substitution: the collapse
of the social is tied to the gradual elimination of traditional forms of the
sacred from the contemporary world, and the emergence of techno-science
as a new, surrogate religion. This idea expresses the more apocalyptic strand
of Virilio’s thought.
As Lyon (1988: 144) notes, new technologies have been infused with
religious symbolism at least since the time of Francis Bacon, whose New
Atlantis (1627) proposed that science and technology could be the means
for overcoming the human ‘fall’ from God’s grace. None the less, the
immense power, fascination and excitement that technology now seems to
hold for many people, added to its capacity to substitute virtuality for real-
ity, expresses for Virilio a new religious form in which nobody can ‘behave
like unbelievers’. The only way to counter this technological religion is to
choose the ‘god of transcendence’ over the ‘machine-god’, since all atheists
now bow before the miracles of techno-science (Virilio, 1996: 81). This reli-
gious rebellion is difficult, however, in a world where genuine religion, along
with humanity and society, are being systematically eliminated (Virilio and
Lotringer, 1997: 124).
In contrast to many techno-society theorists, then, Virilio’s vision is a
passionate, immensely powerful depiction of the contemporary human lot,
which does not simply accept contemporary technologically driven social
and cultural changes as inevitable, let alone desirable. Furthermore, in con-
trast with much postmodern theory, he does not doubt that embodied
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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
I have already noted the connection between Virilio’s vision of techno-

science and Weber’s concerns about the spread of instrumental forms of
rationality at the expense of value-rationality. A further influential set of
social theories concerned with the ‘hollowing out’ of society focus more
specifically upon this instrumentalism and, rather than seeing social life as
technologically driven, tend to see it as increasingly determined by patterns
of homogenisation, rationalisation and an economically driven con-
sumerism. George Ritzer’s (1993, 1998) account of the ‘McDonaldization’
of society is an influential account of these processes. Alongside
‘McDonaldization’, however, consumerism has also been associated with a
religious pattern of ‘re-enchantment’ rather than a consolidation of the ‘dis-
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enchantment’ Weber associated with the spread of instrumental rationalisa-

tion (Ferguson, 1992; Ritzer, 1999; Lyon, 2000). This religious dimension of
consumerism is expressed through emotional identifications with powerful
symbols in ‘cathedrals of consumption’, but lacks the moral seriousness of
traditional religious forms and their engagement with human potentiality
and finitude. Taking both of these aspects of consumerism together, in fact,
it is possible to talk not only of a consuming society, but also of a consump-
tive society in the sense that such processes can be associated with a chronic
enfeeblement of society as a context for human flourishing.
‘McDonaldization’ is not simply the application of highly rationalised
methods of production, distribution and consumption to the fast-food
industry, but the spread of these into society as a whole: ‘After the
McDonaldization of the fast-food industry, these principles have been
applied to universities and medicine. McDentists and McDoctors extends
the principles of cheapness, standardisation and reliability to the health
industry’ (Turner and Rojek, 2001: 108). For Ritzer (1998: 68), contem-
porary capitalism is now geared towards the ‘maximisation of consump-
tion’, and the spread of efficient, rationally organised and standardised
products which, even if they are focused on ‘niche’ markets, ensure that
consumers are guaranteed ‘safe’, predictable goods, services and experi-
ences. Thus, ‘action holidays’, for example, are actually carefully ordered
simulations of adventure and danger pre-packaged for consumers who
desire efficient and controlled breaks from their daily routine (Ritzer,
1998: 146; see Bauman, 2002: 197).
Bryan Turner and Chris Rojek (2001: 219) illuminate some of the
embodied aspects of living in ‘McSociety’ when they note the
McDonaldization of maternity units in public hospitals, where the labour of
mothers is organised in a highly rationalised manner, expressing an underly-
ing Cartesian view of the body as a machine. This suggests a connection to
the values of techno-science discussed by Virilio, but also to the postmod-
ern global networks discussed by Castells and Urry. As Lyon (2000: 78)
notes, McDonald’s is ‘part of the accelerated compression of time and space
which is characteristic of the postmodern’. While Barber’s (1995) depiction
of the confrontation between Islamic jihad and ‘McWorld’ indicates the
power of these McDonaldization processes, however, the idea that they have
no religious dimension in and of themselves has been challenged. Ritzer
(1999: 7) notes that McDonald’s and other globally recognised brands such
as Disney, have become some of the world’s ‘most powerful icons’, and are
part of the re-‘enchantment of a disenchanted world’ through consumerism.
Here, consumerism rather than Virilio’s ‘machine-god’ becomes the domi-
nant religious form of contemporary societies, though it offers little other
than a transient stimulation of the senses and the promise of a certain
amount of security, predictability and order to human life. More fundamen-
tal existential, ontological and moral questions remain unanswered. As
Ritzer (1999: 217) is aware, in fact, for all the talk of ‘cathedrals of con-
sumption’ and the ‘enchantment’ of goods and services ‘the most immedi-
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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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that peculiar blend of determinism and voluntarism that characterises much

postmodernist, post-societal and techno-scientific thought. Discussing the
‘until-further-notice’ character of the relationships, forms of work, patterns
of belief and action, social arrangements and commitments that appear to
characterise contemporary societies, he identifies a lack of trust as a key fea-
ture of our current disposition towards the world: ‘Whoever chains them-
selves to an unseaworthy vessel risks going down with it at the next tide. By
comparison, surfing seems a safer option’ (Bauman, 2002: 193). Here, it is
accepted that the ‘next tide’ (of relentless social, cultural, economic or polit-
ical change) will inevitably come and that there is nothing we can do to stop
it (determinism), but it is also accepted that people can teach themselves to
adapt to, and make the best of, these transformations (voluntarism). Surfing,
of course, although it can be done in the company of others, is an individual
pursuit, so that, in so far as we can talk of a ‘society’ in relation to such activ-
ity it is, necessarily, an ‘individualised society’ (Bauman, 2001). In these cir-
cumstances, society as a sui generis phenomenon transcendent of individuals
is simply ‘an unseaworthy vessel’ it would be foolish to commit ourselves to:
if it has not yet sunk in the tides of change, it can only be a matter of time.
Bauman (2002: 191) suggests that such a situation contrasts starkly
with Durkheim’s (1972: 93–4) view of society where we ‘believe that our
actions have consequences which go beyond the immediate moment:
that they are not completely limited to the point in time and space at
which they are produced’. Now, in so far as we experience ‘society’, it
‘makes itself present to most of us mediated by occasions which do not
necessarily connect into continuous and coherent experience’, so that
‘society’ becomes just a ‘summary name’ for the diverse, often discon-
nected phenomena of our social encounters and experiences. In fact, con-
trary to Durkheim’s view that our lives in society give us a sense of things
that outlive us as individuals, the uncomfortable fact now is that we tend
to outlive particular forms of society: ‘My life may be too short for com-
fort, but the lifespan of anything else seems disconcertingly brief by com-
parison’ (Bauman, 2002: 192–3). Giddens’s (1991a) account of the
pervasiveness of threats to ‘ontological security’, including ‘radical doubt’
and a collapse into ‘personal meaninglessness’, also expresses a sense of
the difficulties of living in such a social context.
Giddens’s (1990, 1991a) account of the chronically ‘reflexive society’ of
‘high’ or ‘late’ modernity and Ulrich Beck’s (1992) depiction of contempo-
rary ‘risk society’ share many similar features with Bauman’s analysis,
though they focus in more detail on how this transient, ‘until-further-notice’
aspect of contemporary societies permeates institutional as well as individ-
ual characteristics. At an institutional level, social organisations become ‘dis-
embedded’ from their local contexts to emerge as ‘abstract systems’ that are
organised across ‘indefinite tracts of time-space’ and are driven by expert
‘knowledges’ such as science and medicine (Giddens, 1991a: 18). The
abstract and ‘all-encompassing’ nature of these systems means that they
have to be reflexively maintained, but also that they encourage a further
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spread of reflexivity, particularly given that these systems tend to generate

new risks, dilemmas and fears as well as promises that they can control nat-
ural and social environments (Beck, 1992: 22). At the individual level,
Giddens’s notion of ‘confluent love’ is intended to exemplify the impor-
tance of reflexivity in intimate relationships. The inherently fragile, transient
character of these relationships is understood to be indicative of the broader
‘until-further-notice’ character of reflexively defined projects. Close per-
sonal ties, like everything else, are entered into, and maintained, only for the
benefits they offer to individuals (Giddens, 1991a: 89). Here, ‘love’ is sim-
ply a ‘codifying force’ for organising the competing, reflexively determined
pursuit of emotional and sexual satisfaction by the individuals involved.
This thoroughgoing institutional and individual reflexivity is associated
with the ‘future-oriented’ character of modernity which means all beliefs,
values, social practices and forms of knowledge can be altered, revised or
abandoned in the light of reflexive adaptations to changed circumstances
(Giddens, 1990; Beck, 1992; Luhmann, 1998). For Giddens (1990: 38),
modernity and tradition are incompatible, since tradition is ‘past-oriented’
and vulnerable to deconstruction through reflexively applied knowledge: in
fact, what appears to us as tradition in the present has often been so thor-
oughly reconstructed through reflexivity that it is merely ‘tradition in sham
clothing’. Consequently, religion, which is closely tied to tradition, also
tends to become increasingly irrelevant to contemporary life. It might have
some value for some individuals grappling with existential problems, but
this value is arrived at through a reflexive reconstruction of religion in the
light of contemporary needs and circumstances (Giddens, 1990: 109).
Religious fundamentalism, for example, is merely one of a number of
‘lifestyle decisions’ (Giddens, 1991a: 143).
Although Giddens (1991a: 179) notes the arguments of Rieff (1966),
who argued that therapy had come to replace religion as the dominant form
of social control in modern societies, his own understanding of religion is
essentially psychoanalytic, and built on the views of Freud (1962) and
Erikson (1965), for whom religion offered an infantile protection from the
harsh realities of life (Giddens, 1990: 104). In fact, Giddens (1991a: 195)
offers an essentially Freudian reading of ‘premodern’ life as a world of coher-
ent fantasies that protected people from life’s unpredictability. This is why,
for Giddens, despite all the ‘radical doubt’ and reflexively induced mean-
inglessness, living in modernity is ultimately a liberating experience full of
all sorts of potentialities and opportunities as well as risks. While Bauman,
who has a far more sceptical view of the ‘therapeutic’ dimensions of con-
temporary societies, worries about an ‘individualised society’ where people
surf across social and cultural changes with little sense of their moral prox-
imity to others, Giddens (1991a: 211) suggests that such phenomena are the
latest stages in the post-Enlightenment liberation of individuals from tradi-
tional constraints, and is happy to present them in terms of the development
of ‘emancipatory politics’.
It is in this context that Giddens’s (1990: 64) suggestion that sociologists
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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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evaluated as narcissistic and inherently anti-social (Bauman, 1993: 178–9).

In fact, the amoral subjects that have come to populate the contemporary
era are exemplified by Bauman’s typologies of contemporary individuals:
the ‘vagabond’ and the ‘tourist’ are concerned with their own interests and
possess little grasp of the notions of moral proximity and moral responsibil-
ity (Bauman, 1993: 142; see Shilling and Mellor, 2001: 194). For Bauman
(2002: 42), the images of ‘closeness, proximity, togetherness, a degree of
intimacy and mutual engagement’ that surrounded sociological uses of soci-
ety not only now look archaic, but also point towards things we cannot
believe in because they are no longer embedded in our daily lives.
For Bauman, debates about the disappearance of ‘society’ cannot be
reduced to arguments about sociological terminology: there are moral issues
at stake. None the less, his position, articulated with a significant amount of
regret, is simply that the world has changed, and that sociology must there-
fore change too, which means abandoning notions of society that may have
had real referents in the past but no longer do so. This stress on the need to
think carefully about the appropriateness of sociological theories for making
sense of contemporary changes is also made by Touraine (1989: 5), who
argues that sociological interpretations of social life must change along with
the realities they are trying to grasp. Contrary to some post-societal theo-
rists, however, Bauman finds little to celebrate in the ‘death of society’ that
appears to have followed the ‘death of God’, and even offers us a (faint)
hope in its resurrection in the lives and works of men and women who are
able to resist the de-humanisation of the present time (Bauman, 2002: 51;
see Arendt, 1995).
The mantra of ‘no salvation by society’ that Bauman (2001: 5) identifies
as a key sign of contemporary ‘individualised’ society testifies to the power
of this pattern of dehumanisation. In fact, his analysis of a post-societal form
of ‘liquid modernity’ rests on recognition of the pervasiveness of a crude
utilitarianism that, combined with the cultural relativism of postmod-
ernism, serves to impoverish human aspirations and undermine the possi-
bility of human solidarity (Bauman, 2002). Nevertheless, the positive
endorsement of this utilitarianism, rather than its critique, underpins
another influential post-societal perspective, which seeks to reduce social
life to a series of ‘markets’.
Market society
Contrary to various arguments suggesting that the notion of society is out-

moded, the market-oriented post-societal perspective suggests that it has
never referred to anything real anyway. This is not because this view
endorses postmodernist relativism or technological determinism, or even
that it endorses a view of modern reflexivity that makes social life uniquely
problematic, but because it grounds all social phenomena very firmly in a
robust view of self-interested, ‘rational’ individuals.3 Drawing on the utili-
tarian tradition of philosophy and economics, rational choice theory urges
the subordination of the notion of homo sociologicus, which emphasises the
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influence of society upon individuals, to the notion of homo economicus,

which views individuals as having the innate power to make ‘rational’ deci-
sions about what best serves their self-interests, and the ability to act accord-
ingly. In Durkheim’s time, opposition to homo economicus was integral to the
project of establishing sociology, yet rational choice theory offers an ‘eco-
nomic approach to human behaviour’ with philosophical roots in the work
of Thomas Hobbes, Adam Smith and Jeremy Bentham, and is particularly
hostile to the Durkheimian focus on the transpersonal dimensions of social
life. George Homans, for example, argues that the ‘social system’ is a myth,
that ‘structures’ never do anything, and that sociology’s unit of analysis
should be the actions of individuals engaged in processes of ‘preference
maximising exchange’. Social contexts and structures, values, beliefs, habits,
emotions, and religious choices are all explained as products of rational,
individual, ‘utility maximisation’. Social order is simply the aggregation of
the actions of rational individuals (Coleman, 1990; Abell, 1991; Bohman,
1991; Scott, 1995: 86; Iannaccone, 1997).
In some cases, this focus on the determining power of rational choices
is so strong that even basic biological limits to human life are swept away.
Gary Becker (1986: 116), for example, suggests that nearly all deaths can
be understood as ‘suicides’, in the sense that death results from individu-
als making choices about actions that fail to ensure their longevity. This
is not simply where a particular choice (for example, to smoke) results in
a particular cause of death (for example, lung cancer), but is a rule that
can be applied universally: even if I reach a hundred years before I die,
my death can be ‘explained’ as a result of rational choices not to do things
(for example, eat well, take exercise) and to do other things (eat too
much/too little, take too much/not enough exercise). While Becker is
content to reduce such matters of life and death to utility maximisation,
Stark and Bainbridge (1987) extend this logic to life after death too.
Viewing individuals as ‘information-processors’ who identify problems
and seek to solve them, they note that many rewards (such as immortal-
ity) are apparently beyond reach. Religious beliefs in life after death,
however, can act as ‘compensators’ for such elusive rewards, and there-
fore offer a potentially sound investment. Iannaccone’s (1997) view that
investing in a religion is not, in essence, any different to investing in a new
house or car follows the same logic. He suggests, furthermore, that ‘reli-
gious consumers and religious producers form a religious market’, and
that religious producers (for example, the Churches) necessarily ‘aban-
don inefficient modes of production and unpopular products in favour of
more attractive and profitable alternatives’ (Iannaccone, 1997: 27).
As Polanyi (2001) and, more recently, Archer (2000) have suggested, the
rational choice picture of people as self-oriented utility maximisers owing
nothing to society rests on a particularly impoverished notion of what it is
to be a human. While individuals appear to have a great deal of power, and
a strong sense of their own self-interest, they are stripped of many of the
emotional, moral and imaginative aspects of what it is to be human, they are
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Complex Society
deemed incapable of acting in a genuinely altruist way, and, since they

appear to emerge from the womb with all their preferences and rational fac-
ulties fully formed, are apparently devoid of the capacity to develop. The
‘market model’ of religion offered by rational choice theory expresses this
reduction of human potentiality particularly clearly: in suggesting that I
might become a member of a church because I make a rational choice to
‘invest’ in its ‘product’ with the ‘calculation’ that, at some point (even if
after death), I can anticipate a ‘profit’, it not only rules out the possibility of
an encounter with something transcendent that might transform my desires
and expectations, but also, in making economic calculation the keystone of
the universe, offers an astonishingly impoverished view of the human lot. In
this perspective, when we all eventually commit ‘suicide’, as Becker would
have it, anyone trying to assess what kind of life we actually lived can only
look at our cost–benefit balance sheets and hope we can show a profit.
Rethinking society
Although the ‘market society’ theorists appear to offer a robust challenge to

the social constructionism central to notions of the ‘hyper-real society’, they
actually display similar weaknesses in terms of a failure to offer a balanced
account of the embodied capacities of humans and the emergence of col-
lective social forms. In rational choice theory, there is a very strong empha-
sis on the inherent nature of individual human beings, conceptualised as a
capacity for selecting courses of action that maximise self-interest (Becker,
1986; Coleman, 1990). Yet, this not only necessitates the disappearance of
society into the realm of ‘aggregation effects’ and ‘markets’ (Abell, 1996),
but also robs humanity of anything other than the ability to act ‘rationally’
in relation to self-interest. Erotic, psychological and moral motivations are
excluded from analysis (Olson, 1965: 61), while phenomena such as altru-
ism are explained as self-interest in disguise (Shilling and Mellor, 2001:
177). Consequently, although rational choice theory has produced some
influential studies of religion, its reductive view of humans, and replacement
of societies with markets, means that the ‘religion’ it envisages has no con-
nection with a societal hyper-spirituality, and, therefore, has nothing to do
with any collective engagement with the possibilities of transcendence
inherent within the contingencies of life, only the self-interested attempt to
maximise ‘benefits’ and minimise ‘costs’.
On the other hand, the idea that individual identities and, indeed, real-
ity in general are constructed by society, which has achieved a great deal of
consensus in sociology, appears to offer a very strong emphasis on the
importance of society. Ironically, however, this not only allows the disap-
pearance of ‘real human beings’ in a flurry of social constructionism, but also
robs ‘society’ of any real substance. If society is everything, then it is noth-
ing in particular. This explains how it is that Urry (2000: 201–2) can see
‘humanity’ and ‘nature’ as social constructions, yet also deny any reality to
‘society’ (see also Strathern, 1998). It also accounts for the emergence, and
sociological appeal, of postmodernist forms of philosophy. In this regard,
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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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1998: 16; see Waldrop, 1992). The sociological implications of these

divergent uses of complexity theories obviously vary considerably, but
the argument of writers such as Byrne is that the postmodernist use of
complexity theory is contrary to its true implications. Further to this,
clarifying the true implications of scientific notions of complexity can
help illuminate problems in the postmodernist position.
There is a growing interest in the potential usefulness of develop-
ments in the natural sciences for making sense of society. Zohar and
Marshall (1994), for example, introduced the notion of the ‘quantum
society’ in order to help illuminate how developments in physics can help
us make sense of societies as ‘emergent wholes’. What interested them
was the notion of ‘quantum reality’ as a complex interweaving of ‘parti-
cles’ and ‘waves’ that, by analogy, allows us to see individuals as particles
and social forces as waves washing over time and space (Zohar and
Marshall, 1994: 326; Urry, 2000: 122). As potentially beguiling as such
language is, however, it is only really useful if it helps resolve genuine the-
oretical problems regarding social life, rather than simply offering a new
set of metaphors for social theorists to play with. Indeed, some uses of
complexity theories, which assert that a new ‘axial age’ is upon us, look
as overblown and speculative as the more creative forms of postmod-
ernism (see Gillette, 2002). Reed and Harvey (1992: 359) and Byrne
(1998: 39), however, see a real potentiality in chaos and complexity the-
ories because they allow us to appreciate that nature and society are
ontologically open and historically constituted, in some respects indeter-
minate but also amenable to rational explanation. Building upon these
views, it is possible to emphasise four key aspects of complexity theory
that need to be taken seriously in contemporary social theory.
First, complexity theory directs our attention towards ontology: it helps
remind social theorists that, regardless of how we theorise about the world
and the particular types of language we use, the question of being cannot be
converted into the problem of meaning because social life has to be under-
stood with regard to broader temporal, biological, physical and evolutionary
factors (Bergmann, 1981: 17; Adam, 1990: 43). Second, though, this does
not mean that society can be reduced into biological factors, for example,
since complexity theory reinforces the realist emphasis on emergence. It
thereby allows us to see that social realities are non-reducible, emergent
phenomena, respecting ‘the autonomous logic of sociological theory’
(Byrne, 1998: 47). Third, contrary to the ‘social systems’ theories of writers
such as Parsons, which have too strong a focus on the ‘problem of order’,
complexity theory can encourage sociologists to recognise the contingency of
all emergent phenomena, and, therefore, to explore the ambiguity of social
phenomena with regard to problems of order and disorder (Harvey and
Reed, 1994: 390; see also Durkheim, 1995: 412–13). Fourth, however, sci-
entific notions of complexity can help remind us that engagements with
contingency have to be placed within a holistic context: contrary to post-
structuralist and postmodernist rejections of all notions of totality as cultur-
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Complex Society
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-
Ch3 final.qxd 10/09/2004 14:54 Page 54
gion expresses a collective engagement with the ‘open-ended’ possibilities of

transcendence emergent from embodied human life allows it to develop
cosmological visions of the universe that can have an immense impact upon
humanity’s social relationships and self-understandings. Thus, the theologi-
cally realist interpretation of the ontological stratification of the universe as
a signal of the contingency of all creation, including humanity and society,
upon God (Soskice, 1987; Torrance, 1998), helps us to understand how reli-
gion comes to have such a powerful social influence: the recognition of the
contingency of the human condition that all of us, perhaps, in one way or
another, are conscious of, is characteristically intensified in religious thought
and practice, but also placed in a broader cosmological context that means
contingency and the ultimate meaningfulness of our lives are not incompat-
ible. Weber’s (1965) vision of religion as theodicy is comprehensible in these
terms, though Durkheim’s exploration of the embodied basis of society
offers a more productive foundation upon which to illuminate the emergent
character of theodicies.
The arguments of this chapter are developed through a critical discus-
sion of a broad range of theorists but they are focused specifically upon the
social theories of Turner and Rojek (2001), Archer (1995, 2000), Durkheim
(1995) and Bataille (1987, 1991), all of which offer illuminating accounts
of the embodied basis of society, although the visions of embodiment they
propose leave variable degrees of room for the societal hyper-spirituality and
its emergent religious forms that are key concerns of this book. Bringing
them into dialogue, I suggest, offers a fruitful way forward for developing a
social realist account of the contingent relationship between embodiment,
society, hyper-spirituality and religion. Initially, however, it is useful to dis-
tinguish between the social construction and the social constitution of reality
as a way of establishing the central significance of embodiment for an
account of societal hyper-spirituality, since some accounts of the embodied
energies within society, such as Bataille’s focus on the ‘excessive’ character
of social forces, have been adopted by postmodern theorists in a manner
alien to their true character.
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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1960: 89). Hertz analyses this right/left polarity in relation to Durkheim’s

sacred/profane dualism, noting the spread of taboos surrounding left-hand-
edness, and the ‘positive cult’ surrounding right-handedness evident in a
range of religious forms. Thus, the association of the right side with the gods
and the left side with evil in Maori religion is mirrored by Christian depic-
tions of the Last Judgement, where Christ’s raised right hand directs the
saved to heaven, while his lowered left hand directs the damned to their
abode in Hell (Hertz, 1960: 100–1). Furthermore, Hertz notes that, even
today, it is the right hands that are joined in marriage, that are used to greet
each other, and that are the only ones allowed to come into contact with
food in many cultures (Hertz, 1960: 106–7).
What Hertz is not doing is arguing that the distinction between right and
left hands is either socially constructed or biologically determined. What he
argues is that most humans appear to have an embodied predisposition,
related to brain functions, towards right-handedness: it is upon the basis of
this predisposition that social forces serve to sacralise all that is ‘right’ and
denigrate all that is ‘left’. Many musicians, of course, can retrain the left
hand out of it its socially reinforced relative ‘uselessness’, and Hertz argues
that societies as a whole could do this. Nevertheless, the embodied predis-
position itself cannot be socially deconstructed, which explains why left-
handed people living in societies that have striven to coerce them into
right-handedness continue to have a preference for the left. In short, even
though the vast array of practices, beliefs, ideas and values attributed to right
and left are clearly distinctively social phenomena, the distinction between
right and left is not socially constructed: it is socially constituted through the
societal engagement with real embodied human predispositions.
This focus on patterns of social constitution rather than social construc-
tion allows humans to have some sort of access to, and connection with, a
real world independent of the particular social and cultural forms placed
upon it. In this regard, the fact that all human beings are mortal is particu-
larly significant. The observation that those influenced by postmodern ideas
are often particularly uncomfortable with the fact of human mortality, or
even in complete denial about it, tells us a lot about the limits of social con-
structionism (Bauman, 1992b). The social and cultural arrangements sur-
rounding death may vary dramatically, of course, and many of these offer
promises or hopes of some kind of immortality, but the facts of ageing and
death are incontrovertible consequences of birth, and forms of social theory
that cannot take these into account can hardly be satisfactory. In contrast, it
can be noted that religions as diverse as Buddhism and Christianity make
the reflection upon these facts absolutely central to their systems of belief
and practice. Death not only draws attention to the embodied limitations
and contingency of individual human lives, however, but also to those of
society.
Although Durkheim (1995: 271) suggests that belief in the immortality
of the soul reflects a sense of the perpetuity of society in contrast to the
unavoidable deaths of individuals, he also notes that all deaths ‘enfeeble’
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society, robbing it of vitality, and thereby necessitating mourning rituals to

reinforce and revitalise common feelings (Durkheim, 1995: 404–5); a pat-
tern also discussed by Hertz (1960: 77) in his essay on ritual practices sur-
rounding death. It can be said, indeed, that just as embodiment is the
medium through which the social constitution of beliefs, practices, mean-
ings, values and identities is developed, so too society itself is a phenomenon
constituted through the medium of human embodiment. This is not to say
that it has no reality, as social constructionists would suggest, only that it has
no reality apart from the embodied human beings who constitute it: it is a
contingent reality. It is in this sense that the body must, necessarily, be cen-
tral to social theory. None the less, having emphasised this, it is clear that
the particular ways in which it is possible to conceptualise the characteris-
tics and consequences of this embodiment can vary considerably, resulting
in many different accounts of society (Shilling, 2003). The recent work of
Turner and Rojek (2001) on this subject, however, offers a challenging vision
of embodiment centred on an ‘ontology of frailty’.
Frail society
Turner and Rojek’s reassessment of the sociological project is centred on a

concern with the foundational significance of embodiment in the constitu-
tion of human society. In a direct challenge to forms of sociology influenced
by postmodernist and post-structuralist philosophies (‘decorative sociol-
ogy’), which effectively dissolve social and political struggles into a philo-
sophical and moral relativism that makes notions such as ‘human rights’
groundless and arbitrary, they argue for an embodied social theory able to
grapple with the sensuality, frailty and interconnectedness of human being-
in-the-world. The value of their study is evident in their critiques of social
and cultural theories that fail to engage satisfactorily with human embodi-
ment, and their sensitive account of how issues pertaining to embodiment
permeate various intimate, fraternal and public dimensions of social life.
However, their stated aim of retaining ‘society’ at the centre of the socio-
logical project is, to some extent, compromised by the philosophical sources
they draw upon in their conceptualisation of human embodiment, since
these, in arguing for an ‘ontology of frailty’, tend to promote a somewhat
‘frail’ image of society.
These philosophical sources include British social contract theory, par-
ticularly Hobbes, and a German philosophical tradition that includes
Heidegger, Marx, Weber, Feuerbach, and the philosophical anthropology of
writers such as Gehlen. Following Hobbes, Turner and Rojek (2001:
215–16) argue that life is ‘nasty, brutish and short’, though they soften this
with the Feuerbachian view that the sensuous embodiment of humans
ensures that the engagement with reality is, in some respects, pleasurable.
This Hobbesian position is also supplemented by the German philosophical
tradition’s concern with the vulnerability, anxiety and frailty inherent to the
human condition. Gehlen’s (1988) argument that humans are ‘not yet fin-
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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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tural characteristics. Thus, for example, society cannot construct, through

normative labelling, the emotional energies and capacities associated with
phenomena such as shame, remorse, pride or envy, but these become
‘socially constituted properties which are emergent from the interrelation-
ship between a subject’s concerns and a society’s normativity’ (Archer,
2000: 215). It is through such interrelationships that humans become ‘social
beings’.
For Archer, however, the processes through which individuals become
‘social beings’ are not simply abstract phenomena of interest only to profes-
sional sociologists, but realities confronted every day by each human being,
and involving questions about freedom, autonomy, power and constraint
(Archer, 1995: 1). In other words, we cannot escape ‘the vexatious fact of
society’ in our daily lives, as well as in academic analyses of problems relat-
ing to structure and agency, freedom and responsibility, liberation and
oppression. For Archer, society is a ‘vexatious’ phenomenon because it is
inherently ambivalent. Social reality is not self-subsistent but of human con-
stitution, yet it eludes individual and collective efforts to transform it in
accordance with our ideals and projects, and often changes in ways that no
one wants. Furthermore, it constrains our actions even when we are reflex-
ively aware of our role in constituting society through our own activity
(Archer, 1995: 1–2). This ambivalence means that the essential characteris-
tics of society cannot be captured adequately through analogies with
mechanics, language or cybernetic systems: society does not have fixed
parts, an orderly syntax or a pre-programmed set of goals and functions
(Archer, 1995: 166). Societies pre-exist people and, in that sense at least, are
not reducible to them, but they are nevertheless made up of people, with all
their complexities and ambiguities, and are therefore shaped by human
beings, albeit in unpredictable and often unintentional ways.
For Archer, then, society is a contingent phenomenon because it is an
emergent reality, but she is also interested in the fact that this emergent real-
ity thereby imposes contingent constraints upon individuals: it is this ‘dou-
ble’ contingency that gives social life its unpredictable and ‘vexatious’
character. Alongside her vision of society as an emergent phenomenon, how-
ever, she is also interested in the fact that people are not simply the embod-
ied ground out of which society emerges, but are also creatures who
continue to develop contingent, emergent powers and properties of their
own, such as self-consciousness and the development of an evaluative ori-
entation in terms of our interactions with natural and social realities
(Archer, 2000: 316). It is this attentiveness to the ‘internal conversation’
inherent to individual human beings that causes her to reject Durkheim’s
vision of society as one that attributes it with too many powers and proper-
ties, even though she is fully attentive to the fact that social reality has sui
generis characteristics (Archer, 2000: 19). Nonetheless, contrary to Archer’s
doubts, key thinkers in the Durkheimian tradition have seen these sui generis
characteristics as phenomena that nurture and expand embodied human
potentialities rather than deplete or curtail them.
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Contingent Society
In contrast to Turner and Rojek’s ontology of frailty – and offering a

much stronger view of society’s emergent properties than Archer –
Durkheim (1995), Mauss (1969) and Bataille (1991) envisage embodied
being-in-the-world not in terms of an ontological deficiency or a robust
practical orientation, but in terms of an excess of energies, emotions and
forces. Rather than deploying a language of frailty, these writers focus more
explicitly on contingency, in the sense that human embodiment entails a
radical dependence on others, but go on from there to examine the
exchanges of social energies that continually mould, sustain and transform
individual identities. Durkheim (1995: 213), for example, talks of the ‘stim-
ulating action of society’ as an embodied experience affecting nearly every
instant of our lives. This not only contrasts sharply with a Hobbesian view
of life as ‘nasty, brutish and short’, since it suggests a plenitude of vitality and
energy endemic to social experience, but it also challenges the ontology of
frailty offered by Turner and Rojek in the sense that society is not simply a
collective ordering of lives marked by existential anxieties and biological
limits, but a dynamic, vital phenomenon that arises from, and yet can trans-
form, the experience and knowledge of human embodiment in all its con-
tingency.
This concern with the emergent properties and powers of society is close
to Archer’s view, as is Durkheim’s focus on the primacy of practical activity
‘enacted and experienced concretely by real people in real time and in real
places’ (Rawls, 2001: 63). For Durkheim, however, the emergent properties
of society possess an inherent vitality that exceeds the reflexive patterns of
interrelations discussed by Archer. She identifies the ‘transcendental condi-
tions of human development’ in the common, interactive and practical ori-
entation to the world characteristic of all humans (Archer, 2000: 17), and
Durkheim would clearly assent to this. He would add, however, that the sui
generis characteristics of society introduce further ‘transcendental conditions
of human development’ that arise from, and yet exceed, the embodied char-
acteristics of individuals. However, his account of these develops from a very
particular vision of the relationships between individuals and societies that
has been subject to a great deal of criticism.
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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Contingent Society
his notion of humanity’s homo duplex character articulates a sense of the

embodied predisposition towards a form of existence (society) that tran-
scends us as individuals yet whose existence is dependent on individuals in
a continuing dynamic process. As Moscovici (1993: 20) notes, it is
Durkheim’s argument that ‘society springs from within us, as passions aris-
ing from each of us which are knit together by countless acts on countless
occasions. Being associated with one another and being carried along
together in this way, we feel ourselves different, and appear so.’ In this view,
‘the individual’ and ‘society’ are neither identifiable with each other nor are
they rigidly dichotomous realities. The ‘spirituality’ of individuals and the
‘hyper-spirituality’ of society have their own integrity, yet society is depend-
ent on the individuals who constitute it even though society transcends and
transforms them.
Here it is worth noting that Bataille’s and Caillois’s (1988) development
of this Durkheimian theme emphasises the dynamism of this relationship:
society is a ‘compound being’ in the sense that it is greater than the indi-
viduals of which it is composed, yet the individual is the embodiment of
society. As Richardson (1994: 27) notes, Bataille’s views were not only a
development of Durkheim’s thought but also were similar to those of the
surrealist Mabille: differentiation between the ‘individual’ and ‘society’ is
important theoretically and methodologically, because it helps us compre-
hend the dynamism of human relations, but, ultimately, there is no conflict
between them. For Bataille, the individual is the social being (Richardson,
1994: 29; see Mabille, 1977). In Durkheim’s case, at least, this is not meant
to imply that individuals are reducible to society, any more than society is
reducible to individuals, only that individuality is an inherently social phe-
nomenon. It is in his account of the centrality of the sacred to social life,
however, that Durkheim develops his vision of the inherently social aspects
of human identities in a way that helps illuminate how attempts to grapple
with the contingency of society must necessarily engage with the religious
dimensions of human relationships.
Sacred society
This notion of a hyper-spirituality specific to society endows social life with

an inescapably religious dimension. Human interaction does not simply
broaden our horizons beyond our own immediate perceptions and desires,
but transforms them under the influence of an energy peculiar to collective
life: to be part of society is to experience that self-transcendence which
Durkheim understands to be the essential feature of religion, and which he
identifies as the experience of the sacred. It is the religious dimension of
Durkheim’s work that has, however, attracted most controversy. It has been
suggested, for example, that his concern with the ‘religious’ character of
social forces had such an intoxicating effect on him that he was led to deify
society, treating it as a deus ex machina with ‘powers and qualities as myste-
rious and baffling as any assigned to the gods by the religions of this world’
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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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Contingent Society
sacred and of society, in terms of emotional energies and conceptual factors.

First of all, social forces tend to lose their energy over time, and need to be
replenished if society is not to fall into a pattern of decay (Durkheim, 1995:
342). Second, the idea of society must be kept alive in individual minds,
through the support of the beliefs, traditions and aspirations of the collec-
tivity; otherwise society will die (Durkheim, 1995: 351). As Poggi (2000:
88) notes, this sense of contingency appears to be particularly acute in some
of Durkheim’s reflections on modern society. Considering the ‘moral medi-
ocrity’, de-Christianisation and loss of collective vitality characteristic of
modernity, he expresses a sense of the fragile nature of modern society, but
none the less suggests that periods of ‘creative effervescence’ will again
occur (Durkheim, 1995: 429). He discusses the French Revolution as one
such example (Durkheim, 1995: 430), and Tiryakian (1995) has also dis-
cussed the ‘Velvet Revolutions’ of 1989 in the same terms, but this effer-
vescence need not apply to societal forms as large as nation-states, as Collins
(1988) has noted. Rather, it can occur within a number of different social
forms.
The attempts of Bataille and Caillois (1988: 77) to establish a ‘sacred
sociology’ in the Collège de Sociologie, centred on ‘the entire communify-
ing movement of society’, reflects this sense of the continuing significance
of patterns of creative effervescence. As Caillois (1988a: 10) expresses it,
this form of sociology was concerned to redress the neglect of ‘an entire side
of modern collective life, its most serious aspect, its deep strata’. Taking its
lead from Durkheim’s study of religion, the Collège strove to reveal ‘the ele-
mentary phenomena of attraction and repulsion’ that mark social existence
(Caillois, 1988a: 11). Rather than identifying these phenomena with the
nation-state, in fact, they were understood to pose a challenge, if not a
threat, to nation-states. For the Collège, the ‘epidemic contagion’ of the
sacred suggested a confrontation with the atomised, individualistic and ‘de-
virilised’ world of modern nation-states (Bataille, 1988a).
This reading of Durkheim’s concept of the sacred draws attention to the
misleading nature of those claims that Durkheim ‘deifies’ society. The sim-
ple formula often attributed to him – ‘God’ is society, therefore society is
‘God’ – is a simplification. For him, the sacred may, in some social contexts,
be symbolically represented in the form of an all-powerful deity, but the
reality is that the sacred is a representation of the dynamic, contagious and
often ambiguous processes through which individuals become ‘social
beings’; processes that are central to the social constitution and embodied
experience of human social life but have a contingent relationship to par-
ticular social institutions and structures (Durkheim, 1995: 420). His claim
that a ‘society is to its members what a god is to its faithful’ tends to blur
this distinction between social forces and social structures, but what he is
trying to express is the idea that society (like a god) can foster feelings of
respect, dependence, moral obligation and restraint (Durkheim, 1995: 208).
However, his emphasis on the ambiguity of the sacred, which is volatile,
potentially destructive, productive of ‘dysphoria’ as well as euphoria, and
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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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Contingent Society
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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The concept of ‘heterogeneity’ is a significant part of Durkheim’s

account of the sacred. He emphasises that the relationship between sacred
and profane is one of absolute heterogeneity (Durkheim, 1995: 36). As
Hegarty (2000: 29) suggests, Bataille takes this concept of heterogeneity fur-
ther by re-conceptualising the sacred/profane relationship as ‘heteroge-
neous’ when it is ‘strongly polarised’ and ‘homogeneous’ when it is ‘weakly
polarised’.3 As modernity becomes an increasingly homogeneous society, the
collective effervescence stimulated by heterogeneous activity becomes less
common, leading to a devitalised society (Richardson, 1994: 35). A truly
vital society, on the other hand, embraces the heterogeneity that threatens
its order and stability and, in doing so, realises the true nature of those forces
that bring it into existence in the first place: repulsion becomes attraction,
and society is renewed (Bataille, 1988b, 1988c). The heterogeneity of sacred
and profane can therefore be associated with contingent processes of social
creation and dissolution (Caillois, 1950).
Given that heterogeneity can only be understood in relation to sacred
and profane, it is clear that heterogeneity cannot be associated with the
sacred alone. Returning to Durkheim, Bataille’s source for the concept of
heterogeneity, Hegarty (2000: 29) suggests that this heterogeneity is evident
in Durkheim’s account of the sacred itself in terms of the ‘pure’ and
‘impure’ forms that have socially benevolent or malevolent manifestations.
Contrary to this view, however, it is clear that these forms are not heteroge-
neous since they are simply various manifestations of the ‘ambiguity’ of the
sacred, rather than radically different phenomena (Durkheim, 1995: 412).
Similarly, for Bataille, the sacred itself cannot be associated with hetero-
geneity. Noyes (2000: 134–5), under the influence of postmodernist philos-
ophy, removes Bataille’s concept of heterogeneity from its social context as
the encounter with a strong sacred/profane polarity, and interprets it as a
kind of general valorisation of the notion of ‘difference’ (in the manner of
Derrida), but this is not what Bataille’s work is really about.
For Bataille, what the sacred represents is not ‘difference’ but, on the
contrary, undifferentiated continuity. He argues that this continuity is evident
in the condition of animals: ‘every animal is in the world like water in water’
(Bataille, 1992: 19, emphasis in original). This, however, is completely for-
eign to the experience of humans. In contrast to the animal world’s ‘imma-
nence and immediacy’, human life has a form of self-consciousness that
turns other beings and other phenomena into ‘things’ that are separate from
ourselves, thereby breaking the undifferentiated continuity (Bataille, 1992:
23–4). This tendency to objectify phenomena developed with the use of
tools, but is stimulated still further by language, which reinforces the sub-
ject–object polarity (Bataille, 1992: 27, 31). The sense of the sacred amongst
humans is not, therefore, simply identifiable with the immanence of the ani-
mal world precisely because humans are so remote from it. Like Durkheim,
Bataille emphasises that, for humans, the sacred is ambiguous, in that it is a
source of attraction to us in its promise of recovered intimacy and continu-
ity, but also a danger in the sense that it threatens the profane world of con-
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sciousness, difference and utility that is distinctively human (Bataille, 1992:

36). Thus, to encounter the sacred is to encounter heterogeneity not because
the sacred itself represents heterogeneity (it represents undifferentiated
continuity), but because the confrontation between sacred and profane is so
extreme.
In this context, the purpose of religion is to express the human yearning
for a return to undifferentiated continuity, and to provide the means
through which an experience of this becomes possible. The ritual function
of sacrifice, for example, is to draw a victim from the profane ‘world of util-
ity’ and destroy that victim as a ‘thing’ by returning it to the ‘intimacy’ of
sacred continuity (Bataille, 1992: 43). This destruction threatens established
social orders but, simultaneously, reveals the ‘invisible brilliance’ of life that
is not a ‘thing’ and thereby confronts individuals with a world beyond their
own narrow experiences, goals and desires (Bataille, 1992: 47). This tension
between destruction and brilliant creativity is also evident in the festival.
Here, a ‘prodigious effervescence’ is let loose, confronting the world of util-
ity and production with ‘the contagious movement of a purely glorious con-
sumption’ (Bataille, 1992: 52–3). The festival, as a ‘fusion of human life’,
attempts to mediate the ‘constant problem’ of being human, which is the
fact that surrendering completely to immanence would rob us of our
humanity and return us to an animal state, while the world of utility denies
our humanity by reducing us to things (Bataille, 1992: 53–4). For Bataille,
the festival is not a complete return to immanence, which would involve a
return to the world of animals, but a structured reconciliation with the
sacred expressed in the intense heat of a communal intimacy which serves
to reinforce a spirit of community (Bataille, 1992: 56).
None the less, if religion reflects a desire, and, to some extent, offers the
means, for a return to a lost continuity and intimacy, then it can also reflect
the degree to which humanity has become ‘discontinuous’. The theological
concept of a ‘supreme being’, for example, ostensibly reflects a sense of the
unification of all phenomena in the will of a Creator God, but, for Bataille,
it reflects discontinuity in the sense that God becomes a ‘thing’, separate
from others (Bataille, 1992: 33). The Protestant conception of a God
entirely transcendent of His own creation, which henceforth operates
entirely according to instrumental criteria, is an extreme example of this dis-
continuity (Bataille, 1992: 89). Consequently, while religion is vitally impor-
tant in terms of the development of humanity and society, certain religious
forms can also be an obstacle to this development. This is the context in
which to assess Bataille’s apparent hostility to Christianity. What he objects
to is that Christianity is not, in his terms, religious enough (Bataille, 1987:
32; Richardson, 1994: 115). What he admires in Christianity is its hope of
‘finally reducing this world of selfish discontinuity to the realm of continu-
ity afire with love’ (Bataille, 1987: 118). He believes, however, that
Christianity has compromised with the world too much. This is so not only
because of its positing of a supreme being, and a whole system of sacred
‘things’ which serve to reinforce subject/object divisions, but in its prolon-
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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
Bataille’s manifest antipathy to Christianity is full of ambiguity: he was a

passionate convert to Catholicism in his youth, and his later loss of faith
rages throughout his writings in a way that suggests his acceptance of the
‘death of God’ is quite different to the ironic nihilism of later postmodernist
writings. Bataille’s understanding of Christianity as a refusal of the sacred
(Hegarty, 2000: 91), however, indicates a marked divergence from
Durkheim, who introduced the notion of the sacred as a way of under-
standing religions, not as a way of judging them. Consequently, while
Bataille helps illuminate the contingency of humanity’s embodied being-in-
the-world and the contingency of society upon the circulation of energies
arising from its hyper-spiritual substratum, he is not really able to offer
much in the way of a constructive account of how a religion such as
Christianity can come to have such a powerful social influence, or how such
forms might add to our comprehension of the nature of human and socie-
tal contingency. These failings are also evident in other forms of social the-
ory, even when they do not adopt a simplistic notion of secularisation.
Turner and Rojek’s (2001) account of religion, for example, is full of
ambiguity regarding its social and sociological significance. Locating their
account of the sacred in Durkheim’s emphasis on the effervescent energies
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that bind individuals into communities, and acknowledging Bataille’s devel-

opment of this into a theory of the surplus energies of the ‘general economy’
(Turner and Rojek, 2001: 130, 217), they none the less associate the essence
of religion with something outside society, namely ‘the unmediated inner
experiences which are the foundation of all spirituality’, and thereby rob it
of any elementary social or sociological significance (Turner and Rojek,
2001: 131). Perhaps reflecting Turner’s (1991: 10–11) considerable debt to
Weber’s sociological approach, this view of religion tends to accord, theo-
logically, with some Protestant traditions of Christian religiosity, though it
does not sit well with the Catholic idea that salvation is mediated through
the church. Certainly, it cannot easily be yoked to a Durkheimian view of
the fundamentally social nature of religion. These different sociological posi-
tions also imply different conceptions of human embodiment. In contrast to
Durkheim, Weber’s work is characterised by a deep scepticism about the
possibilities of reconciling the rational and emotional capacities of humans,
as well as a keen sense of the tensions between charismatic religiosity, a
quality of individuals, and the societal patterns of rationalisation that rob it
of its power (see Shilling and Mellor, 2001: 73).
Furthermore, although the Durkheimian tradition sees religion as a fun-
damental feature of all societies (because it is inextricably a part of the
social energies that create society), Turner and Rojek (2001: 218) emphasise
that ‘the metaphors of human religion are now largely obsolete’. Contrary
to this, however, and aside from broader questions about the contemporary
power of religions such as Christianity and Islam within and beyond Europe,
they draw attention to writers such as Kristeva (1986), who have drawn
extensively on Christian theological themes to develop new ways of think-
ing in contemporary cultural theory. Furthermore, they also connect their
own ontology of frailty to Christian thinking by asking ‘What best expresses
metaphorically the nexus between frailty, precariousness and interconnect-
edness? One answer would be the crucified Christ, the Lamb of God, who
gave his body that we might have eternal life’ (Turner and Rojek, 2001:
217). In short, the ontology of frailty central to their vision of embodiment,
because it limits what society can add to individuals, leaves little room for
an account of religion which locates it at the heart of societal dynamics, even
though they are partially persuaded by its expressive power that this should
be so.
In contrast to Turner and Rojek, Lemert (1999: 249) offers an unam-
biguous statement of the significance of religion in relation to embodiment
and society. His argument that human beings in society are creatures limited
by the fact of their dependence on community, while each community is
limited by its context-specific relation to others, offers not an ‘ontology of
frailty’, but an ontology of contingency. In this view, religion is not simply
an expression of human contingency but the means through which it is
encountered socially. Contrasting the utopian dreams of liberal hope with
the religious metaphor of ‘heaven’, for example, Lemert (1999: 261) sug-
gests that while the former simply conveys human aspirations, the latter
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tempers hope with the chastening reality of common contingencies atten-

dant upon human embodiment. Although Lemert suggests that Durkheim
does not go far enough in stressing the full implications of this contingency,
Poggi (2000: 85) recognises that he does, in fact, stress that not only indi-
viduals but also ‘society is a contingent reality’. This is why Durkheim’s soci-
ology of religion culminates in a sociology of knowledge: humanity’s
religious characteristics not only illuminate the true characteristics of
embodied being in society, including the collective forms of consciousness
through which meaning, identity and knowledge are constituted, but also
signal the potentialities and limitations of human life in a universal chain of
interdependencies (Durkheim, 1995: 432).
Archer’s (2000) account of religion is, in many respects, quite close to
Durkheim’s, despite her critique of his ‘downwards conflation’. Like
Durkheim, she emphasises that religion arises on the basis of practice, argu-
ing that religious knowledge entails a ‘feel for’ the sacred rather than a
prepositional knowledge about it, an exercise of spiritual ‘know how’ rather
than a cognitive acceptance of abstract principles. This challenges the
Enlightenment’s logocentric view of human beings, in cutting through the
distinction between reason and emotions: as she expresses it, ‘unless we are
already affective beings, then no amount of knowledge could move us to
anything’ (Archer, 2000: 185). This echoes Durkheim’s (1995) critique of
post-Enlightenment views of religion centred on beliefs and ideas, rather
than action and the emotional dispositions of humans.
Following this line of thought, religion is ‘a codification of practice, and
thus there is no such thing as a non-liturgical religion’ (Archer, 2000: 184).
This codification gives rise to developments in art, music, architecture, arte-
facts and other cultural forms, while the institutionalisation of a ‘church’ is
usually connected to the development of a ‘priesthood’ to act as custodians
of codified practice (Archer, 2000: 185). Not only do these developments
impact back upon practical activity, elaborating new forms of embodied
relations and new bodily practices, however, but the essence of religion also
remains fully embodied. Discussing the (Catholic) Christian tradition, for
example, Archer (2000: 186) notes that the practice of Christian life as an
embodied commitment of the whole person ‘is distorted if fragmented into
a cognitive-propositional “grammar of assent” and a modern decalogue of
prescribed behaviour’. Rather, the real centre of Christian life is in the bod-
ily disciplines of prayer, pilgrimage and contemplation and, especially, in the
corporeal reception of the Body of Christ in the Eucharist. Archer’s argu-
ments here not only accord with those of Durkheim, but a whole tradition
of theological, philosophical and historical accounts of Christian practice
(see Mellor and Shilling, 1997).
None the less, Archer’s (1995: 38) argument that Durkheim is guilty of
‘bundling personal properties (thoughts, convictions, feelings) into collec-
tivities … and thus representing them as predicates of the social’ indicates
her desire to grant individuals a greater autonomy than she believes he
allows, and thereby seems to distinguish her view of religion from his quite
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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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held dear (Stedman Jones, 2001: 7). Consequently, he arguably presupposes

the kind of ‘inner conversation’ Archer discusses, since without it individu-
als have no reality at all. In short, it can be suggested that Durkheim is not
guilty of ‘bundling personal properties (thoughts, convictions, feelings) into
collectivities’, since he acknowledges their location within the individual:
what he emphasises, as does Archer, is the power of society to constitute
these properties which are emergent from the interrelationship between
individuals and social forces (Archer, 1995: 38; 2000: 215). Nevertheless,
something Archer’s work does draw our attention to, indirectly, is
Durkheim’s failure to take belief seriously enough, a failure which means it
is necessary to move beyond his account of religion in certain respects.
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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much as it helps us to make sense of religion.

A sociological location of religion within an embodied vision of ontolog-
ically open, emergent strata also helps illuminate weaknesses within those
theories of religion that overemphasise the significance of culture. Here,
Talal Asad’s (2002) anthropological argument about the Christocentric
character of much academic study of religion is of note. Asad would concur
with Bossy (1985) that the Reformation has had a major impact upon mod-
ern conceptions of religion; he goes further, however, and claims that the
whole idea of a general theory of religion has a specific Christian history,
often replicating Protestant ideas about the essence of religion. There are
two major dimensions to this argument, which concern the distinction
between religion and other social elements, and claims about how religions
relate to reality. First, Asad (2002: 115) criticises Dumont (1971) for
acknowledging that religion was inseparable from social and political factors
in medieval society but nevertheless suggesting that religion is analytically
identifiable in this context. He believes that this makes it possible to say that
the essence of religion today is the same as it was then, encouraging the idea
that religion is a trans-cultural and trans-historical phenomenon, while also
creating significant problems in terms of understanding Islam, where ‘reli-
gion’ and ‘politics’ are not demarcated in the modern, Western way. None
the less, this misunderstands Dumont’s argument, which is precisely that
religion is not the same today as in the Middle Ages, and serves merely to
reinforce Asad’s (2002: 116) own, very modern, belief that what constitutes
‘religion’ are historically specific ‘discursive processes’. In fact, Asad’s (2002:
129) Foucauldian deconstruction of religion into ‘a particular history of
knowledge and power’ looks more like cultural imperialism than Dumont’s
attempt to get to grips with religious diversity within the context of a
broader account of religious phenomena, and fails to address why a general
theory of discourse and power is okay, but a theory of religion is not.
Second, however, Asad (2002: 123) also criticises Geertz (1973) for
implicitly adopting a modern ‘theological’ viewpoint in associating religion
primarily with beliefs and practices that must ‘affirm something about the
fundamental nature of reality’. In this regard, Asad’s (2002: 125) reference to
Harré’s (1981) social constructionist view that all beliefs are simply mental
states confined to particular social contexts reveals a lack of sympathy with
the idea that there is any possibility of an access to reality through religion.
Furthermore, it is hard to think of a religion that does not make some sort
of claim about reality: it can be noted that Theravada Buddhism, for exam-
ple, which is firmly anti-theological in the sense that it acknowledges no
God, nevertheless makes very explicit claims about the fundamental nature
of reality (Gombrich, 1980). Again, it might be said that there is something
more culturally imperialistic about reading the world’s religions through the
lens of post-structuralist philosophy than taking them seriously as different
expressions of the human attempt to grapple with reality.
Further to this, however, Weberian visions of reality analysed within the
strictures of an ‘ontology of frailty’, where religion offers fictitious, if vitally
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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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Necessary Society
character of modern intimacy is essentially the same as that which charac-

terises global capitalism and modern systems of knowledge: everything is
‘disembedded’, open to revision and reconstruction, and radically discontin-
uous with all that went before it.
While Giddens (1994, 1998) distinguishes the social and political impli-
cations of his arguments from the ‘free market’ theorists of neo-classical
economics, they have much in common. Giddens’s (1998: 66) vision of the
reflexive construction of social and political orders through, and with
respect for, individual interests and choices, for example, rests on the sort of
individualistic, utilitarian and nominalist view of society that would not be
out of place in rational choice theory. In broad terms, in fact, his notion of
‘dialogical democracy’ arguably implies a reflexively constituted lifestyle
market more than a society (see Giddens, 1991a: 231; 1994; 252-3). Even
within this type of sociological analysis, however, there is a contradiction,
which is picked up by Beck (1992: 116) who notes that, even if other soci-
etal obligations tend to disappear, the one thing that will not go away is the
obligation to choose: in one sense, ‘anything goes’, since choices open up and
constraints become the objects of reflexive scrutiny, but, on the other hand,
not making choices ‘is tending to become impossible’. At the very least, this
suggests that obligation is not entirely a thing of the past, even if the plu-
rality of choices and options available to modern persons might lead them
to believe that this is the case. Beyond that, however, Beck’s comments not
only raise questions about other obligations that might still be significant in
contemporary societies, but also raise more fundamental questions about
the necessary character of society in a more general sense.
In order to make sense of this necessary dimension of society, the con-
temporary reluctance to acknowledge an emergent, sui generis aspect to
social relationships that imposes various obligations upon individuals looks
highly questionable. With regard to sexual relationships, for example,
Giddens does not allow that the hyper-spiritual dynamics of the couple
might make infidelity something more significant than the breaking of a
reflexively constituted contract, resulting in the sort of ‘righteous anger’ and
violence discussed by Randall Collins (1988: 121; see Dobash and Dobash,
1979). Here, the ‘cult of the dyad’ imposes sacred obligations upon the indi-
viduals concerned, not agenda items for a reflexively constituted relation-
ship committee. With regard to societies in general, it is also clear that
Giddens’s lack of attention to obligation is unsatisfactory for similar reasons.
Day-to-day rules governing social encounters considered by Goffman
(1969), the social constraints upon economic forces and activities that
recurrently frustrate free market philosophies (Polanyi, 2001), the persist-
ence of taboos on things such as paedophilia, and the continuing social value
attached to the sacrifices offered by military and civilian personnel in times
of war or terrorist attacks, all indicate that participation in social life entails
an encounter with various forms of obligation which we ignore at our peril.
Even in ‘reflexive modernity’, people who ignore everyday social rules face
ostracism; paedophiles are objects of such contempt they are not even safe
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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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Necessary Society
(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 which are particularly relevant to the con-
temporary era of globalisation.
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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Romantic literature, but also observes its continuing strength; a strength he

connects to the women’s movement and to contemporary notions of ‘child
abuse’. As well as connecting taboo to ritual, however, many studies of taboo
also link it with patterns of inclusion and exclusion that define and reinforce
the boundaries of community.
Christie Davies’s (1982) study of sexual taboos and social boundaries
makes this linkage explicit, suggesting that the strong taboos that exist
against homosexuality, bestiality and transvestism in the West are the result
of attempts to establish and defend strong ethnic, religious or institutional
boundaries. These boundaries, which can be both internal and external, and
cover male/female and human/animal polarities, are the means through
which a community establishes a distinct identity for itself (Davies, 1982:
1032). The resurgence of conflicts surrounding the construction of such
boundaries in advanced modern societies would therefore suggest that the
analysis of the development of taboos should remain an important socio-
logical concern. Nevertheless, an awareness of the complexity of modern
societies has led many writers to focus upon the role of taboos in more
‘primitive’ social forms in order to illuminate enduring features of all human
societies, or to propose evolutionary schemas that contextualise changes in
patterns of prohibitions within broader arguments about the developing
complexities of human societies.
Although the association of non-white, non-Western races with ‘primi-
tive’ forms of society and culture has now, itself, become taboo, theories and
analytical studies of ‘primitive’ society have a long history in sociology and
anthropology (see Evans-Pritchard, 1965). Durkheim’s (1995) and Lévi-
Strauss’s (1969) theories of taboo, for example, along with the evolutionary
dimension of the theories of Freud (1950), Bukert (1983) and Girard
(1995) in relation to taboo, are all examples of this. Beyond these, however,
evolutionary conceptions continue to shape certain types of theorising
about society. Yehudi Cohen (1978), for example, has suggested that the
more complex a society is, the less likely it is that the incest taboo will apply
to relatives beyond the immediate family. This accords with Parsons’s adop-
tion of a broadly evolutionary understanding of the development of societies
(see Robertson, 1991), and his argument that there are two types of incest
rule, one related to the immediate family and one to that of broader kinship
groups (Parsons, 1954: 108). Cohen’s argument is that the latter type of rule
is disappearing as societies become more complex. Similarly, White (1948:
432) has argued that in complex societies tribal bonds have been replaced
by the power of the state, so that the incest taboo becomes severely weak-
ened in comparison with ‘primitive’ societies; a view reinforced by Leavitt’s
(1989) cross-cultural analysis of the disappearance of the incest taboo. More
broadly, however, there are also arguments about the embodied potentiali-
ties of humans, especially in relation to their capacity for sociality, that
underpin such evolutionary models.
Leslie White (1948: 423), for example, has developed Edward B. Tylor’s
(1888) emphasis on the essentially cooperative nature of human communi-
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Necessary Society
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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stitution of social order therefore becomes dependent, to some extent, upon

the regulation of women, especially the regulation of women’s bodies. The
sacred may symbolically represent all that a society values, and may bind
individuals into collective patterns of meaning and identity, but it is also
simultaneously exclusionary as well as inclusionary. The sacred/profane
dichotomy that makes society possible is also, therefore, the basis upon
which obligatory social differences, divisions and polarities are constructed.
Here, Durkheim’s (1995: 404) observation that women frequently fulfil the
ritual function of the ‘scapegoat’, anticipating Girard’s (1995) similar argu-
ment, is notable: women are, in a sense, ‘insiders’ who are also ‘outsiders’ and
can become objects of real, as well as symbolic, violence that aims to chan-
nel away destructive energies and thus preserve the cohesiveness of (male)
societies.
Such arguments have been criticised by feminist thinkers for reinforcing
the idea that society and culture belong to males. In her study of sacrifice,
religion and paternity, for example, Nancy Jay (1992) expresses concern that
the ritual construction of (male) society, and sociological theories of it, rest
on the attribution of certain universal biological characteristics to men and
women, while ignoring the embodied relationships men have with their
mothers ‘before’ they enter any world of social relations (Jay, 1992: 133).
Looking back to Thomas Hobbes, for example, she notes his view of the
‘state of nature’ as a violent war of all against all where life is ‘solitary, poor,
nasty, brutish and short’ (Hobbes, 1957: 143). She observes that in this view
the relationship between mother and child counts for nothing as it is merely
‘natural’, not ‘social’: ‘Society is the rational creation of adult males, who
alone contribute to it’ (Jay, 1992: 129). Thus, looking at Bukert’s (1983) the-
ory of the hunt, she interprets his ‘intraspecific violence’ as just another ver-
sion of Hobbes’s war of all against all, and sees Girard’s (1995) account of
sacrifice as making similar assumptions about how gender relations are
shaped by a biologically given male violence (Jay, 1992: 132–3). Jay (1992:
xxiii) sees in Girard’s work, as well as a vast range of other literatures on sac-
rifice, a close association of sacrifice with the construction of gender
dichotomies and the social marginalisation of women. Focusing upon the
embodied basis of these rituals, in fact, she goes so far as to see ‘sacrifice as
a remedy for having been born of woman’.
None the less, while Jay’s criticisms of implicitly Hobbesian views of
‘nature’ and the biologically determinist conceptions of men and women
that flow from them are illuminating, it is not simply the case that socio-
logical theories of the ritual construction of society are necessarily complicit
in the subordination of women. On the contrary, such theories can help illu-
minate the social processes through which such subordination takes on its
obligatory character. As Rawls (2001) emphasises, a key aspect of
Durkheim’s study of religion and society is the emphasis upon enacted
social practices: in his account of taboo he is illuminating the ritual mecha-
nisms through which the relationships between men and women become
integrated into a sacrificial economy. Rituals channel the hyper-spiritual
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dynamics of the group towards particular systems of symbolic classification

through enacted practices: the denigration or subordination of women (as of
any other oppressed or marginalized group) is manifest in actions, and can
only be changed through actions (see Rawls, 2000). In fact, contrary to Jay’s
view of the ordination of women into the Church representing their incor-
poration into a male sacrificial order, such patterns of ordination invariably
transform that order, in time, since the order is an emergent outcome of
social action.
One conclusion that could be drawn in the light of these arguments is
that directing attention towards the sacrificial structure underpinning social
relationships can help illuminate how patterns of inclusion and exclusion
become obligatory, and thereby offer an opportunity to work towards their
transformation. None the less, a more radical conclusion is often drawn by
writers such as Jay, namely that the entire network of sacrifice, taboo and
obligation that appears to have an enduring significance for the develop-
ment of society should be deconstructed and rejected. In Jay’s case this is
because of what she perceives to be the inherently ‘patriarchal’ character of
this network, even though many feminist attempts to conceptualise ele-
mentary social processes tend to come back to patterns of inclusion/exclu-
sion reflected through taboos (Shilling and Mellor, 2001: 126). More
broadly, however, a widespread cultural interest in transgression rather than
taboo has raised questions concerning the nature of contemporary societies
and, in the case of some theorists at least, has tended to endorse the idea
that more or less any form of social obligation is fragile, undesirable or even
impossible. Here, the significance of Bataille’s work is much disputed.
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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facts that penetrate an entire society, concentrating its hyper-spiritual ener-

gies, and channelling them into particular symbolic, ritual and conceptual
patterns. The gift, in ‘archaic’ societies, is Mauss’s best-known example of a
total social fact. The systems of ‘total prestations’ he focuses on not only
involve the exchange of wealth or goods, but also courtesies, entertainments,
ritual, military assistance, women, children, dances and feasts (Mauss, 1969:
11–12). Some of the examples he discusses concern the potlatch, which is
the gift of an effervescent gathering, feast, or festival. The potlatch is, simul-
taneously, wildly celebratory and a solemn tribal gathering. On these occa-
sions, wealth is consumed, destroyed or simply given away, hierarchies are
challenged and reconstructed, marriages, initiations and shamanic séances
occur, and religious cults centred around gods and totems perform rituals.
For Mauss, rituals of giving, and the obligations that flow from them, per-
meate the entire proceedings.
He argues that the essence of potlatch is the obligation to give. A chief
must give a potlatch for himself, his son, his son-in-law or daughter, and for
the dead. He has to demonstrate his good fortune and great wealth by
expending it (Mauss, 1969: 37). There is an obligation to invite others out-
side the family or clan, and only the invited can attend. Neglecting to invite
someone invariably has fateful results (Mauss, 1969: 60). In European folk-
lore, the myth of the bad fairy or witch not invited to a wedding or a bap-
tism, with a resulting curse, as in the Sleeping Beauty myth, has the same
character and origins as the obligations surrounding the potlatch. There is
also an obligation to receive, however, and an invitation cannot be refused
without loss of honour (Mauss, 1969: 39). Following this, there is also an
obligation to repay. As with all gifts, the potlatch must be returned, ideally
with interest. If this cannot be done, a person risks losses of honour and
social status (Mauss, 1969: 40).
In these examples, Mauss is addressing patterns of gift-giving in ‘archaic’
societies but, as he often points out, such activities endure even within
modern Western societies, where ‘Much of our everyday morality is con-
cerned with the question of obligation and spontaneity in the gift’ (Mauss,
1969: 63). A wedding, for example, which involves a vast expenditure of
wealth (traditionally by the bride’s father), has many elements of the pot-
latch about it. It is both a celebratory and a solemn occasion, involving a
feast as well as a ritualised public (and traditionally religious) enactment of
vows. The list of invitations to the wedding often has an obligatory charac-
ter, involving two families and an opportunity for reconciliation in relation
to inter-familial or intra-familial conflicts, or the opportunity for one family
to assert itself over another through its generous expenditure. Attendance,
if asked, is also obligatory, at least with regard to the close family.
Furthermore, the vast expenditure of wealth by the bride’s father is, ideally,
matched or exceeded by the flow of gifts to the bride and groom. The cus-
tomary practice of putting on a public display of gifts at the wedding recep-
tion also offers an opportunity for those in attendance to exhibit their
generosity, or risk shame, by having their offering available for all to see.
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Necessary Society
In all of these exchanges, as Mauss implies, there is often a competitive

element even though this cannot be reduced into an individualistic attempt
to maximise self-interest. This is evident with regard to the ritual exchange
of Christmas presents. Just as a tribal chief lavishes his wealth on a potlatch
in a grand expenditure that reinforces his social status, so too people often
spend vast amounts of money on presents they can ill afford. This might
look like a lavish expression of generosity, but it also signals the kind of
social status and affluence the gift-givers aspire to. It also places an obliga-
tion on the recipients of gifts to be equally lavish in return: an expensive
present cannot be repaid with an inexpensive one without social awkward-
ness, loss of face, or conflict. For similar reasons, a thoughtful, carefully cho-
sen gift demands something similar in return: an inability, or refusal, to
‘repay’ appropriately can cause hurt, offence and damage to social relation-
ships. Patterns of gift exchange, then, involve rituals of obligation, even
thought they might appear to be voluntary and gratuitous. It is in this way
that they build up patterns of solidarity between people. A gift made or
received binds the people concerned into a pattern that cannot easily be
broken. This is why, as Mauss points out, a common way of seeking to con-
trol enemies in tribal societies is to bestow gifts upon them: once someone
accepts a gift they are indebted until they repay it. More positively, within
friendships the exchange of gifts is not simply an expression of solidarity,
but a means for its creation: in bestowing gifts upon friends, and happily
receiving them, we are establishing enduring patterns of solidarity that tie
us to each other beyond our immediate actions, feelings and circumstances.
It is also worth noting that mythical gift-bearers, such as Father Christmas
and the Christ Child, ensure that children too are integrated into the cycle
of reciprocity that encompasses adults (Berking, 1999: 15).
The inseparable connection between gifts and solidarity is expressed in
what Mauss refers to as ‘the confusion between the person and the thing’.
Amongst the many examples of this confusion noted by Mauss is the per-
sistence in China, even today, of ‘mourning licences’ where the person who
sells property retains the right to ‘weep over it’ for the rest of his life (Mauss,
1969: 62). Specifically in relation to gifts, however, he notes several exam-
ples in Hindu texts where people become so confused with their property
that the gift of any part of it creates a bond that is almost unbreakable, and
yet invokes dire consequences for those who do not respect the bond and
attendant obligations appropriately (Mauss, 1969: 56–7). It is important to
note that this confusion is not some sort of ‘commodity fetishism’ in a con-
sumerist sense, however, since the thing given is transformed in the emer-
gent ‘electricity’ of social relationships. In fact, the basis of the confusion of
person and thing is that a gift from someone is, in a sense, a gift of that per-
son. This continues to be apparent in contemporary Western societies: the
gift of a thing from a loved one, for example, which may have no significant
monetary worth or ‘market value’ might be invaluable to the recipient
because of the association of that thing with the beloved. All the emotions,
memories and thoughts aroused by the beloved become condensed around
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that thing, and the possession of it remains immensely significant, to the

point where the loss of it might be unbearable.
The ‘confusion’ between the person and the thing is especially complex,
however, when the things exchanged are words. Language, as a system of
symbolic representations through which communication takes place, often
has a highly ritualised character. This is evident not only in formal contexts,
where particular patterns of words, ways of speaking, and attendant gestures
and bodily dispositions are often expected, if not demanded, but also in the
informal encounters that characterise our day-to-day interactions. Words
exchanged upon meeting or leaving friends and acquaintances, for example,
tend to follow established patterns that are simply taken for granted, though
we have to socialise children into recognising and conforming to them
(Goffman, 1969). In fact, these patterns vary across time and between cul-
tures, but they are always there, even where, as in late modern Western cul-
tures, there is a strong valuation of the personal authenticity of
communication rather than highly ritualised patterns of earlier forms of
Western society.
In this regard, Sennett (1977) has discussed the shift in Western societies
from a public life characterised by thoroughly ritualised social encounters to
one where an ‘ideology of intimacy’ dominates. This ideology places a great
emphasis on the authenticity of social relationships, and our communications
are meant to reflect our ‘inner psychological concerns’ rather than our grasp
of a society’s ritual dynamics. None the less, and despite Sennett’s anxieties
about the destruction of the social following from the spread of this concern
with psychological authenticity, it is clear that this ideology tends to
obscure, rather than simply undermine, the degree to which social relation-
ships can be highly ritualised. David Moss’s (2001) study of the phenome-
non of pentimento in Italy, referring to the collaboration of former Mafia
members with the judicial system, is instructive in this regard.
Moss (2001: 301) analyses the confessions of former Mafiosi as gift
exchanges, involving the exchange of words in return for reduced sentences,
financial aid and police protection, and notes that critics of these judicial
arrangements have denounced the ‘dangerous confusion of legal, religious
and moral considerations’ they appear to involve. It is precisely such ‘confu-
sion’, of course, that characterises Mauss’s notion of total social facts, as
Moss notes, but he illuminates how such gift exchanges stimulate poten-
tially endless chains of other exchanges so that confessions not only lead to
other confessions, but have implications for the value of other confessions,
for the future operation of judicial processes, for religious and moral ques-
tions concerning repentance and absolution, and for questions about the
authority of the state (Moss, 2001: 304–5; see Godelier, 1999: 69–70).
Furthermore, in offering a ‘potlach of former comrades and weapons’, the
Mafiosi informers had to take care not to appear to be acting purely in terms
of their self-interest as this would devalue the nature of their gifts, so their
information took on characteristics of the Catholic confessional and the
appearance of authentic contrition for past sins (Moss, 2001: 309, 318). In
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Necessary Society
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
In The Accursed Share (1991) Bataille uses Durkheim’s (1995) analysis of

the sacred and Mauss’s (1969) work on gift exchange to develop a theory of
a ‘restricted’ and ‘general’ economy. The ‘restricted’ economy is the conven-
tional subject matter of classical economics and much contemporary phi-
losophy, politics and social theory. Based upon the concept of scarcity, and
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the accumulation of precious resources, this notion of economy is repre-

hensible to Bataille because it ignores the fact that economic activity cannot
be explained by economic facts or activity alone, and because it therefore
‘surrenders the possibilities inherent within society to immediately per-
ceived necessities that are often illusory’ (Richardson, 1994: 68). In contrast,
the notion of a ‘general’ economy is focused on ‘excess’ rather than scarcity,
and ‘expenditure’ rather than production: in this understanding of ‘econ-
omy’, ‘a human sacrifice, the construction of a church or the gift of a jewel’
are as significant as the production and sale of economic goods (Bataille,
1991: 9). The ‘excess’ referred to here is the surplus of social energy that
characterises human life and which must, necessarily, be expended in some
form. Contrary to classical economics, then, Bataille emphasises not the util-
itarian pursuit of self-interest but a collective impulse towards ‘useless’
expenditure, manifest in the gratuitous, prodigal gifts of wealth and energy
characteristic of all societies other than modern ones. The ‘restricted’ econ-
omy is important in that it helps produce the surplus wealth (the ‘accursed
share’) that is uselessly expended, but if this broader context for productive
activity is ignored, then a society becomes oppressive to its members and
alienated from its own essential being (Richardson, 1994: 73).
The modern tendency towards such a pattern of alienation is evident
with regard to ‘leisure’. For Bataille, leisure is important because it offers an
opportunity for ‘useless’ expenditure, regardless of material, economic or
productive factors. In so far as capitalism ‘allows’ time for leisure, however,
this is largely related to the need to give people sufficient rest so that they
can work as efficiently and productively as possible the rest of the time
(Richardson, 1994: 72). This is ‘perverse’ in the sense that leisure (part of
the ‘general economy’) is defined, negatively, in relation to the ‘restricted’
economy, rather than the other way around. The increasing commodifica-
tion of leisure in modern societies, where a ‘market’ mentality tends to
shape people’s experiences of cultural, sporting and aesthetic activities,
makes this situation worse.
Featherstone (1991: 96) has noted that leisure is now part of a market
where people consume particular types of experiences in specifically cre-
ated centres, such as ‘theme parks’, and tend to associate such patterns of
consumption with ‘lifestyle’ choices. With respect to such transformations,
Featherstone (1991: 22) uses Bataille to highlight how they can be inter-
preted as excesses of energy translated into contemporary patterns of con-
sumerism. Thus, the sports stadia, theme parks and shopping centres of
contemporary societies allow individuals to expend the ‘accursed share’ pro-
duced by the ‘over-production’ of capitalism. A similar interpretation of
such phenomena is also offered by Botting and Wilson (1998: 18), when
they talk of capitalism’s ongoing evolution into a more ‘Bataillean universe’.
This use of Bataille, however, would clearly have appalled him. For him, cap-
italism was a perverse alienation of society from its own being precisely
because it reduced what is human to the condition of commodities (Bataille,
1991: 129). The kind of shift from a ‘production’ to a ‘consumption’ orien-
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tated economy described by Featherstone is not a shift from a ‘restricted’ to

a ‘general’ economy, but the colonisation of things that properly belong to
the general economy by patterns of commodification. Thus, leisure becomes
a market we ‘buy into’, figuratively and, increasingly, literally, and part of a
broader series of market-sensitive choices through which we construct iden-
tities on the basis of the commodities we consume. In Bataille’s terms, the
development of modern patterns of consumerism can be seen as a de-
humanising phenomenon, and evidence of a ‘sick society’. He argues that
what is essential to a society, and what modern society tends to marginalise,
is the encounter with something that ‘causes one to tremble with fear and
delight’ (Bataille, 1991: 129). This has nothing to do with the consumerist
pleasures of shopping, nor even the experience of ‘white-water rafting’ at an
outdoor activities centre. What Bataille is talking about is the sacred.
In his account of Brahmanical notions of sacrifice, the Indologist Sylvain
Lévi described the sacred as ‘electricity’, a view that contributed to Hubert
and Mauss’s (1964) focus on the socially embodied nature of sacrifice as a
form of action manifesting the ‘deep-seated energy’ of the sacred (Mauss,
1900: 353; Strenski, 1998: 122). Below such ritualised forms of sacrifice,
however, in the substratum of society itself, is a deeper sacrificial structure.
Contrary to utilitarian and individualist notions of society as the aggregate
outcome of individual choices and actions, Durkheim (1973: 163) argues
that it is because ‘society has its own nature’ that there is always some
degree of conflict between individual interests and the demands placed
upon us by society. This is so not simply in Archer’s (1995) sense that the
society we have to live in is not necessarily the society we want, but also in
the sense that individual interests often have to be forsaken for the greater
good of society as a whole. As Durkheim (1973: 163) expresses it, ‘society
cannot be formed or maintained without our being required to make per-
petual and costly sacrifices’. In short, society ‘obliges us to surpass ourselves’
to our real cost, a fact evident in the daily acts of generosity, empathy and
heroism that mark many people’s lives, but also, in a somewhat corrupted
form, in societies where it seems that ‘anything goes’. This helps us to under-
stand, for example, how it is that in Beck’s account of reflexive individuals
endlessly reconstructing their biographies, relationships and orientations to
the world, there is an undercurrent of pain, fear of failure and sacrifice in
the face of what are supposed to be individual freedoms but often turn out
to be oppressive and de-humanising (Beck, 1992: 135–6). Understood in
this light, the highly ritualised patterns of consumer culture do not reacti-
vate the sacred, but parody it: the ‘electricity’ of the sacred does not animate
the desire to shop, hyper-spirituality is not manifest as ‘hyperconsumption’,
and redemption promised through the sacrifice of all meaning and value in
the glittering vacuity of global capitalism’s ‘cathedrals of consumption’ turns
out to be empty (Ritzer, 1999).
On the basis of Bataille’s (1991) notions of the ‘general’ and the
‘restricted’ economy, it is possible to interpret modern consumerism as the
attempted colonisation of the general economy by the utilitarian concerns
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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:
Political economy … is an abstract and deductive science which is occu-

pied not so much with observing reality as with constructing a more or less
desirable ideal; because the man that the economists talk about, this system-
atic egoist, is little but an artificial man of reason. The man that we know, the
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real man, is so much more complex: he belongs to a time and a country, he

lives somewhere, he has a family, a country, a religious faith and political
ideas. (Durkheim, 1970: 85; see Smelser and Swedberg, 1994: 11)
In this passage, Durkheim is emphasising that economic factors cannot be

separated from their societal context, and cannot rest upon the fictitious
concepts of humans as anti-social egoists dreamt up by modern liberal
philosophers and economists. Polanyi’s great contribution to the study of
modern economics is his detailed examination of how this ‘economistic fal-
lacy’ arose, and the dangers it represents for the present and the future of
Western societies.
Polanyi (2001: 46) notes that history and ethnography furnish us with
knowledge of various types of economies, most of them containing markets
of various types, but argues that it is only in the modern West that the econ-
omy has come to be regulated and controlled by markets. The general rule
is that the economy is deeply embedded with social relationships, especially
within patterns of obligation, reciprocity, religious beliefs and actions, and
an array of other forms through which societies direct human passions and
desires towards non-economic ends (Polanyi, 2001: 48–9). Drawing on the
works of Malinowksi (1930) and Thurnwald (1932), for example, Polanyi
(2001: 49–50) notes the significance of reciprocity and redistribution in soci-
eties characterised by ‘superabundant non-economic motivation for every
act’, so that foods, goods and services can never be separated from obliga-
tions, responsibilities and religious motivations, and the idea of exchanging,
bartering or ‘selling’ these for economic gain makes no sense at all. Further
to this, he argues that such examples reveal that, contrary to modern neo-
classical economic myth, the ‘individualistic savage collecting food and
hunting on his own or for his family has never existed’ (Polanyi, 2001: 55).
It is on this basis that he takes issue with Adam Smith’s view of humanity’s
innate ‘propensity to barter, truck and exchange one thing for another’, not-
ing, however, that this notion of ‘Economic Man’, while a misreading of the
past, ‘proved more prophetic of the future’ in its often dire social conse-
quences (Polanyi, 2001: 45). Indeed, Polanyi (2001: 88) argues that, under
the influence of a liberal political philosophy that viewed the liberation of
individuals from society’s regulation of their innately selfish propensities as
a march of progress to be undertaken with ‘unbounded hope’, the historical
development of the modern West was marked by ‘limitless despair’ and
‘painful dislocations’. As he suggests, the traditional unity of Christian soci-
ety gave way to a denial of obligations and responsibilities towards others, as
‘unheard-of wealth turned out to be inseparable from unheard-of poverty’,
and ‘a stoic determination to renounce human solidarity in the name of the
greatest happiness of the greatest number gained the dignity of a secular
religion’ (Polanyi, 2001: 107).
This ‘secular religion’ of utilitarianism that heralded this renunciation of
solidarity did not seek to disentangle the economy from society but, rather,
to subordinate the economy to the market, with the effect that society too
becomes subordinate to the market and a ‘market economy’ becomes syn-
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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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Necessary Society
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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Necessary Society
life has been an important element of some areas of sociological theory

(Berger, 1990; Bauman, 1992b), Polanyi’s argument is not only that the
uniqueness of the person and the reality of society are equally important,
but also that the due recognition of their necessary inseparability is
absolutely fundamental to the creation of just social order. For him, market
economics has a strong focus on the individual, but denies society and there-
fore has barbaric social and moral consequences. On the other hand, fascism
recognises the reality of society, but negates the Christian discovery of the
uniqueness of the individual, thereby facilitating atrocities, barbarism and
contempt for the consciences of individuals. Consequently, contrary to
Bauman, ‘the meaning of freedom in a complex society’ rests on the accept-
ance of the reality of society, just as we must accept the reality of death, but
it also rests, as Bauman would concur, upon the development of the courage
to accept that individual moral responsibility which is the spring from
which the critique of injustice and oppression flows (Polanyi, 2001: 268).
Returning to the subject of taboo, it is possible, in the light of Polanyi’s
arguments, to have a clearer sense of how this phenomenon is a manifesta-
tion of the obligatory characteristics of society, and yet is something that can
manifest itself in morally ambiguous and dangerous forms. Contrary to the
(post)modern assumption that greater permissiveness leads to greater liber-
ation (Hawkes, 1996), the persistence of taboos surrounding incest, for
example, demonstrates the resistance of society to those forces that seek its
reduction into a market for the expression of egoistic desires (Twitchell,
1987). Here it is possible to see that the ‘anything goes’ mentality has defi-
nite societal limits. On the other hand, the critiques of taboos surrounding
women offered by writers such as Jay (1992) illuminate the dangers of an
acceptance of the reality of society that overrides the ability to challenge
injustice and oppression. With reference to Polanyi’s stress on the role of
Christianity upon the evolution of Western notions of freedom, however, it
is worth noting that the Christian transformation of patterns of taboo into
the systems of community ethics, manifest in notions of the Seven Deadly
Sins and in the Ten Commandments, tend to support rather than curtail
such critiques, since they embody the idea that individual moral integrity is
exercised through social responsibility towards others (Bossy, 1985;
Williams, 2000). More broadly, as discussed in the last chapter, although
society has the power to impose itself as an unavoidable reality, recognising
its contingency upon the humans who constitute it also opens up a space for
a moral critique of existing social forms.
In confronting the destructive impact upon society of a particular form
of economics, then, Polanyi’s intention is not to suggest that money itself is
the cause of modern social problems: under the influence of Polanyi’s vision
Zelizer (1994), for example, has challenged the Weberian vision of money
as a rationalising mechanism, arguing that money is always embedded in
social relationships and cultural meanings (see Mizruchi and Stearns, 1994).
The major source of many modern social problems, rather, is that this
embeddedness has been obscured by disembedding philosophies. Temple
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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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reassessment of society further, however, I suggest it is important to consider

the religious origins of Western understandings of society, including many of
those developed in sociology, if we are to develop a satisfactory under-
standing of contemporary social characteristics and conflicts.
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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Here, phenomena such as the instantaneous exchange of information

through computers are deemed to have led to the collapse of past, present
and future into the ‘timeless time’ or ‘virtual time’ of information exchange
(Lyon, 2000: 121; see Castells, 1996). In short, the fragmentation of societies
mirrors the fragmentation of time (de Connick, 1995).
While such arguments undoubtedly draw attention to significant contem-
porary changes in the social organisation of time, and the cultural meanings
attached to it, they also tend to ignore what Barbara Adam (1990: 154) has
referred to as broader questions concerning ‘the more universal principles of
time that are to be found throughout nature’. Here, the lack of an engage-
ment with humanity’s embodied being-in-the-world is crucial, not simply in
the sense that bodies age, but also in relation to the fact that human beings
are, in their depths, temporal beings who are ‘practising centres of action’
(Adam, 1990: 70–1). Indeed, in their critique of the ‘contemporary utopian
writing about the social consequences of the internet’, Turner and Rojek
(2001: xi) have suggested that such writing fails to account for the
‘emplacement of action’ that follows from human embodiment and thereby
limits the expansion of virtuality beyond a certain point. Attendant upon
this neglect of embodiment, however, is the further neglect of those hyper-
spiritual forces emergent from embodied relations and constitutive of the
‘substratum of collective life’ (Durkheim, 1982a: 57). Under the influence
of technological determinism or a neo-Kantian conception of self-determin-
ing, reflexive subjects able to reconstruct time and space, this inattention to
a social substratum also leads to the neglect of the immense significance of
Christianity in Western history, and an inability to recognise that this influ-
ence may continue into the present.
In this chapter, I shall argue that such views tend to overestimate
Christianity’s apparent lack of contemporary social significance because
they depend upon a questionable understanding of the temporal dimensions
of society. The ‘temporal’ dimensions of particular note here are not the
immensely diverse experiences, codifications and transformations of time
discussed by Adam (1990), but two very specific phenomena. The first of
these is the broad temporal context within which societies develop: the
longue durée of societal development. A focus on the fact that contemporary
societies have to be analysed in relation to this longue durée can help reveal
to us some significant ways in which Christianity has had a very significant
influence upon contemporary social life. The second phenomenon at the
heart of this chapter, however, which emerges out of this Christian influ-
ence, is the distinction between the temporal and the spiritual. This distinc-
tion, central to medieval thought, was transformed, at the time of the
Protestant Reformation, into a distinction between the ‘religious’ and the
‘secular’ that came to have a major influence upon various modern philo-
sophical and sociological visions of society, though the influence of the
medieval view is also apparent in this regard, even if this has been less com-
mented upon. Indeed, although the Protestant view of religion as essentially
distinct from society became normative for many forms of sociology, for
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others, something close to the medieval Christian understanding continued

to be significant for understanding the complex inter-relationship between
religion and society.
The chapter is structured as follows. After discussing the value of a social
realist account of the significance of time for how we conceptualise society,
I examine how Christian history has provided Western societies with certain
cultural contradictions, concerning the temporal and the spiritual, that con-
tinue into the present and still affect how we make sense of social life.
Following this, I examine how these contradictions run through influential
philosophical accounts of social bonds and contracts, and then explore their
presence in some key sociological visions of modernity. Throughout, I shall
argue that many conventional 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 analytically precise and useful than that between the
secular and the religious.
Time-binding society
The importance of interpreting the temporal constitution and development

of society in terms of the longue durée of human history can be established
by looking at problems arising from theories that suggest otherwise. In a
well-known argument, Berger (1990: 3), for example, says that ‘Society is a
dialectic phenomenon in that it is a human product, and nothing but a
human product, that yet continuously acts back upon its producer.’ This
‘dialectical’ process of world-building involves three stages: externalisation
(the physical and mental ‘outpouring of human being into the world’), objec-
tivation (the appearance of ‘reality’ attained by the products of this activity),
and internalisation (the ‘reappropriation’ of this reality within subjective
consciousness) (Berger, 1990: 4). It is on the basis of this dialectical process
that Berger develops his social constructionist account of religion and soci-
ety. For him, externalising activity results in the construction of a ‘nomos’, a
meaningful order, that imbues life with reality, although this is continually
vulnerable to collapse because it ‘hangs on the thin thread of conversation’
(Berger, 1990: 17). Religion, which he defines functionally (despite his
protestations to the contrary), ‘guarantees’ the reality of the nomos by iden-
tifying it with cosmic order: the sacred is our ‘ultimate shield against anomy’
(‘the sacred canopy’), because it hides the constructed nature of the world
with ‘fictitious necessities’. The decline of religion in modern societies,
whereby large areas of ‘society and culture are removed from the domina-
tion of religious symbols’ and religion loses its subjective ‘plausibility’
(Berger, 1990: 107, 128), thus involves the stimulation of broader ‘anomic’
processes, as the socially constructed nature of ‘reality’ becomes increasingly
fragile. Although Berger does not say so explicitly, the logical implication of
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his argument is also that ‘society’ is in danger of collapsing in these circum-

stances.
As Bhaskar (1979: 33) has argued, however, people and society are not
related ‘dialectically’ within one process, since, contrary to Berger’s sugges-
tion that we ‘reappropriate’ products of our own activity, the society that is
appropriated by human beings is always already made: we may reproduce or
transform society, but we cannot create it because it is already there. As
Archer (1995: 63) suggests, the same argument can also be made against
Giddens’s (1984) structuration theory: to deny the notion of an emergent
reality distinct from human agents not only massively overestimates the cre-
ativity of people, but also denies what is obvious to all of us, namely, that
the conditions and consequences of our choices and actions are constrained
by the fact of the pre-existing societies we inhabit. Consequently, contrary
to Berger, we cannot simply construct meaningful realities independent of
the social circumstances in which we find ourselves but, also, we cannot
simply deconstruct existing ones either. With regard to religion, this means
that the Christian dimensions of Western societies do not necessarily vanish
in a flurry of anomic social currents, however ‘implausible’ Christian beliefs
and practices might appear to many contemporary persons.
What Berger’s analysis lacks is an adequate recognition of the impor-
tance of the temporal dimensions of society. Although he notes that society
‘both precedes and survives’ the individual, and that externalising activities
‘persist over time’, he none the less fails to see how these ideas contradict
his ‘dialectical’ model (Berger, 1990: 3, 7). In contrast, it can be noted that,
although Berger (1990: 189) derives his notion of ‘nomos’ from an inversion
of Durkheim’s (1952) concept of ‘anomie’, Durkheim’s understanding of
the importance of the temporal aspects of society is much stronger, and
builds on Fustel de Coulanges’s (1956: 14) argument that ‘the past never
completely dies for man …take him at any epoch, and he is the product, the
epitome of all earlier epochs’. For Durkheim (1977: 15), we cannot even
begin to understand the present if we sever its connection to the past.
Furthermore, the importance of the past is not simply subjective, in the sense
that people, places and things that have a particular significance in terms of
our individual biographies somehow ‘live on’ within us, but is objective: at
the level of the individual and at that of large-scale societal forms, the pres-
ent is shaped by an ‘agglomeration’ of actions, events, experiences and traits
that occurred in the past. We may not be fully conscious of many of these,
but that is because ‘they are so deeply rooted within us’ (Durkheim, 1977:
11; see Strenski, 2002: 116–17). As Archer’s (1995: 169) account of the
necessity of seeing structure and agency as analytically distinct also makes
clear, the emergence of the social structures that confront us as social agents
depends on the activities of previous ‘generations’.
As I suggested in Chapter 2, however, Bauman (2002: 191), amongst
others, has argued that Durkheim’s (1972: 93–4) view of human actions
having consequences that go beyond the immediate moment seems to be
called into question by the diverse, apparently disconnected phenomena of
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contemporary social encounters and experiences. Giddens’s (1990, 1991)

arguments concerning the ‘chronic reflexivity’ of the present, which serves
to undermine any real connection to the past, express a similar view, as does
Hervieu-Léger’s (2000) account of the deconstruction of those collective
chains of memory that have shaped Western civilisation in the past. A
potentially even more damning critique is offered by Urry, however.
Specifically challenging Archer’s temporal distinction between culture and
agency, he accuses her of offering ‘a Newtonian conception of time’ that
‘goes against the entire thrust of twentieth century science’. For him, she
reduces time to a linear ‘before-and-after’ model that ignores the signifi-
cance of multiple ‘times’ and the ‘warping of time–space’ ushered in by
those global changes that make ‘instantaneous’ time one of the most pow-
erful post-societal human/technological ‘hybrids’ (Urry, 2000: 16).
The value of Urry’s analysis rests on its capacity to illuminate key char-
acteristics of sociological analyses of time, including the social organisation
of work, leisure and identity around ‘clock-time’, and to draw attention to
some of the complexities of attempting to theorise different dimensions of
temporality in a globalised world. However, his critique of Archer is ques-
tionable on two counts. First, it is not clear that Archer has a ‘Newtonian
concept of time’ at all. The key characteristics of the post-Newtonian con-
ception of time are its emphases on the irreversibility of time and on the fact
that events do not simply occur in one, linear, temporal form, but that tem-
porality is inherent within events and actions themselves (Adam, 1990;
Prigogine and Stengers, 1984). As Byrne (1998) and Sayer (2000) suggest,
critical realist conceptions of time are entirely consistent with these argu-
ments developed by complexity theorists in that both agree reality is con-
stituted by multiple causes and multiple effects in a dynamical but
irreversible temporal pattern characterised by emergence. In this regard, it is
important to note that, contrary to Urry’s suggestion that ‘before-and-after’
understandings of time are now theoretically questionable, the notion of
irreversible time reinforces such understandings.
Second, Urry does not distinguish between the specific matter of con-
temporary social reconstructions of time and general issues to do with the
temporal dimensions of societies. Thus, he is able to integrate chaos and
complexity theories with Castells’s (1996) account of the transformations
in time stimulated by the information society to argue that the current sig-
nificance of ‘instantaneous time’ is evident in the importance of technolog-
ical processes dependent on ‘inconceivably brief instants which are wholly
beyond human consciousness’, the collapse of the temporal distinction
between cause and effect that follows from the instantaneous character of
social and technical relationships, and the spread of a general cultural expe-
rience of temporal fragmentation and short-termism (Urry, 2000: 126).
These arguments resist the implications of chrono-biology and thermody-
namics, which, taken together, can endorse a focus on irreversible flows of
time grounded in human embodiment, and they ignore how Adam, Urry’s
principle source for his account of post-Newtonian notions of time, stresses
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Temporal Society
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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Time-bound society
For Durkheim (1982b: 211) ‘there is no sociology worthy of the name

which does not possess a historical character’. A similar view has also been
expressed by Giddens (1991b: 205), who has called the social sciences ‘irre-
mediably historical’. None the less, Giddens (1990: 4) has a ‘discontinuist’
view of history, distinguishing sharply between modern and premodern soci-
eties in his argument that ‘The modes of life brought into being by moder-
nity have swept us away from all traditional types of social order, in quite
unprecedented fashion.’ This seriously underestimates historical continu-
ities. It could be said, in fact, that, just as Giddens’s account of agency tends
to place too much emphasis on the creativity of individuals (Kilminster,
1991), so too his view of history appears to place far too much emphasis on
the discontinuities ushered in by modernity. More than that, he does not
give sufficient attention to the fact that the idea of ‘modernity’ itself has a
particular history, rooted in Christian tradition. Kumar (1995: 69), indeed,
has argued that ‘much of what we understand as modernity is contained in
the Christian philosophy of history’.
Kumar (1995: 68) notes how ‘Christianity recharged the notion of time
and history’, infusing time with meaning through an eschatologically
grounded vision of past, present and future. Contrary to Giddens’s (1990:
37) vision of a future-oriented modernity defined against a past-oriented,
traditional and religious premodernity, Kumar (1995: 69) notes that
Christianity was, from the start, future-oriented. Its eschatological hopes
(Christ’s Second Coming and the Resurrection of the Body) were based on
an event in the past (the life and death of Christ), but this was an ‘unre-
peatable and incomparable event’ that gave time, and human history, their
future-oriented direction and meaning. As de Lubac (1950: 66–7) expresses
it, one feature of the uniqueness of Christianity has been its recognition that
the course of history is real, being characterised by ‘ontological density’, and
evolving towards a particular end. What distinguishes modernity, then, is not
its future-orientedness, but the fact that the Christian concept of time is
partially secularised, robbing it of those apocalyptic aspects which Kant
referred to as Christianity’s ‘moral terrorism’ (Kumar, 1995: 79), though
even here the return of apocalyptic themes in contemporary theories of his-
torical development suggests a limit to this secularisation (Baudrillard,
2002; Virilio, 2002; Zizek, 2002).
In the light of this view of modernity, the claim that nation-states , for
example, can be understood as distinctively modern phenomena, radically
discontinuous in relation to premodern states (Giddens, 1990: 13), is ques-
tionable. Giddens’s view is consistent with that of Benedict Anderson’s
(1991) conceptualisation of the nation-state as a phenomenon realised
through a politically validated imagination in modern societies. None the
less, while certain institutional organisations and understandings of nation-
states can be dated in this way, the notion of the ‘nation’ has a much longer
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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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In the Middle Ages, these dimensions were conceptualised in terms of

the distinction between the ‘temporal’ and the ‘spiritual’, though these were
also understood to have a productively interactive relationship. The signifi-
cance of this distinction is evident not only in relation to the historical
development of Western beliefs, practices and institutions, but also in rela-
tion to philosophical and sociological reflections upon the nature of social
reality, even when these appear to have a ‘secular’ character, and where the
distinction is not adopted self-consciously, as in the case of Comte, who
embraced it as offering a vital insight into the nature of society (Aron, 1990:
93–4; Pickering, 1997: 31–2; Serres, 1995: 453). Before examining these
philosophical and sociological reflections, a further examination of specifi-
cally Christian understandings of society can help establish the significance
of the temporal/spiritual distinction.
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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tied up with these religious changes:
In the fifteenth century ‘society’ meant a state of companionship, fellow-

ship or mutually recognised relation with one or more of one’s fellow men …
By 1700 or shortly after, it had already come to mean mainly an objective col-
lectivity, exterior to its members and delimited from other such collectivities.
Above them, as above the numerous examples of religion, planed the larger
abstraction Society, an entity from which most actual human contact had
been evacuated …[Religion and Society] are like the sexes according to
Aristophanes, effects of the fission of a primitive whole, yearning towards one
another across a great divide. The whole, for better or worse, was
‘Christianity’, a word which until the seventeenth century meant a body of
people, and has since then, as most European languages testify, meant an ‘ism’
or body of beliefs. (Bossy, 1985: 171)
For Bossy, then, this transformation of ‘Christianity’ from a body of people

to a body of beliefs was intimately tied to the process of abstraction sur-
rounding the notion of ‘society’, following its cleavage from ‘religion’. From
this point on, however intently individuals may have believed in their reli-
gion, the medieval consciousness of the links between Christianity and soci-
ety, spirituality and temporality, tended to fade from view or, at least,
become much more problematic. The so-called ‘disenchantment’ of the
Western world associated with the Reformation does not, therefore, simply
express a ‘secularisation’ of society in the sense that religion becomes
socially (and sociologically) insignificant: what it expresses is the emergence
of a new religious consciousness that uncouples the temporal from the spir-
itual. This is not to say, furthermore, that Protestantism lacked an interest in
society: on the contrary, some versions of Protestant Christianity, such as
Calvinism, were characterised by a desire to reconstruct society in a manner
that far exceeded that of the medieval Catholic Church in some respects
(Taylor, 1989: 227). Nevertheless, even where such social activism was
apparent, it tended to reflect a sense that society could be reconstructed by
religiously minded individuals for the glory of God, rather than indicating
any sense of the inherent religious potentialities of society itself. Some of the
distinctive features of such Protestant views are evident in some of the the-
ological, philosophical and sociological accounts of embodiment, religion
and society that have had a significant impact upon modern understandings
of the world.
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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of language without individuals living together and talking to each other’

(Marx, 1973: 84). In this respect, although Marx’s distinctive contribution
to philosophy rests on his elevation of class conflict to a position of unpar-
alleled importance as a determinant of collective action, it can be noted that
he has a strong interest in the significance of collectively nurtured patterns
of social and moral consensus. This significance is evident, for example, in
his accounts of class-consciousness, solidarity, loyalty and group conscious-
ness (Aron, 1990: 163; Marx, 1956: 489). In particular, his vision of the con-
flict-free conditions of ‘primitive communism’ and those that will prevail in
a future communist state, contrasted sharply with the ‘alienating’ individu-
alism of capitalist societies, and exhibits a clear rejection of both Hobbesian
and Kantian conceptions of humans and their relationships to society
(Aron, 1990: 145, 171).
Supra-individual society
Early modern French theories of society, in contrast to much of the German

philosophical tradition but closer to Marx’s views, tended not to focus on
self-determining human subjects but on social dynamics, forces and ener-
gies. Here, rather than Protestant influences, and despite the anti-clericalism
that has marked the history of modern France, the influence of Catholicism
is suggestive, particularly with regard to new attempts to engage with the
hyper-spiritual dynamics inherent within medieval notions of the ‘social
miracle’.2 These philosophical arguments are also, in general, attempts to
develop ostensibly ‘secular’ theories of society, but they reject individualism
and build on the medieval view of the collective characteristics and poten-
tialities of social life, and the distinction between the temporal and the spir-
itual. Montesquieu, for example, challenged Hobbes directly on social realist
grounds, emphasising the absurdity of trying to find the origins of society in
the raw dispositions of individuals, since ‘humans are always born into a
society and never encountered outside of a society’ (Levine, 1995: 153). His
understanding of society is not, therefore, an abstract one, but one attentive
to the particular circumstances in which individuals encounter it. As Aron
(1991: 18–19) notes, Montesquieu was aware of ‘the almost limitless diver-
sity of morals, customs, ideas, laws and institutions’ far removed from
abstract notions of a unified, ‘ideal society’, but attempted to find within
this diversity an intelligible order. His notion of the ‘general spirit’ (esprit
général) of a society, anticipating the Durkheimian concept of hyper-spir-
ituality, expresses a key aspect of this attempt. This spirit was the product
of the totality of the physical, social and moral dimensions of a society
that, over time, gave a particular society its unity and originality (Aron,
1991: 46).
Building on Montesquieu’s work in certain respects, but also returning to
the type of social contract theorising Montesquieu had rejected, Rousseau
(1983) developed a notion of the social contract that saw in the theories of
Hobbes and Locke a transposition of the early modern suspicions about the
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anti-social characteristics of humans into an entirely fictitious ‘state of

nature’. None the less, he followed Hobbes in building a theory of society
on his own speculations about a pre-social state of nature. In Rousseau’s
vision of a state of nature, however, humans were amoral and asocial.
Society was not a natural development of this state, but a product of the
emergence of private property and subsequent inequalities. In such circum-
stances, only the development of a social contract grounded in a ‘general
will’ for the common good (volonté générale), a notion developed from
Montesquieu’s conception of the ‘general spirit’ (esprit général), could pro-
vide a basis for morals and a measure of the corrupting power of social insti-
tutions (Frisby and Sayer, 1986: 21; MacIntyre, 1967: 183–4; Levine, 1995:
155). Here, society is an inherently ambiguous phenomenon: it is either a
corrupting force that unjustly curtails human freedom, or a morally enrich-
ing, collective endeavour guided by the ‘general will’.
Mark Cladis (2000) has mapped out the contours of this ambiguous
view of society across Rousseau’s work, which offers a number of (some-
times contradictory) attempts to make sense of the relationships between
individuals, society, virtues and vices. Cladis emphasises that Rousseau’s
accounts of society have to be placed within a French theological context
that distinguished between amour-propre (base self-love), amour de soi
(benign self-love) and charité (disinterested love) (Cladis, 2000: 225).
This term charité, like its English equivalent of ‘charity’ discussed by
Bossy, had originally referred to a specifically Catholic combination of
love of God and solidarity with others, but came to inform broader social
ideals concerning the public good and the need to transform charité’s
opposite, amour-propre, into something that would not weaken society
(Cladis, 2000: 227). Contrary to Luther’s view of humans as essentially
hateful, disgraceful creatures, and Hobbes’s view of humans as naturally
violent, Rousseau saw charité, in the form of pitié (a compassion for the
suffering of others) and amour de soi as a characteristic of the state of
nature, while amour-propre was classed as a characteristic of humans in
society (Cladis, 2000: 223). For Rousseau, society is potentially corrupt-
ing only in so far as it nurtures amour-propre; society’s legitimacy rests on
its cultivation of amour de soi and charité.
Thus, although Rousseau introduced a significant qualification of the
idea that society is irreducible to individuals, his overall arguments were,
nevertheless, consistent with the general French concern to depict society
as a supra-individual phenomenon against British theorists who focused
so heavily on individuals. With regard to Germany, Scheler’s (1961: 166)
suggestion that ‘society’ is simply the ‘rubbish’ left over from individuals
and the masses, rather than a genuinely inclusive phenomenon, is by no
means alien to the broader theoretical tradition. If, as I have suggested,
however, it is possible to see distinctive Christian influences upon these
divergent social theories, it is also possible to observe their continued
presence in specifically sociological accounts of society that developed in
these different contexts.
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Individualised society
Talcott Parsons’s (1968) argument that classical (and, indeed, contempo-

rary) sociology converges around a Hobbesian ‘problem of order’ has been
highly influential, but it is also highly misleading. Society is only reduced to
a ‘problem of order’ for Hobbes because of his vision of the individuals who
compose it, with their competing interests and lack of social instincts, and
because of his rejection of any notion of a spiritual substratum underpinning
its temporal form. For Montesquieu, on the other hand, such a reduction is
absurd because society is an unavoidable reality rather than an artificial
imposition upon unruly individuals motivated only by their own interests.
For Kant, Hobbes’s tension between nature and society is transcended com-
pletely by self-directing subjects’ rational embrace of moral imperatives.
Given that the philosophical positions developed by Montesquieu and Kant
became so influential, respectively, for the French and German traditions of
sociology that have dominated the modern social sciences, it is clear that
Hobbes’s significance can be overstated.
Where Parsons (1991) might well have been correct, however, is in his
insistence that the individualistic social and cultural values of American
society have a recognisably Protestant character (see also Robertson,
1991). In this respect it is interesting to note that, from the start,
American sociology often tended to favour a strong focus on individuals
and a minimalist view of society. Discussing the pioneering work of Park
and Burgess (1921: 36), for example, Morrison (2001: 103) notes that
they ‘took the position that the only investigative reality was the individ-
ual and that society as such is a category that exists only in name, and is
not itself a real object or category’. Rational choice forms of sociology,
which developed primarily in the USA, push this strong view of the indi-
vidual and nominalist view of society still further. It is in rational choice
theory, in fact, rather than sociology in general, that the influence of
Hobbes is unambiguously apparent. The ‘aggregation model’ of social
actions offered by rational choice theories clearly returns to Hobbes’s
minimalist conception of society (Bohman, 1991: 148–9). Hobbes’s influ-
ence is also evident in the suggestion, by Olson (1965), that coercion is
necessary to encourage cooperative action, and the general emphasis this
approach places on ‘individual interests’ above all else. Similarly,
Coleman (1990) explicitly identifies his attempted reconstruction of
sociology on rational choice lines with Hobbes, while Becker’s (1986)
stress on the importance of Bentham and Smith, who developed aspects
of Hobbes’s thought, underlines this continuity with early modern British
social theory, particularly in terms of its economistic tendency to define
all human phenomena with reference to ‘markets’. In some influential
quarters of the American sociology of religion this continuity is also evi-
dent, particularly with regard to the attempts of Stark, Iannaccone and
Finke to analyse religion in terms of stable individual preferences for reli-
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gious goods, and shifting supply-side patterns in changing markets (see

Young, 1997; Mellor, 2000).
In German sociology, a Protestant influence is also apparent, though it is
of a significantly different sort. Here, Kant’s focus on self-determining indi-
vidual subjects proved to have a decisive influence upon Simmel and Weber,
both of whom tended to be sceptical about the notion of ‘society’ in gen-
eral, but particularly with regard to any suggestion of a spiritual substratum
(Levine, 1995: 211). Simmel refused to accept the reduction of society to
individuals, yet saw society as an abstract ‘summing-up concept’ for the pat-
terns of interaction, or ‘forms of sociation’, that shape human experience
(Frisby and Sayer, 1986: 58–60). For him, it is only because ‘an extraordi-
nary multitude and variety of interactions’ exist at any moment that a
‘seemingly autonomous historical reality’ has been attributed to ‘society’
(Simmel, 1971: 27). Simmel also rejects the view that individuals are
socially determined beings. Humans, he suggests, are characterised by a dis-
tinction between pre-social impulses and individualised mental forms on
the one hand, and social emotions and reciprocated mental forms on the
other: they are naturally predisposed to interact, yet are partly shaped by
social interaction (Shilling and Mellor, 2001: 59). For Weber, similarly, the
subject matter of sociology is not ‘society’ but different types of social action
and their meanings for individual actors (Frisby and Sayer, 1986: 68).
Offering a Kantian interpretation of action, Weber (1978:4) suggests that
‘Action is “social” insofar as its subjective meaning takes account of the
behaviour of others, and is thereby oriented in its course.’
For both Simmel and Weber, however, society is not simply an abstract
concept, but also something that, historically, has been problematised by
social and cultural transformations. This sense of the historical problemati-
sation of society is especially evident when each of them discusses religion.
Simmel suggests that humans possess inherent religious needs for transcen-
dence and completeness, and that religion therefore has an immense signif-
icance in terms of bringing subjective (interior) and objective (social)
aspects of human experience into a coherent whole that makes life mean-
ingful (Simmel, 1997: 142). Nevertheless, although it is still a ‘concrete real-
ity within the soul’, religion is paralysed in modernity where the gap
between subjective and objective has become too wide to traverse, creating
immense existential difficulties for individuals (Simmel, 1997: 9). For
Weber (1991), it is, ironically, because of ascetic Protestantism’s promotion
of an individualist ethic of rational mastery of the world that modern soci-
eties now deny many of the moral capacities and values that allow human
beings to flourish in social contexts.
In broad terms, it could be said that the Protestant rejection of Catholic
conceptions of the religious dimensions of social life provides an important
context for, and influence on, the emergence of the German sociological tra-
dition’s interest in the separation of religion from society (and the develop-
ment of theories of secularisation), and, more broadly, the problematic
nature of society itself. The distinction between Gemeinschaft ‘community’
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and Gesellschaft ‘society’ in the work of Tönnies (1957), for example,

expresses a sense of the shift from a taken-for-granted social habitus shaped
by tradition and religion to one that is more associational, contractual and
individualistic. Also within this tradition, Berger’s (1990) vision of moder-
nity in terms of a ‘sky empty of angels’ not only offers a sociological analy-
sis of the Protestant reconceptualisation of social life in profane terms, but,
in a sense, reflects it: the ‘sacred canopy’ has been ripped up, Berger tells us,
and nothing can piece it together again.
Transcendent society
Turning to French sociology, however, an ostensible repudiation of Catholic

doctrines and practices does not result in methodological individualism and
narratives of secularisation. On the contrary, the medieval ‘social miracle’,
society as ‘charity’ or ‘solidarity’, tends to take on a sociological form in a
number of different visions of the interrelationship between the temporal
and spiritual dimensions of society. In the work of Comte, who first intro-
duced the term ‘sociology’, the gradual, ongoing de-Christianisation of soci-
ety is simply assumed, but he nevertheless builds religion into his very
strong emphasis on society as a real phenomenon transcendent of individu-
als. Comte (1853: 350–2) criticised Hobbes, in fact, for his focus on indi-
viduals and his denial of the ‘spiritual’ dimensions of society, and sought to
build on Montesquieu’s concern with society as a supra-individual entity.
For Comte, the ‘temporal power’ of society (its manifest institutional, con-
tractual or political form) was contingent upon something greater than itself
(Aron, 1991: 93–4). Comte discusses this transcendent basis of society in
terms of ‘spiritual power’ and suggests that religion has the power to gener-
ate ‘sympathetic emotions’ and bind individuals into a sense of unity
(Pickering, 1997: 31–2). Having made this distinction between the tempo-
ral and the spiritual, which he traces to the Catholic opposition between
heavenly and earthly interests, Comte’s suggestion is that the positive polity
must re-establish this distinction, shorn of any supernatural referents, in a
sociological ‘religion of humanity’.3
As eccentric as Comte’s ideas might now appear, they helped reinforce
Durkheim’s concern with the importance of religion in relation to society;
a concern also evident in the writings of Montesquieu, Rousseau, Saint-
Simon and others in the French tradition of social thought. Furthermore,
just as Comte associated patterns of social breakdown in early modern
Europe with the attacks of Luther and Calvin on the ‘organic fusion’ of reli-
gion and society in the medieval period (Nisbet, 1993: 228–9), so too
Durkheim (1952: 170) identified Protestantism with a weakening of the
common beliefs and practices that bind individuals into society. He poured
scorn, however, on ‘Comte’s attempt to organise a religion using old histor-
ical memories, artificially revived’, and emphasised instead that new reli-
gious forms would inevitably arise of their own accord (Durkheim, 1995:
429). His sense of the inevitability of these new religious forms emerging
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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
In The Evolution of Educational Thought (1977) Durkheim draws attention to

a cultural contradiction endemic to Christian belief and practice. He notes
that Christianity’s origins are inextricably entwined within Graeco-Latin
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Temporal Society
influences that carry within them a ‘pagan spirit’ entirely contradictory of

theological doctrines concerning God and His Creation. This contradiction
was not simply a logical contradiction, but one that affected action in the
temporal world since it involved divergent accounts of natural and super-
natural realities, while Christianity also encouraged a culture of learning
that, in drawing sustenance from classical literary, philosophical and artistic
sources, ensured the persistence within daily life as well as within doctrine
of an internal contradiction that could never be overcome (Durkheim,
1977: 21–2). As Archer (1995: 231–3) suggests, in offering this account of
Christian development, Durkheim thereby developed an unsurpassed
account of how cultural contradictions can constrain choices and actions
over huge tracts of time.
The validity of Durkheim’s interpretation of this particular contradiction
between sacred (Christian) and profane (classical) elements in the history of
the Church is no doubt open to question, since many writers would argue
that these two elements are actually characterised by much greater conti-
nuity than he allows (see Rist, 2002). Nevertheless, it is an important insight
that, because societies exist in the longue durée, evolving cultural systems
can carry within themselves the patterns, assumptions, ideas and beliefs of
what has gone before. In view of this insight, it is possible to see contempo-
rary ‘secular’ society in a fresh light. This is so not only in relation to some
of the apparently secular forms of philosophical and sociological theory con-
sidered in this chapter that clearly contain religious elements, but also in
relation to a host of other examples. Current concerns with ‘choice’ and
‘autonomy’, for example, and the generally anti-institutionalist orientation
that tends to go along with them, might also be traced back directly to the
Protestant Reformation (Rist, 2002: 59). Furthermore, current debates
about medical ethics and the ‘sanctity of human life’ tend to be framed in a
broadly Christian way. Indeed, Parsons (1978) has argued that a specifically
Christian notion of the ‘gift of life’ has come to form the basis for the appar-
ently ‘secular’ ethics of the modern medical profession.
In short, it can be argued that ‘secular’ culture carries within itself the
Christian elements that it seeks to repudiate and, as Durkheim argued
regarding Christianity’s Graeco-Latin origins, it is hard to see how this repu-
diation will ever be complete without secular culture destroying itself. This
is not to say that we are all ‘anonymous Christians’ (Rahner, 1979), only to
suggest that the Christian influence upon the Western world is such that,
even if we consciously reject much of this legacy, its constraining power
remains relevant in terms of some of the limits it sets in relation to con-
temporary agency, and in terms of the resistance it affords when we seek to
break free of it. Against this argument, it is possible to anticipate criticisms
that this treats human agents as ‘cultural dopes’ who are not fully aware of
the characteristics and consequences of their actions; a criticism that might
be made by Giddens (1984), for example, given his emphasis on knowl-
edgeable agents able to reflexively monitor their actions. Giddens’s
approach, however, tends to overestimate the knowledgeablity of actors and
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agents, in a manner similar to rational choice theorists (Mellor, 2000: 280).

In contrast to such views, it can be noted that it is highly improbable that
individuals or groups, however ‘reflexive’ they are, can ever know everything
that impinges upon choices, decisions and orientations. Furthermore, in a
society that represents itself as ‘secular’, religious influences on action and
belief are unlikely to be grasped fully, even if, in reality, they remain signifi-
cant. It is for this reason that a sensitive engagement with historical changes
is important, otherwise sociological arguments can express, uncritically, very
particular theological points of view.
In this regard, it is notable that, while the German tradition of sociolog-
ical thought about society might capture many elements of the apparent
‘disenchantment’ of the modern world, it tends to endorse, as a sociological
reality, what is in origin a specifically Protestant view of the religion/society
division based on a rejection of the idea that society has any ‘spiritual’
dimensions. This is not to say that sociological views associated with this tra-
dition are simply ‘Protestant’, or to deny the significance of those Protestant
theologies that do recognise the hyper-spiritual basis of society (Torrance,
1985). What is claimed, rather, is that the unacknowledged influence of
views of society that have a specifically Protestant history can encourage
sociological theorists to underestimate the significance of two things. First,
theorists might underestimate the degree to which the idea that religion and
society are fundamentally separate is a culturally and historically specific
one (see Asad, 2002). Weber’s (1978: 432–3) argument that religions have
their origins in the ‘other-worldly’ charisma of individuals, which is progres-
sively robbed of its power by rationalisation processes in society, reflects this
pattern. Second, theorists might underestimate the degree to which the reli-
gion/society division is actually unsustainable theoretically. Cameron’s
(1991) study of the Reformation, for example, identifies this factor as a sig-
nificant influence on the return to Catholicism by some Protestant peoples.
The unsustainable character of the religion/society division is even evident
in the history of New England Puritanism, where a rigid opposition to all
Catholic notions of sacred space eventually gave way to a return to a form
of sacramentalism and the construction of sacred spaces symbolic of its own
congregational solidarity (Wilson, 2002). In fact, the emergence of such
phenomena can be read as evidence of the causal significance of hyper-spir-
itual forces even within religious traditions that, theologically, refuse to
countenance them.
To return to the subject of nation-states touched on earlier in this chap-
ter, it is also notable that the unsustainability, ultimately, of the
religion/society division is also evident in relation to their current evolution.
The emergence of the religion/society division was also tied to the post-
Reformation reconstruction of national and universalist tendencies within
Christianity, thereby encouraging the emergence of modern nation-states:
‘nations’ existed within medieval ‘Christendom’, but nation-states start to
emerge along with the fragmentation of Christendom into demarcated
Christian ‘religions’. The tension between national and universal tendencies
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Temporal Society
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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stellation’ rather than the disappearance of Christianity, as Christian

beliefs, symbols, signs and assumptions circulate within contemporary
culture in an increasingly unpredictable and ambivalent form (see also
Hervieu-Léger, 2000: 159).
In conclusion, rather than imagining that the past has simply been ‘swept
away’ by modernisation or postmodernisation processes (Giddens, 1990: 4),
it is worth recalling a comment attributed to William Faulkner: ‘The past is
not dead. It’s not even past’ (see Strenski, 2002: 111). This resonates with
Durkheim’s argument that the present can only be understood in relation to
the past because the past is, through the constraints, influences and poten-
tialities with which it confronts us, thoroughly alive within the present
(Durkheim, 1977: 15). In this respect, the Christian influence upon Western
societies cannot be associated with the ‘dead past’ but, as I have suggested,
can be noted even in a variety of contexts that appear to have a secular char-
acter. The purpose of the next chapter is to explore this covert Christian
influence upon Western societies further through an engagement with
Durkheim’s account of how ‘collective representations’ embed social reali-
ties within the consciousnesses of individuals.
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:
Ch6 final.qxd 10/09/2004 14:57 Page 134
361): neither of these things actually exist, because humanity’s embodied

potentialities, out of which societies emerge, are considerably more diverse
than these theories allow. This is not to say that humans are not thinking
creatures with capacities for a rational critique of their social circum-
stances, only that a great deal of what goes on in society is neither rational
nor fully conscious.
In contrast to such approaches, Durkheim’s vision of the hyper-spiritual
dynamics inherent to social realities is sensitive to the fact that many of the
key aspects of society are shaped by a pre-rational substratum of knowledge.
As Gane (1983b: 4) has suggested, Durkheim was an early adherent of the
idea that unconscious phenomena have a significant impact upon patterns
of social integration. His vision of the nature and social power of ‘collective
representations’ is an important part of his account of such phenomena.
This vision is a complex one, however, since it not only touches upon the
social significance of ideas, symbols and beliefs, but also raises further ques-
tions about human agency and the status of particular forms of knowledge
in society (Durkheim, 1982a: 39, 1984: 56; Stedman Jones, 2001: 66). The
complexity of Durkheim’s arguments is indicated by the fact that he has
been interpreted as a social constructionist and epistemological relativist
with an entirely inadequate account of agency (Archer, 1995; Jones, 1999),
but also as someone entirely opposed to relativism and with a strong inter-
est in human action and freedom (Watts Miller, 1996; Stedman Jones,
2001). He has, furthermore, been portrayed as someone hopelessly contra-
dictory or confused about these issues (Lukes, 1973; Edwards, 2002). The
argument offered here, however, is that Durkheim’s understanding of col-
lective representations offers a sound basis for understanding how society
becomes embedded within the consciousness of individuals in ways that are
often tacit rather than reflexively and rationally understood. The first part
of this chapter is devoted to exploring his work in these respects, in dialogue
with contemporary social theories that appear to call his views into ques-
tion. Significantly, many of these critiques tend to challenge Durkheim for
not being sufficiently constructionist rather than for being too much of an
epistemological relativist.
Following this is a critical assessment of Serge Moscovici’s ‘social repre-
sentations’ theory. Moscovici’s distinctive contribution to the contemporary
development of social psychology has rested on his elaboration of the con-
cept of ‘social representations’, and his attempts to demonstrate its theoret-
ical and methodological value (for example, Moscovici, 1976, 1988, 1989,
2001).1 The differences between Durkheim’s and Moscovici’s projects are
often unjustifiably exaggerated, but what Moscovici adds is a valuable
account of the persistence of certain ‘core themata’ within the fluid, shift-
ing configurations of social forms and processes that characterise modern
life, and the role of social representations in the world-views of even those
who claim not to believe in them. On the other hand, he leans towards a
much more social constructionist view of society than Durkheim, princi-
pally due to his tendency to prioritise discursive communication above
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Tacit Society
other patterns of representation, allowing some of his followers to use

social representations theory to endorse the de-traditionalisation argu-
ments of writers such as Habermas and Giddens. Contrary to these, the rest
of the chapter focuses on three different strata within social reality that
are dependent upon tacit forms of knowledge resistant to reflexive
deconstruction.
First, various attempts to explore the sociological significance of ‘every-
day life’ are discussed in relation to what Bourdieu has referred to as the
‘doxic’, or taken-for-granted knowledge enfolded in the social habitus
(Fowler, 1997: 2), though, following Taylor (1989), the specifically Christian
aspects of this taken-for-granted character are emphasised. Second, the
presence of a tacitly Christian way of structuring conceptions of social life
within various modern notions of ‘public’ and ‘private’ life is discussed as a
key example of how a core sociological dichotomy can rest on a religious
substratum. Third, through a brief account of Said’s (1978) thesis on
‘Orientalism’, the role of tacit assumptions in inter-societal relations is con-
sidered, looking at the different role of Christian and Islamic representations
in Said’s arguments. In conclusion, I shall suggest that a focus on how the
tacit dimensions of societies continue to shape the consciousnesses of indi-
viduals calls into question those sociological visions that too readily assume
‘a disappearance of the social bond and value breakdown’ (Lash and
Featherstone, 2001: 17), or dismiss the notion of representations as anachro-
nistic in a ‘global information society’, where mobility, flows and movement
appear to dominate over a more stable symbolic structuring of reality, iden-
tity and meaning (Touraine, 1989, 1995; Castells, 2000; Urry, 2000; Gilroy,
2001).
Representing society
Durkheim and Mauss (1963) argue that, to understand any society, it is

necessary, first of all, to understand its system of symbolic classification.
They not only note, as many others have done, that all societies attempt
to classify diverse types of phenomena into categories that can make
sense of the relations between different dimensions of human experience,
but they also argue for the social origins of all classification systems. In
building this argument, they suggest that when we examine systems of
classification, we are not dealing with ‘pure ideas’ but with societies rep-
resented in collectively recognised forms. Collective representations
express a unity of knowledge and the hyper-spiritual dynamics of the
group represented through collective concepts, symbols and values
(Durkheim and Mauss, 1963: 84–5). This concern with representations as
expressions of collective life is evident throughout Durkheim’s work,
however, including The Rules of Sociological Method (1982a), and The
Elementary Forms of Religious Life (1995). In the former work, while dis-
tinguishing his social realism from philosophical forms of realism that
held individuals and society to have a reality independent of their rela-
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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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Tacit Society
Second, even if we concentrate our attention on concepts as forms of col-

lective representation it is clear that they are not the abstract impositions of
the social scientist upon a ‘sensuous’ flux, but are real phenomena emergent
from the embodied, ontologically open patterns of interaction between indi-
viduals and society. Concepts are indeed reflective of humans as ‘social
beings’, as opposed to the sensations characteristic of ‘individual beings’
(Durkheim, 1995: 275), but individuals do not become social beings
through concepts but through the hyper-spiritual dynamics out of which
collective representations emerge (Durkheim, 1995: 220–1). In short, rather
than reflecting any cognitivist assumptions on Durkheim’s part, his focus on
the sociological significance of collective representations rests on his inter-
est in the sui generis phenomena that constitute a pre-rational substratum to
society.
Third, rather than suggesting that concepts are ‘fixed and immutable’,
Durkheim’s argument is merely that they are ‘relatively unchangeable’, in
contrast to sense representations, because they are the means through which
communication becomes possible: individual sense experiences can change
by the second, but concepts remain less changeable otherwise we would not
be able to understand each other (Durkheim, 1995: 434–5). In attempting
to make sense of social complexity, Urry (2000, 2003) tends to focus very
heavily upon random, chaotic phenomena, so it is easy to see how he comes
to reject Durkheim’s sense of an emergent order within social reality. None
the less, this order is neither as ‘ahistorical’ nor as ‘static’ as he imagines it
to be, given Durkheim’s (1977: 15) emphasis on the dynamic processes
through which temporal phenomena impose themselves upon individuals as
layers of emergent strata. In fact, for him, it is this attention to temporality
that necessitates a recognition of the fact that everything is not arbitrary,
random and ephemeral, since certain ways of making sense of ourselves and
the world can exist over very long periods of time, even if these ways of
making sense are so deeply embedded within us that we are not fully con-
scious of them (Durkheim, 1977: 11).
For Durkheim, then, collective representations have to be assessed in
relation to broad issues concerning human capacities, agency and the hyper-
spirituality of society as an emergent reality. If they are not, then a social
constructionist argument that all knowledge is entirely limited by the social
and cultural circumstances of its immediate context becomes inevitable
(Nicholson, 1990). Such arguments may be valuable in terms of emphasis-
ing the socially situated nature of knowledge, and in drawing attention to
unacknowledged bias in scholarly accounts of social reality, but these factors
do not necessarily lead to epistemological relativism if humanity’s embod-
ied being-in-the-world is acknowledged as the common basis upon which
culturally variable representations emerge. In this regard, Game’s Undoing
the Social (1991) which offers a vision of sociology as a ‘fiction’ unable to
represent the real, identified with the embodied encounter with the every-
day, is unsatisfactory: just as Deleuze’s (1977) account of embodiment
emphasises its constructed character, so too Game’s ‘body’ provides no bul-
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wark against deconstructionist analysis. As becomes clear in her critique of

Durkheim’s account of representations, the body is reduced to ‘fluidities of
sensuousness’ amenable to social constructions, but with no inherent poten-
tialities for emergent forms of knowledge that transcend the circumstances
of the present (Game, 1995; Urry, 2000).
Holistic society
In contrast, Moscovici’s social representations theory takes its inspiration

from the arguments of Durkheim in challenging the behaviourist and cog-
nitive theories that have dominated social psychology. Like Piaget (1965:
145), who also sought to develop the notion of collective and individual
representations, Moscovici (2001: 26) emphasises that it is not enough to
stress the social nature of thought: the dynamic, unavoidably interactive
‘holism’ of collective thought must be demonstrated. He seeks to do this
through emphasising that representations ‘set out the field of activity and
inform the members of the social system of their rights and duties, of a sense
of belonging’ (Moscovici, 2001: 21). This is quite close to Parsons’s (1951,
1969) emphasis on the normative patterning of social action within a social
system, which also has Durkheimian sources, though Moscovici, like
Durkheim, pays more attention to the symbolic character of this patterning:
‘Things in themselves mean nothing; people must represent them and make
them signify, that is, they must give them a meaning using a symbol’
(Jovchelovitch, 2001: 176).
It is important to be clear about what Moscovici does and does not add
to Durkheim’s arguments. It has been suggested, for example, that
Moscovici’s adoption of the term ‘social representations’, rather than ‘col-
lective representations’, fills a gap in Durkheim’s analysis, in that Durkheim
did not account adequately for the bridge between the individual and the
social world (Philogène and Deaux, 2001: 5). This is not so, however, as
social representations (in Moscovici’s model) and collective representations
(in Durkheim’s model) have essentially the same role: both types of repre-
sentations serve to constitute, and express, a collective reality through net-
works of social interactions. What distinguishes Moscovici’s focus on social
representations is his concern with the ‘plurality of representations and their
diversity within a group’, given the fact that modern societies are highly dif-
ferentiated, pluralistic and heterogeneous in many respects (Moscovici,
1988: 219). This has some similarities with Gurvitch’s (1949: 13) focus on
differential patterns of representations in relation to the ‘poles’ of ‘I’, ‘Other’
and ‘We’, in the sense that he also seeks to develop Durkheim’s work in the
direction of a more micro-sociological approach. Nevertheless, Moscovici,
like Durkheim, is also interested in relatively enduring patterns of represen-
tation, which he usefully designates as influential ‘themata’ within particu-
lar societies.
For Moscovici, the symbolic creation and codifications of meanings
through representations are manifest in several forms: first, certain underly-
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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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modernity with the abandonment of the sacred/profane polarity

(Moscovici, 1993: 337), and cites the decline of religion in support of his
arguments concerning the shift from collective to social representations,
thereby allowing his interpreters to adopt a fairly robust secularisation the-
sis (Moscovici, 1988: 219; Jovchelovitch, 2001: 167).3 For him, the decline
of collective representations, which embrace a whole society, is coterminous
with the decline of the sacred because of the shift from a society where
there are widely accepted beliefs and rituals to one where ‘conversations and
communications between individuals become historically more important’
(Moscovici, 1988: 219). This emphasis on conversations signals a departure
from Durkheim’s focus on the embodied basis of representations, and
explains the more social constructionist tenor of Moscovici’s writings.
Although Moscovici (2001: 19) suggests that representations can take
‘iconic’, image-based forms as well as conceptual, linguistic forms, he
focuses especially on the latter. He prioritises the fundamental importance
of conversation in human life and argues, for example, that ‘a social repre-
sentation is discursified thinking, that is a symbolic cultural system involving
language’. This departs from Durkheim (1995: 436), who sees language as a
system of collective representations but does not identify representations in
general only, or even largely, with language. Representations have a commu-
nicative function, but this is not necessarily linguistic but often emotional:
collective representations work on the emotions and the senses to transform
objects by investing them with symbolic power (Durkheim, 1995: 228).
Indeed, it can be noted that, by prioritising language, Moscovici moves away
from Durkheim’s fuller understanding of the embodied basis of representa-
tions towards the sort of linguistically oriented cognitivism central to the
writings of Habermas. In both cases, it might be said that both Moscovici
and Habermas leave us with a somewhat disembodied view of humans as
defined by their capacity for talking. Criticising Durkheim’s neglect of the
sociological importance of linguistic understanding, for example, Habermas
(1987: 57) argues that social realities are no longer shaped by rituals, sym-
bols or emotional energies, but through communicative discourse; an argu-
ment that clearly has some continuities with Moscovici’s focus on discursive
communication. From here, however, the two diverge. For Habermas (1987:
77), in line with the rationalism that dominates his thought, the power of
the sacred in modernity is translated into ‘the authority of an achieved con-
sensus’ established on the basis of ‘criticisable validity claims’. Moscovici’s
work, on the other hand, is free of such rationalism and the speculations
about consensus, truth and the possibility of ‘ideal speech’ situations that
tend to go along with it. This has not stopped Moscovici and Habermas
being used together, however, to endorse a highly questionable picture of
the development of modern societies.
Jovchelovitch (2001: 167), for example, stresses the value of social rep-
resentations theory in accounting for the ‘more fluid dynamic of modern
societies, where worldviews and practices are contested and negotiated, and
the space for a homogenous, unquestioned, and single view of the world is
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very limited indeed’. For Jovchelovitch (2001: 165), ‘social representations

are a form of symbolic knowledge intrinsic to public life’, but ‘traditional’
and ‘de-traditionalised’ societies construct and express symbolic knowledge
in different ways. Drawing principally on Habermas (1989b), she suggests
that we are now living in an age that has ‘gradually freed itself from tradi-
tion and unquestioned historical orderings and sought in rational debate and
democratic dialogue the response for matters of common concern’
(Jovchelovitch, 2001: 168). For Jovchelovitch (2001: 170), where ‘tradi-
tional’ societies were characterised by the central significance of the ‘emo-
tional dimension of the social bond’, de-traditionalised modernity is
characterised by reflexivity, dialogue and negotiation (Beck et al., 1994;
Heelas et al., 1996). This means that the ‘overtotalising conception of the
social’ evident in Durkheim’s notion of collective representations is no
longer of value, since these totalising forms are ‘resistant to experience, argu-
mentation, and logical proof’; in other words, collective representations
embody all the characteristics that are antithetical to de-traditionalised
modernity (Jovchelovitch, 2001: 169–70).
Even so, it is possible to highlight five major problems with the sort of
argument offered by Jovchelovitch. First, notions of de-traditionalisation
tend to work with a faulty conception of ‘traditional’ societies. As Levine’s
(1985: 54) discussion of the Amhara of Ethiopia makes clear, for example,
‘traditional’ societies are much more diverse, complex, inherently flexible
and subject to recurrent change than many in the modern West tend to
imagine.4 Second, the suggestion that collective representations manifest an
‘overtotalising conception of the social’ is misleading. Durkheim (1974a:
24) argues that ‘The representations that form the network of social life
arise from the relations between the individuals thus combined or the sec-
ondary groups that are between the individuals and the total society.’ In
other words, collective representations are manifest between individuals and
social groups other, and smaller, than the ‘total society’. In this respect it is
also worth noting that Durkheim’s (1995) arguments about collective rep-
resentations are developed through an analysis of a plurality of clans and
tribes. There are three further problems, however, all of which are worth
concentrating on in more detail as they reflect a sociological neglect of the
tacit dimensions of society.
A third problem with notions of de-traditionalisation concerns the fact
that reflexivity, dialogue and rational debate may be prized values in certain
sectors of contemporary life, but the degree to which they shape everyday
social realities for the majority of people is, to say the least, highly dubious.
In fact, all the most influential sociological studies of everyday life (which
actually offer a very broad range of theories and arguments) tend to deny
the pervasiveness or, in some cases, the significance of such phenomena. A
fourth problem concerns the fact that notions of de-traditionalisation tend
to underestimate, and often to ignore completely, the degree to which the
exercise of rationality and reflexivity in a modern ‘secular’ society actually
takes place through collective representations that have a specific religious
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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
In an aside that touches upon the sociological neglect of gardening, Turner

and Rojek (2001: 228) have sought to remind social and cultural theorists,
who tend to get much more excited by technological changes, that, judging
by what people do during the weekend, ‘Britain seems to be a country in
which the garden gnome possesses more cultural relevance than the cyborg’.
This suggestion draws attention to the tendency of much postmodern
thought to ignore how most people actually live their lives. Featherstone
(1992: 159) has observed that postmodernism has been associated with a
positive evaluation of local and popular cultures, suggesting ‘an increasing
sensitivity to the more complex levels of unity, to the syncretism, hetero-
geneity, and the common taken-for-granted, “seen but unnoticed” aspects of
everyday life’. None the less, Baudrillard’s (1988b) accounts of the ‘hyper-
reality’ of the contemporary world, for instance, where everything is now
‘simulation’, suggest little contact with the everyday lives of most people,
and little desire to account for the representations through which they make
sense of social realities. Bauman (1992a: 155), it can be noted, has to remind
Baudrillard that there is life outside television, and that people have to eat,
and grapple with some of the harsh realities of life and work, before they sit
down and become immersed in televisual spectacles. He suggests, in fact,
that ‘It becomes a philosopher and an analyst of his time to go out and use
his feet now and again’. In some respects, however, this postmodern neglect
of everyday life dovetails with a more general sociological tendency to
emphasise its decreasing sociological significance.
The notion of ‘everyday life’ is by no mean an unproblematic one, and
sociologists have used the term to represent a broad range of phenomena, of
differing degrees of importance, covering the taken-for-granted aspects of
daily belief and practice, the pre-institutional reproduction and mainte-
nance of social orders, the embodied, sensual or playful, sense of being
together, and the heterogeneity of lived interaction (Featherstone, 1992:
161). One important tradition of analysis, however, represented by writers
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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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Like Urry (2000), Maffesoli discusses the fluid networks, associations

and movements of contemporary persons, as well as the aestheticism and
ephemerality of many social and cultural phenomena. Characteristic of
Maffesoli’s account, however, is the recognition that it is Durkheim’s con-
ception of society that constitutes the basis for a satisfactory explanation of
these phenomena. Although Durkheim’s notion of ‘collective effervescence’
is often associated with the large-scale social upheavals through which social
life is reordered or revitalised, he also argued that the emotionally stimulat-
ing character of society is manifest in even the most ordinary, everyday
interactions, such as in the feelings of neighbourliness aroused by living in
proximity to others (Durkheim, 1995: 213). Maffesoli builds on
Durkheim’s arguments in his account of the pervasiveness of puissance, a
vital energy which he identifies with ways of ‘keeping warm together’ in the
often inhospitable climate of modern rationalisation processes, permeating
everyday life in the form of a ‘basic sociality’ manifest in neighbourhoods,
groups, tribes, sports and workplaces (Maffesoli, 1996: 32, 42).
For Maffesoli (1996: 126), a recognition of the importance of this ‘basic
sociality’ entails an engagement with ‘proxemics’, with the ‘love of the
nearby and the present’ that marks everyday life. This attention to the
embodied proximity of others is often overlooked in some accounts of con-
temporary social life. Urry’s (2000: 40–1) suggestion, for example, that the
Internet is now the principal metaphor for best expressing the contingent,
fluid character of contemporary social life, implies an abstract, disembodied
and inhuman experience of the present. This may, of course, be true for
some people (including some academics). Robertson (1992: 177), however,
has warned of the dangers of developing theories of global social and cul-
tural changes that ignore the immense significance of the local as a dimen-
sion of social experience, treating the local–global along ‘micro–macro’ lines
that prioritise the ‘macro’, though he too tends to interpret the local in
terms of global changes. Jenkins’s (1999) anthropological work on the
immense importance of locality, family and collective memory in English
everyday life, on the other hand, notes the continuing significance of what
he calls ‘local particularity’.
By ‘local particularity’, Jenkins means ways of acting and thinking that
are specific to a particular place, and continue to be passed down through
different generations. Contrary to Urry’s (2000: 129) focus on the
‘time–space desynchronisation’ of family life prompted by changes in
working patterns, eating habits and the development of video technolo-
gies, Jenkins (1999: 129) suggests that ‘local society is family-based and
women-centred’, not only in terms of advice, support and services, but
also in terms of recreation and leisure activities. Discussing the
Kingswood area of Bristol, for example, he notes that ‘It is not unusual
for four generations of a family to live within half a mile of each other’;
local marriages are the norm, and daughters, in particular, tend to live
close to their mothers who become the centres of quite extended family
networks rooted, very firmly, in the traditions and collective memories of
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a specific geographical area (Jenkins, 1999: 129).

This assertion of the importance of locality, family and tradition goes
against the grain of much contemporary sociology. For Jenkins (1999: 69),
however, it is important to note that ‘tradition exists not as a survival, in
opposition to the present and to progress, but within the present and as part
of it’. In this regard, he emphasises that the association of many of the core
values of local society with older people cannot be taken as evidence of the
gradual erosion of tradition: not only is the authority of older people recog-
nised by younger members of local society, but, as older members die, oth-
ers take their places (Jenkins, 1999: 131). This attentiveness to the
endurance of traditional patterns of living may challenge some key socio-
logical assumptions about modernity, but it also recalls Goffman’s (1969)
interest in the highly ritualised patterns that shape our day-to-day interac-
tions with others, and, on a broader scale, Bourdieu’s (1977) interest in how
particular habits can endure over large stretches of time and between gen-
erations. Bourdieu’s (1977: 72) definition of the habitus as a ‘system of
durable, transposable dispositions’ builds on Durkheim’s interest in the
power of society to shape individuals’ experiences of themselves and the
world, and reminds us of the fact that all sorts of traditions, habits and cus-
toms continue to influence our daily lives, even if we are not aware of these
most of the time (Lemert, 2002: 42).
Bourdieu’s emphasis on the taken-for-granted (‘doxic’) knowledge
enfolded in the habitus, drawn from Durkheim and Mauss’s discussion of
representations in Primitive Classification (1963) (Fowler, 1997: 2), suggests
that the power of society is present for us in our day-to-day encounters in
ways that go beyond cognitive frameworks of meaning, in the sense that
society can instil pre-cognitive, embodied dispositions towards particular
forms of action and experience. Mauss’s (1950) account of the ‘techniques
of the body’ characteristic of different societies, and passed down through
generations, emphasises this even more clearly: Mauss notes several exam-
ples where decisions to embark upon cross-cultural collaboration and action
come up against embodied dispositions resistant to other forms. As with
Maffesoli’s interest in ‘proxemics’, and again building on Durkheim’s work,
there is recognition of the fact that society is not simply an abstract idea, but
a reality embedded within human consciousness and our embodied disposi-
tions towards particular types of actions. What is also worth noting, how-
ever, is that the ‘doxic’ knowledge enfolded in the habitus is representative
of a set of social dynamics that can extend through very large periods of
time (Durkheim, 1995: 15; Jenkins, 1999: 69). In this regard, Taylor (1989)
has argued that many of the underlying assumptions, values and dispositions
people bring to everyday life, whether this is considered in terms of the
meaning-constructing character of its ‘micro’ dimensions or threats to its
vitality from ‘macro’ level colonisation processes, have specifically Christian
origins.
Taylor (1989: 216) notes that the Protestant Reformation led to an
enhanced status for what had previously been seen as ‘profane’, namely
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the ordinary, everyday life of individuals and communities. The roots of

this ‘affirmation of ordinary life’ go deeper, to the biblical emphasis on
God, as Creator, affirming the inherent goodness of life and being, but
Protestantism helped nurture this tacit potentiality within Christian tra-
dition to the degree that everyday life became infused with spiritual
potentiality (Taylor, 1989: 218, 221). Much of this argument is consis-
tent with that of Weber (1991), for whom Protestantism established
clearly defined values that made sense of this-worldly activity in relation
to God, and thereby promoted an ethically informed pattern of rational
action that possessed a substantial affinity with the ‘spirit of modern cap-
italism’. For Weber, however, this Protestant re-evaluation of everyday
life resulted in the stimulation of rationalisation processes that eventually
undermined modernity’s religious foundations. Taylor’s analysis, while
not denying the broadly anti-Christian orientation of many aspects of
modernity, raises questions about the degree to which these foundations
are still important. His argument is that modernity tends to suppress the
spiritual roots of the systems of knowledge through which we make sense
of social and natural phenomena, but these remain important not only in
terms of establishing a satisfactorily historical understanding of contem-
porary societies, but also in terms of looking beyond present moral, polit-
ical and social conflicts to the common substratum of tacit assumptions
that structure debates about phenomena such as the instrumentalisation
of contemporary society (Taylor, 1989: 488).
From this point of view, the apparent opposition between, for exam-
ple, Maffesoli’s celebration of the interpenetration of sacred and profane
in everyday life and Habermas’s (1981, 1987) critique of its colonisation
by modern instrumentalism conceals a common dependence on particu-
lar Protestant assumptions. Indeed, while also drawing upon distinctively
Catholic ideas such as the ‘communion of the saints’, Maffesoli (1996:
158) praises Luther’s contrast between the institutional church and the
‘invisible’ ecclesia as something that captures the pluralism and puissance
of the masses, but does not pause to consider whether this unexpected
convergence between Protestant theology and postmodern theory is
more than coincidental. Further to this, it can be noted that the similar-
ity between Habermas’s (1987: 77) ‘linguistification’ of the sacred and
Protestantism’s unique interest in the power of language in the construc-
tion of new forms of community also suggests the endurance of distinc-
tively Christian ‘core themata’ in contemporary societies (Moscovici,
2001: 31). This suggestion is also pertinent to aspects of society other
than everyday life, including those relating to the ‘public’ and ‘private’
dimensions of society. These, in contrast to the more obviously ‘doxic’
character of everyday existence, have been, and remain, subject to a great
deal of reflexive and rational scrutiny, debate and justification. Even so, it
is arguable that there is also a tacitly Christian dimension to these repre-
sentations of social life.
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Acephalous society
Modern representations of public/private spheres have a long history that is

often interpreted in terms of the gradual secularisation of Western society,
even when it is acknowledged that the philosophers who did most to cod-
ify them were committed Christians (see Seligman, 1992; Weintraub, 1997).
As with the modern ‘affirmation of ordinary life’, however, there are
grounds for suggesting that such representations remain tied to specifically
Christian understandings of individuals and society, though some of these
understandings cut across modern notions of public and private, and some
underpin them directly. Karl Polanyi (2001: 268) touches upon the former
type when he argues that Christianity bequeathed to modernity a belief in
the uniqueness of the individual and the oneness of mankind. Dumont’s
(1970) study of the caste system in India, which emphasises the absence of
these beliefs in much Indian thought and practice, reinforces Polanyi’s argu-
ment (see also Siedentop, 2000). Focusing on the development of modern
conceptions of political authority, however, O’Donovan (1999: 246)
emphasises the significance of specifically Protestant ideas for the emer-
gence of what he calls an ‘acephalous society’; that is, the development of a
self-consciously secular society driven by unconscious forces from within
rather than a conscious commitment to Christian truth. Consequently,
while it was only in the nineteenth century, in England, that the idea of pri-
vacy emerged and it should be recognised that, strictly speaking, its applica-
tion to other historical periods is anachronistic (Duby, 1988a: ix), it must
also be acknowledged that modern notions of public and private have devel-
oped over the longue durée of Western religious history.
Georges Duby (1988b: 509–10) has discussed how, in the medieval
period, people lived in the midst of collectivities, rarely experiencing soli-
tude: even spheres of social life we would now deem ‘private’, such as the
life of hearth and home, were collectively oriented ‘households’, rather than
havens for individuals. This started to change, he suggests, as the Catholic
Church sought to intensify individuals’ Christian devotion and practice,
such as when the Lateran Council of 1215 imposed obligations upon
Christians regarding confession and penance before communion at Easter
(Duby, 1988b: 533). None the less, in fostering the interior devotion of indi-
vidual Christians within a Catholic vision of the essentially collective nature
of faith and salvation Christian religiosity could never become a purely ‘pri-
vate’ matter in the modern sense (Duffy, 1992: 92–3). With the emergence
of Protestantism in the sixteenth century, however, a ‘privatisation’ of reli-
giosity became more evident, particularly with respect to the strong empha-
sis upon the intensity and purity of individual faith central to Luther’s
doctrine of justification by grace (Ruel, 2002: 107; see Rupp, 1975). As
O’Donovan (1999: 209) suggests, Luther converted Augustine’s distinction
between the spiritual and the secular ‘into an inner–outer distinction,
between the realm of the mind and the heart on the one hand, and the
realm of social relations on the other’. From this point onwards, the
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Christian stands at a distance from society. As noted in previous chapters,

this distance took a number of different forms, ranging from the internalism
of Lutheranism to the Calvinist commitment to reorder the world in a man-
ner pleasing to God (Taylor, 1989: 227), but eventually resulted in a sepa-
ration of ‘public’ and ‘private’ spheres so clear that even devout, evangelical
Christians, in drafting the First Amendment to the US Constitution, fer-
vently assented to the separation of church from state in order that the state
could not ‘interfere’ in what was principally a matter of private conscience
(O’Donovan, 1999: 245). A key point to note here, however, is that such
phenomena do not amount to ‘secularisation’ in any simple sense, since the
underlying representational structure of what is understood as ‘public’ and
‘private’ is still defined in essentially Protestant terms.
This representational structure is still evident today. Seligman’s (1992)
account of contemporary understandings of society in the USA, for exam-
ple, illuminates fundamental continuities between America’s religious ori-
gins and its present day characteristics. He emphasises that the specific
relationship between private and public spheres in American society means
it is both ‘the paradigm of modern societies’ and thoroughly ‘Protestant’ in
its essential nature: the public arena is actually ‘neutral’ and ‘devoid of
autonomous value’, only becoming meaningful as a social arena when
morally validated individuals bring their private concerns to bear upon it
(Seligman, 1992: 134–5). He is not suggesting that the public arena is unim-
portant or lacks value, then, only ‘that it lacks autonomous value in and of
itself. The value accruing to the public space is a function of the universal
value attributed to the social actors (those morally autonomous individuals)
acting and interacting in the public realm’ (Seligman, 1992: 135). One con-
sequence of this is that the public sphere can become characterised by a
cacophony of voices seeking to assert their individual ‘rights’, with the leg-
islature unable to mediate between irreconcilable visions of these
(Seligman, 1992: 136), but this Protestant vision of the public sphere has
also given rise to constructive attempts to find ways of mediating this plu-
ralism of individual rights-based claims upon society.
These more constructive conceptions of the relationship between public
and private spheres also have a recognisably Protestant character, even if this
is generally concealed by a representational system that is, ostensibly, reli-
giously neutral. In this regard, it is notable that John Rawls (1999: 619–21),
one of the most influential and respected theorists of American political lib-
eralism, argues very strongly for the neutrality of the public arena in relation
to religion, even asserting that religious individuals must ‘translate’ their
religious convictions into the language of ‘public reason’, so that the consti-
tutional protection of the rights, liberties and dignity of the individual is not
compromised by the imposition of any one ‘comprehensive doctrine’ that
might seek to shape social life to particular religious goals (see also Rawls,
1993). On the face of it, this does not look like a religious argument, and,
indeed, it has been suggested that Rawls’s political vision, even if it does not
actively endorse secularism, basically views religion as being irrelevant to a
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flourishing liberal democracy (Song, 1997: 220). It is possible to criticise

Rawls’s views on the basis that they simply ignore the manifest importance
of religious commitments in contemporary public life, particularly in the
USA (Casanova, 1994). As Jeremy Waldron (2002: 237–9) has argued, how-
ever, a more fundamental problem with Rawls’s vision is that it avoids con-
fronting difficult questions about the religious grounds of egalitarian
commitments, failing to see that his political conception of the human indi-
vidual as a morally responsible, reasonable and free agent arises out of, and
arguably still depends upon, the sort of theology of natural law that was cen-
tral to the Protestant social and political theory of Locke. In this regard, the
peculiar absence/presence of religion in such views has, perhaps, a specifi-
cally American character.
As O’Donovan (1999: 245) suggests, the Christians who helped frame
the First Amendment, which articulates the sort of separation of church and
state that Rawls is defending, actually presupposed the current existence and
future vitality of a Protestant society and culture, and it is possible, at least,
to raise the question of whether something similar is presupposed in Rawls’s
work, even if he refuses to acknowledge it. In this regard, it is worth noting
Parsons’s (1960, 1963) studies of contemporary American values, not only
because of his stress upon the enduring significance of specifically
Protestant views for the American social system, but also because of his
awareness of the fact that these views are so deeply established in the sub-
stratum of American society that, to many Americans, they do not look ‘reli-
gious’ at all.
As Robertson (1991: 154) has noted, Parsons recognised that modern
societies in general, and the USA in particular, were increasingly dependent
upon the voluntaristic ‘inputs’ of individuals, but that these, nonetheless,
operated within a distinctive religious and moral ecology that allowed the
individual conscience to be shaped in particular ways (see Parsons, 1966;
Bourricaud, 1981; Bellah et al., 1992). Rejecting arguments about the death
of the Protestant ethic, Parsons saw Christian values as informing the cul-
tural value system of modern America, in the sense that its Protestant her-
itage continues to provide a ‘pre-contractual’ foundation for the
development of modern life so that its ‘secular’ orders still approximate to
the normative models provided by religion (Parsons 1978: 168, 240). In
Durkheim’s terms, what Parsons is talking about is the individual internali-
sation of the ‘conscience collective’, the normative patterning of individual
decisions and choices through the incorporation of collective values into the
personal identities of individuals. Without this incorporation, which in
Weber’s terms can also be referred to as a ‘calling’, Parsons (1978: 320)
holds that the ‘instrumental apparatus of modern society’ could not func-
tion (Shilling and Mellor, 2001: 94).
Viewed in the light of Parsons’s arguments, Rawls’s (1999: 620) assertion
that, in the public sphere, for the sake of creating consensus individuals
must translate their religious convictions into ‘neutral’ forms of public rea-
son, could be interpreted as a concealment of religion rather than a denial of
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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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‘communicative rationality’ conceals the fact that a prior translation has

already taken place: what look like ‘secular’ philosophical concerns have
already been framed in Protestant terms.
Following from this, it is clear that using Habermas’s arguments to sup-
port claims about de-traditionalisation, secularisation and the decline of col-
lective representations, as Jovchelovitch (2001) does, is highly problematic:
not only does Habermas’s position apparently endorse a certain way of rep-
resenting the ‘secular’ world of modernity, rather than simply reflecting an
attempt to make sense of certain social changes, but his own ‘secular’ form
of theory is itself emergent from a particular Christian tradition and retains
some of its assumptions. While these contradictions in Habermas’s work
raise questions about its merit, however, similar contradictions are manifest
in a much more extreme form in the work of others. Edward Said’s (1978)
highly influential account of the Western tradition of ‘Orientialist’ scholar-
ship, which has done a great deal to encourage the development of ‘post-
colonial’ studies, exhibits a set of contradictions that mean his arguments are
both suggestive and deeply flawed. It is precisely because Said defines him-
self as a ‘secular critic’ of society that he is keen to identify the centrality of
tacitly (and, for him, perniciously) Christian assumptions in Western repre-
sentations of non-Western cultures (Said, 1994: 89; Hollis, 2001: 306; Said
and Ashcroft, 2001: 279). Even so, partly because Islamic societies do not
recognise this distinction between the religious and the secular (Asad,
2002), and partly because, as a secularist, he is reluctant to acknowledge the
social significance of religion in general terms, he fails to accord Islam an
equally powerful role in society.
Deconstructing society
Said’s (1978: 2) argument is that ‘Orientalism’ is based upon a distinction

between Orient and Occident that is both ontological and epistemological.
For him, representations have a far greater power than for Durkheim, since
he follows Foucault in expressing the idea that epistemology determines
ontology; that is, he supports the view that reality is defined exclusively
through representations (Said, 1978: 3). He argues that Western ‘knowl-
edge’ about the Orient creates the Orient, classifying Orientals as irrational,
depraved, childlike and ‘different’ in contrast to Occidentals who are
rational, virtuous, mature and ‘normal’ (Said, 1978: 40). For Said (1978: 12),
this ‘knowledge’, which is distributed throughout aesthetic, scholarly, eco-
nomic, sociological, historical and philological domains, is actually a coher-
ent pattern of representations that he identifies with colonial dominance
over non-Western societies. While he outlines several features of these rep-
resentations, however, he places great importance on their religious origins.
For him, Christianity is not only understood to have been a key influence
upon the construction of Orientalist discourse and hegemony, permeating
all sorts of areas of cultural and political life, but is also credited with estab-
lishing an enduring pattern whereby the Orient was ‘accommodated to the
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moral exigencies of Western Christianity’ (Said, 1978: 67). Indeed, it is

claimed that Orientalism, as a ‘form of paranoia’, arose initially from
Christian visions of Muhammad as an impostor seeking to usurp the place
of Jesus (Said, 1978: 72), but its influence continued through the develop-
ment of modernity and into the present. Even where Western ideas and
practices appear to be ‘secular’, in fact, Said identifies them with
Christianity. Thus, figures as diverse as Schlegel, Wordsworth,
Chateaubriand, Bouvard and Comte are presented as proponents ‘of a sec-
ular post-Enlightenment myth whose outlines are unmistakably Christian’
(Said, 1978: 115). Even contemporary books and articles on Islam are
deemed to perpetuate medieval Christian antagonism towards it as a hereti-
cal form of Christianity (Said 1978: 209, 287). As far as Said (1978: 121) is
concerned, the religious influences upon the West did not disappear in
modernity but were ‘reconstituted, redeployed, redistributed in the secular
frameworks’; a suggestion he also repeated with regard to more recent con-
cerns about Islamic terrorism against the ‘Christian West’ (Said, 1997: xxix).
In short, for Said, Christianity is not simply complicit in the development of
Orientalism, but a key feature of its origin, development and persistence.
This attributes to Christianity an immense significance in terms of its social
and cultural power and, in that sense, is consistent with some of the argu-
ments offered in this chapter. None the less, Said’s engagement with the
social significance of religion is a highly partial one.
Islam, it can be noted, has a highly problematic, often contradictory pres-
ence in Said’s work. At many points Said criticises Western scholars for
emphasising differences between Christianity and Islam, or for suggesting
that the two religions should be approached in significantly different ways
(for example, Said, 1978: 276, 282, 297, 299, 306). Despite this, Said’s
treatment of Christianity and Islam are markedly, and significantly, different.
When he discusses the fact that Islam ‘dominated or effectively threatened
European Christianity’ up until the end of the sixteenth century, for exam-
ple, he does so in relation to the development of European Christian impe-
rialism, rather than the military expansion of the Islamic empire (Said,
1978: 74). Even with regard to the Middle East, and in contrast to the
apparently great influence of Christianity in the West, Said seems keen to
play down the impact of Islam upon the lives of people. Said (1978: 278,
299) criticises Gibb, for example, for stressing the importance of Islam in
relation to all areas of life in the Middle East, and also criticises Halpern’s
(1962) observation that Western assumptions about the autonomy of poli-
tics and economics from religion do not apply in Middle Eastern society: for
Said, this is an ‘invidiously ideological’ portrait of Islamic societies. In fact,
he more recently emphasised that ‘Islam’ ‘defines a relatively small propor-
tion of what actually takes place in the Islamic world’, and argues that the
‘vociferously polemical Orientalists’ who endorse the view that Islam has a
broader social and cultural significance are using their scholarly obfuscations
to attack the Middle East and to stir up anti-Islamic feeling (Said, 1997:
xvi). Contrary to Said’s views, however, Jalal al-‘Azm (1981: 11) has sug-
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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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technological possibilities and dangers. Consequently, these deserve seri-

ous attention.
Post-representational society
This chapter began by raising questions about the embedding of society

within the consciousness of individuals, noting that social theories centred
on notions of reasonable or rational dialogue fail to account for the uncon-
scious processes through which social realities, as phenomena emergent
from the embodied potentialities of human beings, are constituted. Drawing
on Michael Polanyi’s notion of the ‘tacit dimension’ of human knowledge, it
was suggested that Durkheim’s notion of collective representations and, to
some extent, Moscovici’s development of this concept, could help explain
how the hyper-spiritual or religious substrata of societies could come to
shape their particular self-understandings. From there, the rest of the chap-
ter dealt with the various degrees to which these tacit dimensions were
explicitly or implicitly present in accounts of sociological theories of every-
day life, Western conceptions of public and private life, and Orientalist rep-
resentations of Islamic societies. The notion of a ‘post-representational’
society, however, suggests that social realities must be conceptualised in a
manner radically different to any of the approaches considered so far.
Lash and Featherstone (2001) have offered a brief but illuminating sum-
mary of the key issues to be confronted in this respect, developing their
arguments in dialogue with Taylor’s (1994) exploration of the politics of
‘recognition’ in a multicultural society. Following Taylor, they emphasise
that the recognition of human dignity and authenticity is a key thematic of
modernity. However, while he stresses the role of recognition in relation to
self-identity (see Taylor, 1989), they add that recognition, ‘grounded in rec-
iprocity and unity of purpose … is also the source of modernity’s social
bond’ (Lash and Featherstone, 2001: 14). In this respect, they draw on the
arguments of Durkheim, Mauss and Lévi-Strauss to show that in modernity,
even where there has been the danger that the social bond will break down,
modern nations provided resources for reconstituted and individualised ver-
sions of the social bond. In the ‘global information society’, however, claims
for recognition come from a multiplicity of cultures rather than a ‘national
Kultur’, while the inclusive social bonds of modernity have broken down,
leaving only a ‘de-traditionalised, transformed and fragmented’ world deter-
mined only by the information flows of ‘the communications order’ (Lash
and Featherstone, 2001: 15-16). Here, in so far as such a thing continues to
exist, ‘the social bond comes more and more to resemble the communication’
(emphasis in original), standing apart from everyday social relations in the
compressed, machine-mediated flow of information that ‘avoids completely
the question of representation’, taking place ‘outside of symbolic structures
– in the real’ (Lash and Featherstone, 2001: 16; Hardt and Negri, 2000). In
fact, in this post-representational world, recognition ‘becomes making sense
of the information and communitational flows’, values ‘are disengaged from
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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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Tacit Society
acknowledging that the date of the millennium is defined by the Gregorian

calendar of Christianity, he dismisses Christianity as ‘a minority religion that
is bound to lose its pre-eminence’ as representation becomes shaped by ‘real
virtuality’ rather than religion. As another ‘secular critic’ dreaming of ful-
filling Enlightenment hopes for a more just social order, however, his
embrace of the emancipatory potentialities of technology, allied to a rejec-
tion of religion, means that he is unable to grasp what Virilio (1984) envis-
ages to be the dangerous and inhuman consequences that flow from the
attempted elimination of modernity’s Christian origins. These dangers,
which are not only related to technology but to the increasing pervasiveness
of a reductive utilitarianism, become even more pressing in the context of a
‘clash of civilisations’ (Huntington, 1996), where other societies begin to
reassess their own moral and religious sources and increasingly define them-
selves in opposition to the West. These are the concerns of the following
chapter.
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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Resurgent Society
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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reductionism was grounded in a firm sense of the Western world’s religious

heritage, and he was a committed Christian socialist (Roth, 2003). More
recent critiques of contemporary social and cultural patterns in the West by
writers such as Zizek (2000, 2002) and Virilio (2002) also look to Christian
sources for a vision of the Western world that transcends economic and
technological forms of reductionism. These theoretical writings are signifi-
cant because they raise questions about whether particular forms of social
life necessarily depend upon particular types of religion; indeed, post-
September 11th, these questions seem all the more important given the fact
that increased suspicion about the motives and actions of Muslims within
Western societies has been matched by a noticeable firming up of patterns
of Christian identification (Fetzer and Soper, 2003). In this respect, follow-
ing the example of writers such as Said (1978, 1997), it is all too easy to
interpret any such firming up of Western identities against those of other
societies and cultures in ‘racist’ terms. This is, nevertheless, a simplistic and
reductionist approach that does not allow for the possibility that religious
factors can be much more important than racial ones, aside from the fact
that it ignores the racial diversity within Islamic and Western contexts. It
should also be noted that Zizek and Virilio are explicitly hostile to all forms
of xenophobia and racism. It is Huntington (1996), however, in an account
of the contemporary ‘clash of civilisations’ that has been both highly influ-
ential and highly contentious in its reassessment of international political,
social and cultural conflicts, who offers a particularly strong emphasis upon
religious factors above others. This account, and related arguments by other
authors, is a good place to begin a discussion of the contemporary resur-
gence of religion and society.
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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Resurgent Society
sises the importance of religion in particular. Indeed, in view of his argu-

ments, a civilisation can be considered as a phenomenon that encompasses
a number of societies united by a common religious substratum: this applies
not only to those societies defined by their identification with Islam, but
also structures what we mean by ‘the West’, since this is constituted by soci-
eties that have evolved along specifically Christian lines even if this evolu-
tion is obscured by the difference in nomenclature.
In this regard, Huntington’s arguments are consistent with some of the
themes developed in this book: he argues, in fact, that ‘Western Christianity,
first Catholicism and then Catholicism and Protestantism, is historically the
single most important characteristic of Western civilisation. During most of
its first millennium, indeed, what is now known as Western civilisation was
called Western Christendom’ (Huntington, 1996: 70). Furthermore, he also
emphasises that Christianity’s significance is not merely historical.
Discussing the Christianisation of parts of Africa and Asia, for example, he
notes that ‘the most successful protagonists of Western culture are not neo-
classical economists or crusading democrats or multinational corporation
executives. They are and most likely will continue to be Christian mission-
aries’ (Huntington, 1996: 65). Also, in his account of the current evolution
of the European Community, he suggests that its borders are essentially
those of Western Christendom from five hundred years ago, and that this
Christian pattern of identification still ‘provides a clear criterion for the
admission of new members to Western organisations’ (Huntington, 1996:
158, 160). In this regard, even though the USA, as an overwhelmingly
Christian society, is often contrasted with the more secular environs of
Europe, the substratum of European societies also remains religious:
‘Christian concepts, values and practices nonetheless pervade European
civilisation’ (Huntington, 1996: 305). Indeed, Huntington argues that, while
the undermining of Christianity would seriously threaten Western civilisa-
tion, there is no likelihood of this in the short or medium term. For him,
however, a real threat to Western civilisation is present in the spread of
Islam, across the globe and within Western societies through patterns of eco-
nomic migration. This idea that Islam manifests a ‘threat’ to Western civili-
sation is, of course, a contentious one, particularly for those Muslim
minorities peacefully living and participating in European and American
societies. None the less, Huntington’s arguments about Islam can be broken
down into three main parts, all of which raise important points about the
relationship between religion and society.
First, he follows Maxime Rodinson in recognising that Islam and mod-
ernisation do not clash, since the successful economic and scientific mod-
ernisation of society is in no sense forbidden by Islamic law (shar’ia), and,
consequently, he asserts that the explicit or implicit assumptions by many
Westerners that modernisation and Westernisation go hand in hand are
false: ‘In fundamental ways, the world is becoming more modern and less
Western’ (Huntington, 1996: 78; see Pipes, 1983). Following this, he empha-
sises that even when Western consumer goods circulate extensively within
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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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Resurgent Society
argues that ‘Fourteen hundred years of history suggest otherwise’

(Huntington, 1996: 209), and claims that ‘Muslims make up about one-fifth
of the world’s population but in the 1990s they have been far more involved
in intergroup violence than the people of any other civilisation’
(Huntington, 1996: 256). Indeed, following James Payne’s (1989: 124)
study of differential patterns of militarisation in Christian and Islamic soci-
eties, he argues that the fact of the ‘Muslim propensity towards violent con-
flict’ is undeniable (Huntington, 1996: 258). Again following Payne, he
notes that the embodiment of Islam as a ‘religion of the sword’ is manifest
in the example of Muhammad, who was a military commander as well as a
religious leader (Huntington, 1996: 263; Payne, 1989: 127). In this regard,
although both Christianity and Islam are monotheistic, universalistic faiths
with a tendency to see the world in ‘us-and-them’ terms, Christ and
Muhammad offer radically different religious models with regard to the
type of actions that can be considered religiously legitimate. Indeed,
Huntington (1996: 264) argues that Islam, alone among all the major reli-
gions of the world, tends to promote a violent struggle against those popu-
lations that refuse to accept its superiority.
Huntington’s claim about an Islamic propensity towards violence is,
clearly, one of the most contentious aspects of his arguments. This concen-
tration on one particular aspect of Islam, which arises from his focus on
international political conflicts, does not offer a comprehensive and detailed
vision of Islam in general terms, and runs the risk of ignoring internal
debates about the legitimate uses of violence, as well as the wealth of diverse
theological views and social practices that have constituted various forms of
Islam. None the less, it is also clear that Qur’anic texts, the analysis of his-
tory, and even the arguments of many Muslim apologists provide some sup-
port for his arguments. Not only are there many Qur’anic texts that urge
violent battle against all those who refuse to accept Muhammad and Islam,1
but the most comprehensive and historically detailed of the many recent
discussions of jihad emphasises the centrality of war to Islam as it has been
practiced historically (Bat Ye’or, 1996). As Bat Ye’or (1996: 40) expresses it,
‘The aim of jihad is to subjugate the peoples of the world to Allah, decreed
by his Prophet Muhammad’. Indeed, she argues that, far from being excep-
tional, jihad has been the norm in Islamic history (Bat Ye’or, 1996: 251).2 In
a more apologetic vein, Nasr (1988: 73) acknowledges that Islam offers a
‘positive symbolism of war’, in which the ‘holy war’ against internal
impulses leading away from religious righteousness and the external ‘holy
war’ against enemies of Islam are part of one inseparable process, since noth-
ing other than ‘some kind of precarious peace’ can be possible until the
defeat of all those forces that oppose submission to God’s will.
Consequently, while Huntington clearly offers a limited account of Islam, it
is, arguably, not an inaccurate one.
The sociological significance of this argument rests on its recognition of
the differential social consequences of particular religious traditions. In this
regard, while the ‘clash of civilisation’ thesis might justifiably be criticised
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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
Written before the events of September 11th, Huntington’s account of

Islam within his ‘clash of civilisations’ thesis raises important questions
about the degree to which different religious traditions can impact upon
individuals and societies in diverse ways. In contrast, a number of assess-
ments of these events by prominent social and cultural theorists have
tended to push these questions aside, a tendency characteristic of many
recent studies of Islam (see Ellul, 1996: 18). Indeed, rather than
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Resurgent Society
Huntington, a number of European sociologists have followed Said (1978,

1997) in their attempts to make sense of these events, focusing on Western
tendencies to misrepresent Islam, rather than dealing directly with questions
about the degree to which Islam might offer religious legitimations for vio-
lence that cannot be confined to a ‘deviant minority’ of ‘extremists’ or ‘fun-
damentalists’. Said, while acknowledging that ‘there has been a resurgence
of emotion throughout the Islamic world’, and that economic problems and
anti-democratic practices have contributed to this, blames the West for pro-
voking problems through its ‘indiscriminate’ attacks upon Islam in the
media, scholarship and ‘pro-Israeli books and journals’ (Said, 1997: xv–xvi,
xxi). Here, Islamic ‘fundamentalism’ is portrayed as a response to the his-
toric and continuing injustices of the West, not as anything that reflects con-
tinuities with earlier patterns of Islamic thought and practice (see Voll,
1987).
Using Said as a theoretical source to help make sense of the post-
September 11th world looks highly problematic, however, since he tends to
burden the West with all the responsibility for all conflicts with Islam. This
ignores the fact that, as Jalal al-‘Azm (1981: 19) points out, powerful repre-
sentations of other cultures are not confined to the West, but occur in all
societies, and Islamic cultures often operate with an ‘Orientalism in reverse’.
Further to this, as Benthall (2002: 2) has noted, Huntington’s vision of a
‘clash’ between Islam and the West is actually an inversion of the classical
Islamic division of the world into two camps, the dar al-Islam (the ‘realm of
Islam’) and the dar al-harb (the ‘realm of war’, that is, of the ‘unbelievers’)
(see also Bat Ye’or, 1996: 40). None the less, following Said’s line of thought,
Turner (2002: 115) interprets the ‘negative images’ of Islam in the post-
September 11th West as ‘a revival of Orientalism’. Here, the new
‘Orientalist’ critique is directed towards Huntington (1993, 1996),
Fukuyama (1992, 2002) and Schmitt (1996a, 1996b, Schmitt et al., 1996).
Similarly, while Kellner (2002: 148) does not accuse Huntington of rein-
forcing an essentially Western hegemonic pattern of discourse, he argues
that his ‘binary model of inexorable conflict between the West and Islam’
‘lends itself to pernicious misuse’, and that Huntington misrepresents Islam
through homogenising it, thereby ignoring internal arguments within Islam
about modernity and the legitimate use of violence.
As Turner (2002: 109) notes, however, Huntington is attentive to con-
flicts within Islam, particularly regarding ethnic differences but also
between different Muslim countries. Furthermore, it can be noted that
Huntington devotes attention to religious, political, economic and demo-
graphic factors affecting Muslim societies, though he interprets all of these
as tending towards the intensification of hostilities towards the West. Turner
(2002: 103-4), however, views the notion of a contemporary ‘clash of civil-
isations’ as a distinctively Western phenomenon, rooted in religious and
political misrepresentations of Islam, and suggests that it cannot be under-
stood fully without recognising the influence of the political theology of
Carl Schmitt (1996a, 1996b; Schmitt et al., 1996), which has had a signifi-
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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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indeed, he questions whether such forms of fundamentalism, along with

‘individualistic Protestantism’, can survive the eroding influence of Western
consumer culture: ‘What remains to be seen is whether, in the long run, the
world of pure entertainment is triumphant over that of the sacred’ (Turner,
2002: 117).
Benjamin Barber’s (1995) Jihad vs. McWorld has similarities in this
respect. For Barber, the conflict between Islam and the West is merely one
aspect of a broader conflict between the tribal politics of jihad and the con-
sumerism and secularism represented by McDonald’s. Turner’s (2002: 111)
suggestion that the terrorist attack on the World Trade Center towers,
embodiments of Western capitalism, can be read as an illustration of
Barber’s symbolic dichotomisation is an example of the influence of his
arguments. Yet they express a highly selective engagement with the signifi-
cance of religion for society. Barber’s (1995: 9) use of the term jihad, for
example, separates it from its Islamic origins and applies it to a range of
other phenomena that he believes embody ‘militant’ rejections of moder-
nity. Some of these usages are manifestly absurd: with regard to France, for
example, the renewal of interest in bagpipes amongst Bretons is presented
as one form of ‘European Jihad’ (Barber, 1995: 172). Other usages exem-
plify broader tendencies to equate Islamic beliefs and practices with other
types of religious phenomena. With regard to ‘American Jihad’, for example,
Barber (1995: 212) equates Islamic ‘Holy War’ with the Protestant ‘funda-
mentalist’ critique of liberalism. As Barber notes, such equations are com-
mon (see Marty and Appleby, 1991), but they often depend upon a neglect
of historical facts. The term ‘fundamentalism’ has a specifically Protestant
and American history, where it originally signalled the rejection of liberal
Protestant views of the culturally conditioned character of biblical texts: the
unchangeable ‘fundamentals’ emphasised, particularly those relating to the
inerrancy of scripture, had deep roots in Protestant history, but also arose in
relation to long-standing difficulties within this tradition regarding the inter-
pretation of biblical texts that were ‘inspired’ by the Word of God
(Ammerman, 1987; Shepard, 1987; Munson, 2003). In view of this, the
application of the term ‘fundamentalism’ to an Islamic context, though now
widespread, looks inherently problematic, since all Muslims would reject
the idea that Qur’anic teaching is in any sense culturally conditioned fol-
lowing their belief that the Qur’an was dictated by God to Muhammad
(Rippin and Knappert, 1986).
One thing that follows from applying the notion of ‘fundamentalism’ in
this general way, however, is that, just as those Protestant Christians who
have a literalist view of biblical teaching can be seen as an ‘extreme’ or ‘fun-
damentalist’ minority, so too a distinction between ‘moderate’ and ‘funda-
mentalist’ Islam becomes possible. It is this distinction that facilitates
statements as general and as historically and sociologically naïve as the fol-
lowing: ‘Fundamentalists can be found among every religious sect and rep-
resent a tiny, aggravated minority whose ideology contradicts the very
religions in whose name they act’ (Barber, 2001: xv). Contrary to this view,
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Huntington’s (1996: 258) emphasis on a general ‘Muslim propensity toward

violent conflict’ is, of course, highly contentious if not inflammatory, but
raises legitimate questions about the degree to which Islam provides
resources for a theological legitimation of violence absent in other religious
traditions. In this respect, it is right that Turner (2002: 114) and Kellner
(2002: 148) note the existence of contemporary Muslim voices challenging
‘militant’ interpretations of Islam. None the less, sensitivity to the dangers
of offering a too homogeneous account of particular religious traditions is
not the same thing as the rejection of any notion of inherent religious char-
acteristics. As Lindholm (1997: 748) has suggested, for some people in the
West the whole notion of a ‘distinct cultural heritage’ has come, under the
influence of writers such as Said, to be regarded as an oppressive act of
Western dominance that seeks to obliterate the multiplicity and creative
flux through which people construct meaningful lives. Lindholm quite
rightly draws attention to the liberal utopianism underpinning such argu-
ments, and their lack of an engagement with social reality. In contrast, a
social realist view of contemporary religious changes not only takes distinct
heritages seriously, but also recognises that these must be considered in rela-
tion to distinctively societal dynamics and characteristics.
Virulent society
Polanyi’s (2001) account of the emergence of communism and fascism in

response to the social fragmentation wrought by free market economics
offers a potentially fruitful way of making sense of why Islam has become
resurgent in the present, for he interprets such phenomena in terms of the
resurgence of society. Echoing Durkheim’s analysis of religion, Polanyi
(2001: 245–7) emphasises the dynamic, emotional underpinnings of com-
munism and fascism, and their capacities for responding to some of the
chaotic, destabilising aspects of modern economic processes by nurturing an
ideology of the group against notions of universal brotherhood. This is not
to say that the emergence of phenomena such as communism and fascism
can be reduced into economic factors, only to suggest that they represent a
certain kind of ‘moral’ and ‘religious’ response to the tendency of econom-
ics to deny the reality of society. For Polanyi, in fact, free market economics
are dangerous in two senses: first, they are dangerous because, in ignoring
social obligations, bonds and forms of solidarity, they can produce inhuman
ways of living and working; secondly, however, they are dangerous because
those hyper-spiritual aspects of social realities they ignore or actively oppose
can reassert themselves in virulent forms manifest as an authoritarian denial
of individual freedom and an aggressive militarism towards outsider groups
(Polanyi, 2001: 266–7).
In some respects, the resurgence of Islam can be interpreted in similar
terms, though not in those proposed by Fukuyama (2002).4 As Huntington
(1996: 98) suggests, the broader resurgence of religion of which the Islamic
revival is a part is a reaction against ‘secularism, moral relativism and self-
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indulgence, and a reaffirmation of the values of order, discipline, work,

mutual help and human solidarity’. Much of Barber’s (1995, 2001) analysis
is also consistent with this argument. Echoing Polanyi, Barber (2001: xvii)
suggests that the global spread of laissez-faire economics, which denies the
reality of society, has stimulated a backlash evident in the resurgence of
Islam in many parts of the world. This backlash, however, is to do with
moral and religious conflicts, not simply with economic grievances or polit-
ical pressures attendant upon globalisation (Davetian, 2001). Contrary to
Urry’s (2000: 209) association of jihad with the ‘identity politics’ of a new,
post-societal ‘global disorder’, in fact, the resurgence of Islam does not sig-
nal the demise of society but its revitalisation. In Polanyi’s terms, what Kepel
(1994) has called ‘la revanche de Dieu’ is the resurgence of society in the face
of its global denial. The antagonism expressed by even ‘moderate’ Muslims
towards what is perceived to be the West’s consumerism and absence of val-
ues, as well as their belief that the West is determined to destroy the Islamic
community, suggest this kind of resurgence (Huntington, 1996: 214;
Vertigans and Sutton, 2001; Lewis, 2002).
As I have already noted, however, this resurgence does not, contrary to
Barber’s view, tend to involve a rejection of the economic and scientific ben-
efits of modernisation, even in its apparently most ‘extreme’ forms. Indeed,
Zizek (2002: 133) suggests that the link between resurgent Islam and
European fascism in the earlier parts of the twentieth century is valid in the
sense that both are attempts to have ‘capitalism without capitalism’; that is,
they are attempts to benefit from all that modern economies can offer with-
out suffering societal fragmentation. It is also important to note, however,
that the particular character of the Islamic resurgence reflects resources spe-
cific to this religious tradition: the ‘authoritarian’ characteristics of this
resurgence, to Western eyes, reflect Islam’s rejection of the distinction
between temporal and spiritual power central to Christian history (Bat
Ye’or, 1996: 256; Lewis, 2002: 96), and the fact that it does not have the
emphasis on the uniqueness of individuals that Christianity has bequeathed
to Western societies (Siedentop, 2000: 209; Polanyi, 2001: 268). In this
regard, resurgent Islam also follows Polanyi’s model in its antipathy to
democracy, a point that can be developed by returning to Barber’s discus-
sion of Islam.
Although Fukuyama’s (1992) The End of History has been interpreted as
an assertion of post-Cold War Western superiority, it has also been suggested
that the events of September 11th and their aftermath have called its con-
clusions into question (Kellner, 2002: 147). In a recent comment on these
issues, however, Fukuyama (2002: 58) has reasserted his view of the even-
tual triumph of democracy and liberal politics over what he calls ‘Islamo-
fascism’. For him, Islam is an inherently anti-modern religion whose power
and influence has been boosted by economic and cultural problems relating
to modernisation processes: arguing that hostility to the West is characteris-
tic not only of a Muslim minority, he none the less believes that Muslims
will eventually prefer the benefits of Western consumption over Islamic
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authoritarianism (Turner, 2002: 110). Such secularist triumphalism has been

rejected by Barber, who not only views the relationship between democracy
and consumption as being far more problematic than this, but who also
offers a more considered account of the possible interactions between vari-
ous forms of religion and democratic politics, and a keener sense of the dif-
ficulties of achieving forms of social and religious consensus. Like
Fukuyama, however, he fails to appreciate the continuing significance of
Christian orientations for the development of democratic societies, and
thereby underestimates the degree to which they underpin even his own
arguments.
Although he notes de Tocqueville’s argument that democracy depends
upon religion (see also Bergson, 1979; Maritain, 1986), Barber (1995: 210)
not only distinguishes democracy from any particular religious form, but
also distinguishes it from modernity (which he defines in ‘secular’ terms).
Consequently, although he notes that Islam is ‘relatively inhospitable to
democracy’, and that Muslim societies are happier to import Western tech-
nology than Western social and political institutions, he none the less argues
that democracy should not be associated with the corrosive secularism
Muslims fear: on the contrary, democracy can accommodate Islamic beliefs
and practices in the same way that it accommodates the ‘fundamentalist’
Protestantism of America’s ‘Christian Right’ (Barber, 1995: 205–11). There
are, however, two major problems with these arguments. First, they do not
take sufficient account of the fact that the American experience of democ-
racy does not simply ‘accommodate’ Protestant Christianity: it was created
through it, and retains foundational assumptions about temporal and spiri-
tual domains inherent to this religious tradition (Taylor, 1989: 399;
O’Donovan, 1999: 245). Second, following from this, Barber’s arguments
leave him in a poor position from which to see how the religious assump-
tions in his own vision of how ‘global democracy’ might be secured. In this
respect, it is notable that, in arguing for the necessity of a global ‘civil soci-
ety’ to counteract the corrosive McDonaldization of the world, he returns
to de Tocqueville’s vision of nineteenth-century America as an embodiment
of his democratic vision (Barber, 1995: 282).5 He is in good company in this
respect, since, as I discussed in Chapter 6, figures such as Rawls, in the USA,
and Habermas, in Europe, have similar blind spots when it comes to reli-
gious presuppositions in their writings. Even so, while these problems with
Barber’s arguments raise questions about the nature and value of his analy-
sis, they also direct our attention to broader questions about the role of
Christianity in relation to contemporary Western societies.
Suicidal society
If the contemporary resurgence of religion can be seen as an attempt to

recover ‘a sacred foundation for the ordering of society’ (Huntington, 1996:
96; Kepel, 1994: 2), then, for the West, this recovery necessitates an engage-
ment with its Christian legacy. In this regard, it is worth noting that Payne’s
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(2003) use of Huntington’s clash of civilisations thesis to elucidate the com-

plex role of Orthodox Christianity in Greek society, and the tensions
between Orthodox theology and European notions of Human Rights that
arise out of Catholic and Protestant traditions, suggests the continuing vital-
ity of this ‘sacred foundation’, in certain societies at least. Similarly, numer-
ous studies such as that of Wanner (2003) testify to the growing importance
of revitalised forms of Christianity in Eastern Europe. Nevertheless, think-
ing principally of the USA and Western Europe, Huntington’s book con-
cludes with a vision of a ‘suicidal’ Western civilisation, despite the more
optimistic tone of some of his statements elsewhere. Here, it should be
noted that the continuing strength of American forms of Christianity in pri-
vate and public life suggests limits to such claims with regard to the USA
(see Warner, 1993; Casanova, 1994), though the greater strength of self-con-
sciously ‘secular’ perspectives within Western Europe, which often align
themselves with ‘multicultural’ repudiations of the West’s religious heritage,
underlines the suggestiveness of Huntington’s analysis. Here, echoing
Durkheim’s (1995: 315) account of how societies die when the beliefs, tra-
ditions and aspirations of the collectivity are no longer felt by individuals, he
discusses the decline of civilisations in similar terms, and raises questions
about the West’s will to renew itself (Huntington, 1996: 303).
Virilio’s (2002) post-September 11th critique of Western societies, while
arising out of a very different tradition of thought to that of Huntington,
offers a complementary, though even harsher, assessment of the ‘suicidal’
state of Western civilisation. For Virilio (2002: 10), the history of the mod-
ern West can be read as a striving to be ‘rid of God’, though this is not an
argument about ‘secularisation’. Indeed, within his Catholic perspective, this
striving has been a key aspect of certain forms of Protestantism, such as
Calvinism, where the doctrine of predestination and an iconoclastic suspi-
cion of human embodiment encouraged a broader, nihilistic ‘hatred of mat-
ter’ (Virilio, 2002: 11–12). It is in the modern ‘techno-scientific
imagination’, however, that this striving reaches its most extreme, ‘Satanic’,
form since humanity becomes enslaved to the pursuit of an immortality,
beyond good and evil, that ultimately results in the elimination of the
human (Virilio, 2002: 16, 19, 28). Consequently, for him, the suicidal
nihilism of the Islamic terrorists on September 11th has to be placed along-
side the suicidal ‘techno-scientific mysticism’ of the West (Virilio, 2002: 37).
Indeed, he interprets the September 11th attacks as Satanic, precisely
because the ‘rich Muslim students, military men and technicians’ involved
in these terrorist acts had fallen ‘inadvertently into the biblical company of
Lucifer’ through their acceptance of the promise of modern techno-scien-
tific progress emanating from the West (2002: 66). While these arguments
have a characteristically apocalyptic tone, Zizek’s (2002) more measured
assessment of the same events has some similar features.
Along with Virilio, Zizek (2002: 40) identifies a nihilistic tendency
within the West as well as among the Islamic terrorists, which he associates
with Nietzsche’s account of ‘passive’ and ‘active’ forms of nihilism respec-
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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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Western societies, and an expressed desire to move towards some sort of

‘post-national, multicultural polity’ (Werbner, 2003; see Commission,
2000). A key feature of ‘multiculturalism’ in this sense is the philosophical
and political disaggregation of social totalities into a multiplicity of differ-
ences: thus, the identification ‘American’, for example, has to be prefaced by
some disaggregating signifier relating to race, gender, sexuality and so forth
(Zaretsky, 1995: 244).
Yet, as Zizek (2002: 64–6) argues, this concern for differences operates,
paradoxically, as a hegemonic ideology, where ‘Hollywood meets the most
radical postcolonial critique of ideological universality’ in their common
advocacy of ‘an infinite task of translation, a constant reworking of one’s
own position’ that reduces the attempt to grasp universality into an ulti-
mately solipsistic ‘respect for Otherness’. Here, the advocacy of multicul-
turalism effectively denies the reality of society and the reality of a common
humanity, thereby frustrating the possibility of real religious, moral and
political critique. In this respect, it is worth recalling that Braidotti’s (1994
12–13) ‘nomadism’, discussed in Chapter 2, places a very strong emphasis
upon the importance of multiculturalism within particular societies, and
even within the self, rather than simply across different types of society (see
also Minh-ha, 1989), but does so within a philosophical system that
‘despises mainstream communication’ and ‘common sense’, and endorses a
highly subjectivist account of what constitutes culture and society
(Braidotti, 1994: 16). For Zizek (2002: 78), such postmodern relativisations
of any notion of truth grounded in the reality of humanity and society not
only constitute an essentially reactionary retreat from real engagement with
the world into a comfortable subjectivism, but also exhibit a deception : the
multiculturalist ‘respect for Otherness’ conceals an inability to engage with
others as they really are. For Zizek (2002: 90), it is this deception that
explains the liberal endorsement of ‘moderate’ Islam against its ‘fundamen-
talist’ forms: it is ‘the tolerant liberal version of the “war on terrorism” which
ultimately wants to save Muslims themselves from the fundamentalist
threat’.
Zizek’s reassertion of the reality of humanity and society in order to
develop a satisfactory critique of contemporary social and cultural forms has
been echoed in other writings emanating from the Marxist tradition of social
theory. Michael Burawoy’s (2003: 193) combination of Gramsci’s theory of
‘civil society’ and Polanyi’s Christian socialist critique of economic reduc-
tionism, for example, argues that a satisfactory form of social theory must
‘give pride of place to society alongside but distinct from state and econ-
omy’. What is notable about Burawoy’s arguments is that, although they are
framed in the terms of a ‘Sociological Marxism’, they draw upon those
aspects of Gramsci’s and Polanyi’s work that are most suggestive of a
Durkheimian influence. It has been noted before that Gramsci’s ‘hegemony’
resonates with Durkheim’s ‘collective conscience’, and Weber’s concern
with the social ethics of religions, in making sense of both the ‘spontaneous’,
‘religious’ consent of the masses to the prevailing social order, and the gen-
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eration of social and moral solidarity (Lockwood, 1992: 325). Burawoy

(2003: 219) builds on this, and Polanyi’s concern with the reaction of soci-
ety to market forces, to argue that classical Marxism was too focused on the
functioning of states to appreciate the crucial role of society in providing a
substratum of beliefs, values, ideas and orientations that can endorse or chal-
lenge particular state forms. What Burawoy neglects, however, is the reli-
gious dimensions of Polanyi’s arguments. In contrast, Zizek’s reassertion of
the reality of humanity and society against postmodern relativism follows
Polanyi in taking an explicitly Christian form.
Charitable society
Zizek’s (2000) The Fragile Absolute is a Marxist defence of the West’s

‘Christian legacy’. For him, the ‘return of the religious dimension’ in much
contemporary social and cultural life is, in many respects, deplorable
because it is manifest, in the West, as an obscurantist postmodern ‘spiritual-
ism’ that dissolves social reality into a multiplicity of meaningless flows (see
Heelas, 1996). In contrast, what he finds in Christianity, uniquely among all
religious forms, is a belief that ‘the temporal Event of Incarnation is the only
path to eternal truth and salvation. In this precise sense, Christianity is a
“religion of Love”: in love, one singles out, focuses on, a temporal object
which “means more than anything else”’ (Zizek, 2000: 96). Here, for Zizek,
the struggle to grasp objective meaning in a world of particularity and dif-
ference becomes the most pressing religious demand placed upon individu-
als and societies: contrary to postmodern theory, people cannot be reduced
into symbolic codifications of ‘Otherness’ which offer opportunities for self-
realisation, but are real, unavoidable neighbours whose very particularity
confronts the individual with universal demands and obligations that cannot
be ignored (Zizek, 2000: 109). This is why, for him, a proper engagement
with the nature of society in the contemporary Western world necessarily
involves an engagement with its Christian legacy. In this regard, it is notable
that, in reference to Saint Paul, Zizek (2000: 145–6) recalls the fundamen-
tal principle of charity that, as I discussed in Chapter 5, provided the reli-
gious basis for medieval conceptions of social life that have cast their
shadow over Western views of society ever since.6
It has already been noted that, historically, the highest Christian calling
has been the nurturing of the ‘social miracle’, where salvation and social sol-
idarity were inseparably linked (Bossy, 1985: 57), and that contemporary
theology’s greatest challenge can still be found in the illumination of ulti-
mate truth through the emergent convictions and experiences arising from
‘the social sub-structure of knowledge’ (Torrance, 1985: 112). Zizek’s invo-
cation of charity as the social and religious medium through which particu-
larity and universality are reconciled not only points to the continuing
vitality of this religious tradition of thought, even in the unlikely setting of
cultural studies, but also touches upon a number of important considera-
tions regarding some of the conflicts, divisions and problems surrounding
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Western societies that are of broader social and sociological significance.

Above all, it suggests that there are three identifiable routes through con-
temporary social and cultural complexity, and that only one of them builds
on the humane values inherent to the West’s religious and moral legacy. In
terms of the ‘clash of civilisations’, the first of these routes involves identi-
fying Islam as the ‘enemy’ of Western civilisation, and preparing for the state
of ‘total war’ envisaged by Virilio (2002: 82); the second, indicative of the
‘passive nihilism’ discussed by Zizek (2002: 40), involves the relativisation
of real religious, moral and political problems within a vacuous multicultur-
alist ideology; the third route, however, engages directly with the West’s
religious legacy and endorses neither nihilism nor a false utopianism. On
this route, moral obligations towards others are recognised as the founda-
tions of all human social relationships, and these are understood to be as
unavoidable as they are beyond deconstruction. Such a route does not, of
course, have anything to do with naïve assumptions about the goodwill of
others: the letter of Saint Paul to which Zizek refers was written when
Christians faced persecution and death. In this respect, the manifest jubila-
tion amongst many Muslims after September 11th cannot be taken lightly
(Barber, 2001: xv). Nevertheless, within this tradition, the obligation to
behave with charity towards others remains inviolable even if others do not
recognise it.
Zizek’s invocation of charity is also significant, however, with regard to
those forces within Western societies that seek to deny the reality of society,
whether this is done on the basis of an economistic individualism or the
foundationless constructionism of postmodern philosophy. As I have sug-
gested at a number of points throughout this study, social and cultural the-
ories offering post-societal or post-social visions of the contemporary world
tend, despite their philosophical differences in other respects, to reinforce
the nominalist view of society promoted by neo-classical economic theory
and those sociological forms of sociology influenced by them. In Polanyi’s
terms, they endorse a ‘liberal’ philosophical view of social reality that denies
its sui generis aspects, which helps explain why both post-societal sociology
(Urry, 2000) and rational choice theory (Stark and Bainbridge, 1985, 1987)
tend to define themselves against the sociological realism of Durkheimian
theory. Such theories and philosophies do not exist in a social vacuum, how-
ever. On the contrary, they have arisen within a broader ‘pattern of derision
and contempt for dependence’ that directly confronts the religious under-
pinnings of Western civilisation (Bauman, 2001: 72). Here, the biblical
injunction to be ‘my brother’s keeper’, which confronts humanity with the
ontological fact of mutual dependence, and forms the basis of the Western
moral tradition, is not only ignored but actively dismissed as states cut back
welfare provision and put more and more areas of social life at the mercy of
‘markets’ of one sort or another (Bauman, 2001: 72).
While Bauman (2001: 80) argues that this biblical injunction manifests
the human quality of a society and the measure of its ethical standard, many
contemporary social and cultural theories elect to follow one of the two
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routes through contemporary complexity that seek to abandon the West’s

religious legacy. Thus, mirroring the nihilistic vision of a ‘total war’ between
civilisations, some forms of social theory (such as rational choice based
approaches) offer a Hobbesian vision of social life as a mass of competing
self-interests forever on the brink of a war of all against all. On the other
hand, mirroring the ‘passive nihilism’ of multiculturalism, social theories
influenced by postmodern philosophy abandon the engagement with social
reality for what is often a highly subjectivised exploration of notions such as
‘hybridity’, ‘nomadism’, or différance. As Zizek (2002: 86) has suggested,
however, social reality does not disappear just because postmodern sociolo-
gists no longer know what it is: on the contrary, it just continues on its
course, often throwing up challenges and dangers that necessitate careful,
considered thought. It might be said, indeed, that the whole ‘clash of civili-
sations’ problem appeared while many sociologists were just not paying
attention to social reality. Even after September 11th, however, Touraine
(2003), for example, persists in his attempts to redefine sociology as the
study of the absence of society, the disappearance of social actors, and the
destruction of social bonds. While this sort of disciplinary development is
not unique – the emergence of forms of ‘negative theology’ focused on the
‘death of God’ prefigure it – it is not only bizarre but, as Bauman’s focus on
moral obligation implies, irresponsible.
Discussing the ethical theories of Levinas (1974) and Løgstrup (1997),
Bauman (2001: 171, emphasis in original) emphasises that both of them
‘posit responsibility as the never ending, eternal human condition’, and the
fact that this ethical demand is a pre-rational presence in our social rela-
tions, forever demanding that ‘the word is made flesh’. In Bauman’s case, it
is the presence of this ethical demand that ensures his sociological work has
a persistent moral dimension, that underpins his case for a ‘sociology of
postmodernism’ rather than a ‘postmodern sociology’, and that means his
account of ‘society under siege’ is a critique rather than a celebration
(Bauman, 1992a, 2002).
In this regard, Zizek’s (2000) suggestion that charity acts as the social
and religious medium through which particularity and universality can be
reconciled and Michael Walzer’s (1994: 1–11) argument that human soci-
ety ‘is universal because it is human, particular because it is society’ have
much in common with Bauman’s moral vision of sociology. What both
Zizek and Walzer are keen to emphasise is that there are certain universal
aspects of the human condition, and that there are certain universal moral
obligations inseparable from these, though they cannot be apprehended
apart from their particular societal contexts. Huntington (1996: 318) uses
Walzer’s argument to support his case for an approach to international pol-
itics that seeks to recognise commonalities, accept diversity and renounce
universalism. Zizek’s approach has much in common with this but, like that
of Bauman (2001), demands more: in this approach the universal religious
and moral obligations that emerge from, and have to be exercised within,
the particularity of human social relationships mean that a sensitivity to
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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).
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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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Conclusion
Many of these approaches, however, seem to presuppose that humanity and

society are infinitely malleable forms subject to endless reconstruction.
Consequently, they tend to exaggerate the world reconstructing power of
particular types of phenomena, allowing the notion of society to disappear
into informational flows or global markets, depending upon which authors
we read.
What the complexity theories developed in the natural sciences have
emphasised, however, is that reality has to be apprehended as ‘interconnected
wholeness’ characterised by specific ontological features (Adam, 1990: 59).
By analogy, the evident partiality characteristic of some contemporary social
theories can only be overcome by appreciating that society is also a complex
totality, possessing specific ontological characteristics emergent from the
embodied human beings who constitute it. This is important, because with-
out sufficient attentiveness to the ontological dimensions of society as a com-
plex reality, social theorists can find themselves being lured into making all
sorts of extreme, and often highly implausible, claims about the contempo-
rary world. Within some social theories, for example, a wholly unconstrained
excitement nurtured by some technological developments leads to visions of
the ‘disappearance’ of society, humanity and religion that look more like sci-
ence fiction than sociological analysis. A prime example of this type of thing
is provided by Baudrillard (1988a: 51), who claims that ‘for mutants there
can no longer be any Last Judgement … for what body will one resurrect?’
(see Gane, 2003: 161). Within contemporary social and cultural theory, how-
ever, Baudrillard’s claim is by no means an eccentric one.
Urry’s (2000: 77–8) rejection of a ‘species-specific’ model of sociology in
favour of focus on various human/technological ‘hybrids’, and Haraway’s
(1991) interest in ‘cyborg cultures’, for example, complement Baudrillard’s
vision of our ‘mutant’ present. In this regard, it is worth noting that Urry’s
model allows him to see religious organisations such as Al-Qaida as ‘mutant’
forms constituted through technological flows and networks (Urry, 2003:
132). The problem with such views, aside from the fact that moral questions
about killing people for religious reasons are obscured by the language of
science fiction, is that they not only ignore the degree to which many con-
temporary social forms can depend upon beliefs, practices and traditions
that have deep roots in the longue durée of human history, even if they cur-
rently express themselves, in part, through electronic communications
media, but also that they fail to account satisfactorily for those sensual, emo-
tional, cognitive and moral capacities that ensure our social reality is indeed
a ‘species-specific’ phenomenon, characteristically constituted in the aware-
ness of our own mortality (Bauman, 1992b). Consequently, it is hardly sur-
prising that writers such as Castells (1998), who appears to believe that
humans can be reconfigured like computers, can regard Christianity as a
bizarre relic of an entirely different world, while others can view Al-Qaida
as a ‘virtual community’, putting it on a par with New Age newsgroups and
other manifestations of postmodern lifestyle choices mediated through the
Internet (Urry, 2000: 43, 209; Barber, 1995; Rose, 1996).
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In view of such arguments, it is hardly a surprise that some have claimed

‘social theory has failed intellectually’, or that they have accused it of pro-
moting a ‘culture of the ephemeral’ in sociology, since a ‘portentous vocab-
ulary’ cannot, in the long run, conceal the lack of a proper engagement with
reality (Abell and Reyniers, 2000). To counter such charges against social
theory, and to build a more satisfactory account of the ontological dimen-
sions of society as a complex reality, a crucial starting point must be a proper
engagement with the real human beings who constitute society. Further to
this, as I discussed in Chapter 3, it is important to recognise that society is a
contingent reality, dependent for its emergence upon the embodied poten-
tialities and powers of human beings. In this regard, one of the most diffi-
cult tasks confronting social theory is the problem of how to make sense of
some of the most elementary capacities and forces that enable societies to
develop and be maintained. Abell and Reyniers (2000: 749), in an attempt
to eliminate the ‘banalities and truisms’ that they believe mark contempo-
rary social theory, argue for the importance of ‘technical expertise’ in the
development of sociological theories, criticising those who have sought ‘to
construct social theory largely in an “arts” framework as a non-technical
endeavour’. None the less, when we are dealing with human beings (and
society is a human reality) the limitations of such views are all too apparent:
the frailties endemic to human life, the reflexive and practical engagement
with lived experience, the emotional and moral responses stimulated by
inter-relationships, and the contagious circulation of religious forces all tes-
tify to a dynamic aspect to social life that cannot be contained within a nar-
rowly ‘technical’ discourse.
Following Durkheim, I have suggested that reflection upon the con-
tingent character of society illuminates its ‘hyper-spiritual’ aspects, and
the fact that it is possessed of an open-ended, transcendent dimension
that necessarily gives rise to emergent religious forms. To some, of course,
the notion of ‘hyper-spirituality’ might, just as much as Castells’s (2000)
talk of ‘timeless time’ and the ‘space of flows’, suggest a ‘portentous
vocabulary’ divorced from the ‘technical issues’ that should be central to
sociological theory. As I have argued, however, sociology has a long his-
tory of recognising, and trying to make sense of, some sort of holistic sub-
stratum of social energies or forces that underpins a society’s more
institutionalised dimensions. Here, it is important to stress that not every-
thing in society is immediately available for empirical scrutiny, particu-
larly with regard to the ‘enhancement of being’ that emerges from our
social relationships (Freitag, 2002). The notion of hyper-spirituality, how-
ever, goes some way towards accounting for the power of societies to
shape human thought and experience, especially in relation to their
capacities for directing human consciousness beyond empirical factors
towards a fuller grasp of the ontological strata within which individuals
and communities make sense of themselves and the world. Rowan
Williams’s (2000: 59) exploration of the theological possibilities inherent
within such a pre-contractual, collective way of being helps illuminate
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Conclusion
the suggestiveness of this notion for understanding how life in society

qualitatively transforms human individuals.
The notion of hyper-spirituality therefore points towards the elementary
social, and sociological, significance of religion as a collective engagement
with the possibilities of transcendence emergent from the potentialities and
limitations of embodied human life, though I have stressed that it is impor-
tant to see religion as an emergent but irreducible phenomenon if we are to
appreciate its immense power over the development of individuals and soci-
eties. Archer (2000: 185–6) captures the essence of this particular relation-
ship between emergence and irreducibility when she stresses the embodied
basis for the development of particular forms of knowledge and experience,
before going on to discuss Christianity as a total way of life that radically
transforms belief and action. In the writings of Mauss (1969, 1973) and
Gurvitch (1964, 1971) the interest in society as a ‘total’ phenomenon illu-
minates further the complex intertwining of religious elements within a
broad range of social and cultural phenomena. Further to this, the notion of
hyper-spirituality helps reveal the limitations of those theoretical
approaches that, even if they do not ignore religion completely, treat it as
an epiphenomenon of economic, political or technological forces: it might
be said, in fact, that such approaches fail to appreciate the full implications
of the fact that society is of human constitution.
Consequently, reflection upon the contingency of society, rather than rein-
forcing some contemporary social constructionist views of the arbitrariness
and relativity of particular societal forms, strongly endorses the view that soci-
eties have some irreducible characteristics of fundamental sociological signifi-
cance. In this regard, the discussion of the necessary dimensions of society,
offered in Chapter 4, further refuted the constructionist view of social reality
and dealt with the ‘vexatious’ character of society directly. Here, it was
emphasised that taboos and other rituals of inclusion and exclusion direct the
sociological imagination towards obligatory aspects of society and their inti-
mate relationship with forms of social solidarity. More broadly, however, the
arguments of Mauss, Bataille and Polanyi were considered as key resources for
illuminating how even the most radical economic transformations of the mod-
ern world have to be assessed in relation to the hyper-spiritual and religious
aspects of society. Further to this, some of the ambiguous characteristics of
society were emphasised, including the possibility of authoritarian reassertions
of social reality against market forces. In the light of these arguments, the idea
that contemporary individuals are free of obligations, rules and traditions can
be exposed as a fantasy; on the contrary, since social realities have what Mauss
called a ‘total’ character, they offer all sorts of possibilities for human poten-
tialities to flourish but also impose constraints and obligations upon people
that we ignore at our peril. In this chapter it was argued, for example, that the
development of fascism and communism in the early twentieth century, and
the appearance of violent anti-globalisation movements at that century’s end,
could all be interpreted as reassertions of society against utilitarian and indi-
vidualistic currents that sought to undermine its reality.
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Sociological accounts of the endless choices and possibilities open to

contemporary individuals, however, which focus on ‘disembedding mecha-
nisms’, and underplay, if not ignore, the degree to which individuals remain
embedded in society in other ways, tend to operate with a ‘discontinuist’
view of history (Giddens, 1990). In their extreme forms, statements con-
cerning the development of ‘high modernity’, or even the appearance of a
‘postmodern’ era, can look relatively modest and understated alongside
more radical sociological accounts of the contemporary post-societal, post-
human and post-representational condition, where the announcement of
the ‘end of history’ is trumped by altogether more ambitious claims about
the ‘end of time’. The appeal of such views is not hard to grasp. While
Giddens’s (1990, 1991a) own view of history is open to question, he is
surely correct to identify a modern tendency to imagine that all links with
the past have been deconstructed and that we live in an era of radical, all-
pervasive change. It is this tendency that informs the desire to construct
post-societal and post-social models of sociology, and that ensures classical
theorists such as Durkheim must be thrown overboard as we set sail across
global information flows towards our post-human future: the basic assump-
tion is that he was writing a century ago, so how could he possibly have any-
thing to say of relevance to the contemporary world, since everything has
changed so radically?
Contrary to such views, a central argument of this book has been that
societies must be understood as phenomena that develop across the
longue durée of human history. In Chapter 5, focused on the temporal
dimensions of society, the value of a social realist view of time was
emphasised: here, it was argued that the irreversible temporal pattern of
emergent social forms constitutes the reality within which humans exer-
cise their agency. Consequently, and against the grain of social theories
focused on notions of ‘instantaneous’ or ‘timeless’ time, I sought to estab-
lish the continuing importance of the fact that, across the longue durée of
Western history, Christian theological perspectives have had an immense
influence on the constitution of societies, even if their modern influence
has often been obscured by the apparently ‘secular’ characteristics of
Western societies. This claim was supported with regard to medieval
visions of temporal and spiritual realities, the hardening up of these in the
post-Reformation separation of religion and society, the emergence of
social contract theories that elaborated upon this separation or sought to
overcome it, and the subsequent incorporation of these concerns into
classical and contemporary forms of sociology. A key idea emphasised
here was that while Western societies became ‘post-Christendom’ soci-
eties, in the sense that the collective constitution of social life was
divested of its explicitly theological character, they never became fully
‘post-Christian’: indeed, it is possible to see Western ‘modernity’ as the
creation of Christianity rather than its secular aftermath (Bossy, 1985;
Taylor, 1989; Ozment, 1992; Kumar, 1995; Siedentop, 2000). From this
point of view, divergent patterns of sociological interpretation in
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Conclusion
German, French and American traditions of thought can all be read as

attempts to grapple with problems inherited from Christianity, ranging
from a ‘Protestant’ focus on self-directing subjects constituting social
orders through contracts to ‘Catholic’ accounts of the ‘general will’, ‘gen-
eral spirit’ and the positive polity.
Building upon these arguments, the focus on the tacit dimensions of soci-
ety in Chapter 6 offered an opportunity to illuminate the continuing signif-
icance of covert Christian influences upon Western societies. Through
Michael Polanyi’s (1967) notion of a ‘tacit dimension’ in society, and the
theory of collective representations developed by Durkheim and others, this
chapter examined the powerful role of Christianity in the constitution of
forms of collective consciousness that are sometimes so fundamental they
are simply taken for granted rather than being objects of reflexive scrutiny
and critique. In this regard, some of the structures of, and values we place
upon, everyday life, together with the division of social life into ‘public’ and
‘private’ realms, and the location of Islamic societies within Western pat-
terns of representation, can all be read as examples of how a tacitly religious
structuring of collective consciousness is evident within various strata of
social reality. With regard to Rawls and Habermas, for example, it was
argued that the stress on the need for religious commitments to be ‘trans-
lated’ into forms of ‘public reason’ or ‘communicative rationality’ conceals
the fact that a prior translation has already taken place: the constitution of
‘secular’ forms of reason or rationality reflects the influence of specifically
Protestant conceptions of the possibility of a religiously ‘neutral’ social
space; conceptions central to those Christians who helped frame the First
Amendment to the American Constitution (O’Donovan, 1999: 245).
Waldron’s (2002: 238–9) comparison of Rawls and Locke is important,
however, for drawing out some of the implications of the contemporary
tendency to obscure, or deny, the specifically Christian foundations of many
Western ways of thinking about the world and ourselves. As Waldron sug-
gests, Rawls, like Locke, offers a political vision that rests on certain assump-
tions about equality and the fact that human persons are free agents
possessing specific moral powers. For Locke, however, these assumptions are
grounded in a firm belief in God and, consequently, political order has, ulti-
mately, to reflect an underlying sense of religious order. For Rawls, on the
other hand, the equality and moral powers of human beings are simply self-
evident components of a general consensus regardless of particular religious
viewpoints (which should be kept out of public life anyway). The weakness
of this position is evident in the fact that many Nietzscheans, for example,
would have told Rawls that ‘all this moralistic talk of agency and moral per-
sonality was redundant and reducible nonsense’ (Waldron, 2002: 239). In
short, many people would not share his assumptions about human nature.
To go further, however, it could be said that Rawls’s assumptions are not
self-evident at all, but depend upon a Christian theology he rejects. Because
of this rejection, furthermore, a satisfactory defence of notions of equality
and freedom could be compromised. Karl Polanyi’s (2001: 268) account of
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how fascism negated Christian anthropology, and thereby obliterated free-

dom and democracy, is instructive in this regard.
For those theorists who adopt a more relativistic position than Rawls,
however, there are also some potentially troubling aspects. In this regard, it
is worth noting Nigel Biggar’s (1997: 137) comments on the moral irre-
sponsibility of those intellectuals who have used the individual freedoms
nurtured by Christianity to espouse a value relativism that could ultimately
deny these freedoms to others. Wildly overstated claims about the ‘multi-
cultural’ nature of contemporary Western societies exacerbate these dan-
gers, since these too suggest a highly selective engagement with the religious
influences upon society. Similar things, though, can be said about those bold
contemporary assertions concerning the ‘breakdown of the social bond’ and
the appearance of a ‘post-representational’ world where social life is
reduced to the computational problem of ‘making sense of the information’
(Lash and Featherstone, 2001). Not only do writers such as Bataille and
Zizek, who have been called upon to endorse these views, strongly oppose
such forms of reductionism, but they are, again, manifestly selective in their
assessment of current trends. This is not to deny that some of the de-human-
ising processes discussed by such writers are taking place, only to emphasise
that they have to be seen in a broader context. In fact, as de Certeau (1984),
Maffesoli (1996) and Augé (1992), amongst others, have suggested, people
are remarkably resistant to such trends in terms of their capacities for the
domestication and subversion of economically or technologically driven
projects for social purposes. Even Touraine (2003: 127–9), while asserting
that the ‘logic of the market’ is now the ‘non-existent social order’, never-
theless notes the existence of a ‘heterogeneous set of unfinished, local,
barely institutionalised reconstructions of what is usually referred to as the
social bond’.
These phenomena are not only evident at local levels, either: as Rumford
(2003) has outlined, there is increasing interest amongst many sectors of the
European population in the emergence of a new European society, for
example, distinct from the political and economic institutions of the
European Union. In this regard, it is again important to note that this
resilience of society is matched by the persistence of those religious factors
largely ignored by post-societal theorists. Although, in drawing up a draft
Constitution for the EU in 2003, after much debate, all references to ‘God’
and ‘Christianity’ were excluded, with only a more general reference to
Europe’s ‘religious history’ included in the text, it is clear that the EU’s
Christian dimensions remain significant. In a manner not dissimilar to the
construction of the US Constitution, the apparent secularity of the EU
Constitution not only ignores the fact that the whole idea of ‘Europe’ is of
Christian origin (Rémond, 1999: 109), but also that most of the major fig-
ures involved in the construction of the EU have been devoted Catholics
(Hastings, 1997: 122). Here, then, although the Christian sources of an
emerging trans-national form of society have been partially obscured, is fur-
ther evidence that sociological denials of the reality of society and the con-
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Conclusion
temporary significance of religion can be overstated (Siedentop, 2000).

Religion, like society, has ‘vexatious’ characteristics: although of human
constitution, it has sui generis characteristics that ensure its resistance to
those attempts by modern individuals to reflexively reconstruct it in the
manner outlined by Giddens (1990), and that severely constrain the
attempts of multi-national corporations to harness religious dynamics for
commercial gain (Ritzer, 1999). Taken together, in fact, religion and society
remain ‘vexatious’ for contemporary sociology precisely because they will
not vanish into those global flows, aggregate outcomes or reflexively con-
structed lifestyle options that so beguile contemporary theorists. On the
contrary, because they are emergent from embodied human potentialities
and characteristics, they are unavoidable features of human life, and, by
implication, should remain central features of sociological study. None the
less, while my arguments in this respect have been developed on the basis
of a critical discussion of Durkheim’s understanding of society, and through
a development of his view of the significance of the general, sui generis
dimensions of social reality, my concern with divergent patterns of religious
development has signalled a departure from his view that all religions ‘fulfil
the same needs, play the same role, and proceed from the same causes’
(Durkheim, 1995: 3). This departure allowed for an appreciation of the his-
torical and contemporary significance of specifically Christian influences
upon Western societies, but it also facilitated a fresh assessment of the
notion of the ‘clash of civilisations’ thesis offered by Huntington (1996).
In Chapter 7, the discussion was centred upon how this notion of a ‘clash
of civilisations’ can help illuminate the fact that, rather than disappearing,
society is actually a resurgent phenomenon. This chapter offered three main
arguments. First, it was argued that, rather than accepting current impres-
sions of a state of ‘global disorder’, an engagement with this notion reveals
how it is sociologically important to recognise the contemporary existence
of distinct ‘civilisations’ in the world, but that these must be understood as
phenomena that emerge from societies and are embedded in them. Further
to this, and building upon the arguments about the hyper-spiritual dimen-
sions of society discussed in earlier chapters, it was argued that civilisations
develop specific characters through the influence of their religious sub-
strata. Second, it was argued that the global resurgence of Islam could be
understood as a resurgence of society, rather than some sort of ‘fundamen-
talist’ rejection of modernity. Here, it was suggested that Durkheim’s (1995)
view of the ambiguous aspects of the sacred and society, and Karl Polanyi’s
(2001) arguments concerning the fact that society can forcibly reassert itself
as a reality in the face of market forces, could help throw fresh light upon
the Islamic resurgence. Third, it was argued that this resurgence, since it
raises questions about the religious foundations of different types of society,
provides a further stimulus to the reassessment of the Christian legacy for
Western societies. In this respect, it was suggested that the arguments of
Virilio (2002) and Zizek (2000, 2002) are particularly significant.
In the course of this discussion, some of the problems relating to
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Huntington’s (1996: 258) emphasis on a general ‘Muslim propensity toward

violent conflict’ were noted, but it was also suggested that he raises legiti-
mate questions about the degree to which different religious forms endorse
different types of social action, particularly with regard to the huge differ-
ences between the Qur’an and the New Testament in this respect. What was
also noted, however, was that sociological reflections upon the terrorist
attacks on the Twin Towers on September 11th, 2001 studiously avoided
such questions, preferring to endorse Barber’s (2001: xv) bland generalisa-
tions about the essentially peaceful nature of all religions but for a few ‘fun-
damentalists’, or to offer economically reductionist arguments that failed to
even raise the question of why Buddhist, Sikh or Hindu responses to the
social fragmentation wrought by ‘McWorld’ have been so different from
those in parts of the Islamic world. Here, the failure to take religion seriously
as an elementary feature of societies as emergent human realities offers lit-
tle hope for a satisfactory analysis of some of the conflicts shaping the world
today, and certainly can offer little in the way of a constructive response to
these. Indeed, Barber’s (1995: 172) dislocation of the concept of jihad from
its Islamic context, and its application to phenomena such as the revival of
folk music in Brittany, not only trivialises religion sociologically, it is also
morally questionable: given that sociologists participate in the social reali-
ties they analyse, they have a responsibility, as Durkheim understood, not to
shy away from difficult questions and problems but to confront them
directly and seek to make a positive contribution to their resolution. An
inability to recognise that there is a fundamental difference between a fond-
ness for traditional bagpipes and a religious injunction to ‘slay the idolaters
wherever you find them’ (Sura 9: 5; see also Sura 4: 90) would not live up
to Durkheim’s vision of the sociological vocation.
In contrast, I have argued that 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 is of immense sociological value,
as well as being reflective of his theological commitments. Drawing upon
Nietzsche’s account of ‘passive’ and ‘active’ forms of nihilism, Zizek (2002:
40, 64–5) identifies a dangerous inability to deal with social reality evident
in the relativism and solipsism that mark much of the contemporary world.
His reassessment of the Christian legacy for Western societies, however,
recognises that a proper engagement with real particularity and difference
must build on the resources and traditions characteristic of the specific his-
torical contexts out of which they emerge. Here, rather than identifying
Islam as the ‘enemy’ of Western civilisation, and preparing for the state of
‘total war’ envisaged by Virilio (2002: 82), or endorsing the relativisation of
real religious, moral and political problems through a vacuous form of mul-
ticulturalist ideology, it is accepted that moral obligations towards others are
the foundations of all social relationships, and that these are as unavoidable
as they are beyond deconstruction. This understanding of what living in
society is all about explicitly invokes the ‘social miracle’ of Christendom
(Bossy, 1985), but it also returns us to Durkheim’s (1973) vision of society
190
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Conclusion
as a moral and a religious phenomenon, wherein the demands of solidarity

force us to transcend the temptations of egoism and utilitarianism. As such,
it is consistent with Durkheim’s social realism, and with his account of the
moral obligations incumbent upon the social analyst.
This account is, of course, markedly in contrast to the acquiescent ‘post-
societal’ endorsement of economic and technological forces geared towards
the ‘hollowing out’ of the religious, moral and human dimensions of soci-
eties. Touraine (2003: 125), for example, makes the case that ‘Over the past
few decades, the key to understanding the evolution of sociology has been
the desire, whether explicit or not, to destroy the idea of society’, but he
offers little in the way of questions about the plausibility or desirability of
this pattern of sociological evolution; on the contrary, he goes on to argue
that, in consequence, we must develop a form of sociology focused on the
‘disappearance of social actors’ and the ‘non-existence’ of society. This serves
as a de facto endorsement of some of the forces that undoubtedly impover-
ish humanity’s contemporary social experience, and that seek to minimise
the significance of societies in terms of the sustenance of common obliga-
tions, values and meanings. As Bauman’s (2001, 2002) recent studies of
‘society under siege’ emphasise, these forces are significant and need to be
taken seriously in the sociological analysis of society. They do not represent
all that societies are, however, let alone all that they could be, and certainly
cannot constitute benchmarks for satisfactory models of sociological analy-
sis. Zizek’s emphasis on the importance of charity, however, can usefully be
held up as a reminder to sociologists that the analysis of society involves the
engagement with human potentialities and characteristics, and with those
emergent forms that simultaneously constrain human beings and allow
them to flourish.
In this book, it has been emphasised that society is an emergent reality,
contingent upon the embodied dispositions and potentialities of human
beings, and characterised by a substratum of hyper-spiritual forces that facil-
itate the emergence of religious forms manifesting divergent conceptions of
the ‘transcendental conditions of human togetherness’ (Hertz, 1983: 87;
Bauman, 2002: 53–4). None of these different elements can be explained
away with reference to market forces, technological developments, or the
language games of cultural theory; on the contrary, they are real phenomena
and making sense of them is located at the heart of what Durkheim termed
‘the serious life’. If sociology is to remain, as Durkheim intended, a serious
attempt to make sense of the social and cultural processes through which
human reality is constituted, then it cannot push aside such considerations,
as other ‘classical’ sociologists also understood. Consequently, before we set
about writing ‘new rules of sociological method’ to mark the arrival of yet
another new epoch, we should recognise that we can gain a great deal from
a creative re-engagement with the old ones. Until that has been done, or
until postmodern fantasies of a post-human world become a reality, which
does not, as yet, look very likely, then sociology should remain ‘the study of
society’ and religious issues should constitute one of its key areas of concern.
191
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Index
accursed society 97–100 Bhaskar, R. 11–12, 13, 111

acephalous society 148–52 Biggar, Nigel 188
Adam, B. 109, 112–13 Bossy, J. 15, 77, 78, 118–20
aggregation model 124 Bourdieu, P. 23, 135, 146
Al-Qaida 35, 183 Braidotti, Rosi 31, 33, 175
altruism 103 Buddhism 75, 78, 190
Anderson, Benedict 114 Burawoy, Michael 175–6
anomie 110, 111 Byrne, David 4, 9, 49, 50, 53
anthropocentrism 13
anti-globalization 106 Caillé, A. 82
anti-utilitarianism 82 Caillois, R. 63, 65, 90
archaic societies 32–5, 93, 94, 100, 106 Calhoun, Craig 35, 36
Archer, Margaret S. 11, 53, 55, 72–4, Calvinism 173
77, 111; emergence 59–61, 185; Campbell, Colin 41
individuals 62, 99; postmodernism capitalism 98
29; rational choice 46; time 112, Capra, F. 51
113; vexatious society 182 Castells, M. 11, 12, 36–7, 112, 158–9,
Aristotle 116 183, 184
Asad, Talal 78, 154 Catholicism 71, 115, 122, 128, 173;
consumerism 41; divided society
Balthasar, H. U. von 76, 144 130; embodiment 117; individuals
Barber, Benjamin 40, 169, 171, 172, 148; revelation 75
190 Chabal, M. 105-6
Bataille, G. 23, 66–70, 89-92, 158, 188; chaos 2, 49–50, 160; contingency 53;
dynamism 63; general/restricted sacred distinction 76; tacit society
economy 83, 97–8, 99–100, 157; 137; time 112–13
sacred society 65 charitable society 176–80
Bat Ye'or 165 charity 123, 126, 190
Baudrillard, J. 28-30, 33, 48, 66, 142, choices 46, 80, 81, 186
183 Christianity 4-5, 8, 144; acephalous
Bauman, Zygmunt 7, 9–10, 43, 44–5, society 148–9; Bataille's work
48–9, 89, 105, 108, 177–8; 69–70; bias 74–5; charity 176, 179,
Aristotle 116; choices 80; con- 180, 190; Christian society
sumerism 41; everyday life 142, 144; 116–19; civilisation 163; covert
explosive sociality 104; life juices 16; persistance 133; decline 20; divided
society under siege 41–2, 191; tem- society 128–9, 130–1; economy
poral society 111–12, 113; transcen- 104; embodiment 72; enchanted
dental conditions 5 society 70–4; EU Constitution 188;
Becker, Gary 46 life after death 46; modernity 114,
Beckford, James 55 148; nations 115; ontology of frailty
Beck, U. 80, 81, 99, 102 71; Orientalism 152–4; representa-
Beckwith, S. 117 tion 159; suicidal society 173; sys-
beliefs 74–5, 78 tem constraints 15; taboo 105; tacit
believing society 74–7 dimension 23–4; temporal society
Bellah, Robert 13, 14 23, 109–10, 186–7; time 114; virt-
Bell, Daniel 35 ual community 183–4
Berger, P. L. 1, 58, 75–6, 79, 110–11, Christmas presents 95
126 civilisation 162–6, 172–3, 189
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
Index
festival 69 heterogeneity 66–70, 91, 188

Foucault, Michel 28; Bataille's work Hindu, gifts 95
66–7; Said's work 154–5; transgres- Hobbes, Thomas 57, 58, 88, 120–1, 124
sion 90 holism 4, 17, 29, 51, 61–2, 184
frail society 57–9 holistic society 138–42
free market economics 3, 82, 100, 106, Homans, George 46
170 homo duplex 17, 63, 73, 85, 93
free society 104–7 homogeneity 66–70, 91
Freud, Sigmund 43, 83 Hughes, Robert 83
Fukuyama, F. 170, 171 Huntington, Samuel P. 161, 162–71,
fundamentalism 34, 35, 43, 160, 172–3, 174, 178, 190
167–9, 174 hyperbolic doubt 30
hyper-national society 162–6
Game, A. 136, 137–8 hyper-reality 28–30, 47, 142
Gane, Mike 29, 87, 134 hyper-spirituality 4–5, 15–18, 19, 21–2,
Geertz, C. 78, 143 27, 184–5, 191; consumptive
Gehlen, A. 57–8 society 41; contingency 53; divid-
Gemeinschaft 125–6 ed society 130; economy 99–100;
general economy 97, 98–100, 157 social miracle 77; temporal society
Gesellschaft 125–6 115
Giddens, Anthony 1, 9, 27, 31, 43–4,
102, 186; agents 129; bounded sys- Iannaccone, L. R. 46
tems 14; choices 80; chronic reflex- immigration 8
ivity 112; divided society 130–1; incest taboo 83–5, 105
nation-states 7; nomadism 31; inclusive society 86–9
ontological insecurity 58; reflexivity individualised society 124–6
42–3, 80–1; social sciences 114; individuals 3–4, 61–3, 73–4, 99; choices
structuration theory 111; vexatious 80; privacy 148
society 189 information society 35, 36–7, 48
gift exchange 23, 82–3, 92–7 institutions 131
Girard, R. 88 internalisation 110
globalisation 7 Internet 11, 35, 36, 37–8, 39, 145
global networks 33, 131 Islam 20, 152, 169–72, 174, 177,
global transformation 160–2 189–90; belief 75; clash of civilisa-
Goffman, I. 143, 146 tions 163–8; complexity 35;
Gofman, A. 93 McWorld 40, 190; Orientalism
Gould, Stephen J. 53, 77 153–4; resurgence 161, 164, 171,
Gramsci, A. 175 189; September eleventh 173; vio-
Gurvitch, Georges 16, 27, 51, 138, 185 lence 164–5, 190
Islamo-fascism 171
Habermas, J. 90–1, 133, 140, 147, 152,
187; colonisation 143; public Jalal al-Azm, S. 153–4, 167
sphere 151 Jay, Nancy 88, 89, 105
habitus 146 Jenkins, T. 145–6, 179
handedness 55–6, 86–7 Jews, prohibitions 87
Haraway, D. 11, 183 jihad 35, 165, 168, 174; identity poli-
Harré, R. 58–9, 78 tics 160; McWorld 40, 169
Harvey, D. L. 50 Jones, Robert A. 127
Hastings, A. 115 Jovchelovitch, S. 140–1, 152
Hawkes, G. 89 Judaism 74–5
Hebrew Bible 87
Hegarty, P. 68, 91 Kant, I. 121, 124, 125, 151
Hegel, G. 121 Kerr, F. 76
Heidegger, M. 44, 113 King, A. 30
Hertz, R. 55–6, 57, 86–7 Kumar, K. 114
Hervieu-Léger, D. 112
213
laissez-faire economics 171 O'Donovan, Oliver 5, 8, 20, 118, 148,

language 15, 55; disembodied society 149, 150
31–2; exchange 96; Protestantism ontology 3, 11–12, 14, 19; complexity
147; social representations 140 50; depth 21; of frailty 57–9, 71,
Lash, S. 156–7, 158 75, 79; security 44; order 124
leisure 98–9 Orientalism 24, 135, 142, 152–5, 167,
Lemert, Charles 5, 10, 19, 71–2 168
Levine, D. 141 Orthodox Christianity 173
Lévi, Sylvain 99 overlapping consensus 133
Lévy-Bruhl, L. 83, 85
Lewis, Bernard 162 Parsons, Talcott 84, 124, 129, 138, 150
Lindholm, C. 170 Payne, D. 172–3
local 145–6, 160 Payne, James 165
Locke, J. 120–1, 187 pentimento 96–7
Luckmann, T. 1, 79 permissive society 89
Lukes, Stephen 13 pluralism 8
Luther, Martin 120, 121 Poggi, G. 64, 65, 72
Lyon, David 36, 38, 40, 41, 108–9 Polanyi, Karl 3, 23, 28, 82, 83, 100–6,
161–2, 175–6, 187–8; communism
Mabille, P. 63 and fascism 170; complexity 28;
machines 34, 48 Islamic resurgence 189; modernity
MacIntyre, A. 157 148; rational choice 46
McWorld 39–40, 49, 169, 190 Polanyi, Michael 17, 133, 156, 187
Maffesoli, M. 16, 18, 144–5, 147 political correctness 83
Marshall, I. 50 political economy 100–1
Marx, Karl 9, 121–2 post-Christendom society 119–22
Mauss, Marcel 23, 82–3, 92–7, 106, postmodernism 8–9, 11, 178; archaic
135, 146, 185 society 32–3; Bataille's work 67;
May, Christopher 35, 36, 158 complexity 50, 51; consumerism
Mestrovic, Stjepan 41 40; cultural constructions 3; disem-
micro/macro dimensions 143, 145 bodied society 31–2; everyday life
mind/body dualism 44 142, 144; hyper-reality 28–9; meta-
modernity 45, 80–1; Berger's work 126; narratives 108; mortality 56; reality
Christianity 114, 148; reflexivity 1; society rejection 6; techno-soci-
43; sacred society 65 ety 38
Montesquieu, C. 122, 124, 127 post-representational society 156–9
Moscovici, Serge 23, 63, 134–5, post-societal perspective 1, 2, 6–7, 9,
138–40, 155, 156 11, 27–52, 182
Moss, David 96-7 potlatch 94, 96
mourning licences 95 primitive societies 84, 85, 100
multiculturalism 8, 174–5, 178, 188 private sphere 24, 135, 142, 148–9,
multi-dimensional society 21–4 150–1
prohibitions 86-8, 92
nation-states 6, 7–9, 114–15; divided Protestantism 69, 71, 115, 118, 121,
society 130–1; sacred society 65 129, 146–7, 173; acephalous socie-
necessary society 22–3, 80–107 ty 149–50; American society 124;
negative cult 86 civilisation 163; civil society 120;
Nietzsche, Friedrich 28, 90, 190 divided society 130; fundamental-
nihilism 173–4, 177, 178, 190 ism 169; German sociology 125;
nomadism 31, 32, 33, 175 modernity 126; privatisation 148;
nomos 58, 110, 111 religiosity 151; revelation 75; tem-
Noyes, B. 67, 68, 90 poral society 109–10
public sphere 24, 135, 142, 148–9,
objectivation 110 150–1
objectivity 111 Puritanism 130
obligatory society 93–7
214
Index
quantum society 50 174, 177, 179, 190

sexual relationships 81
Radcliffe-Brown, A. R. 83 Simmel, G. 9, 125
radical social constructionism 55 Skidmore, D. 166
rational choice theory 46–7, 103, 124 Smart, B. 33
rationalisation 143 Smith, Adam 101
Rawls, A. W. 88–9, 143 Smith, W. C. 74
Rawls, J. 133, 149–51, 187 social constitution 54–7
real society 1–26 social constructionism 28–9, 44, 47,
reciprocity 101 54–5; beliefs 78; complexity 51;
redistribution 101 mortality 56, 57;
reductionism 21, 77, 162 social contract theory 57, 120, 122–3
Reed, M. 50 social divine 18
reflexive society 42–4 social facts 93–4, 127–8
reflexivity: construction 44; de-tradi- social habitus 23
tionalisation 141–2; divided society social miracle 15, 77, 115, 118, 122,
129–30; Giddens 42–3, 80–1; 126, 128, 176, 190
Reformation 5, 78, 109, 115, 118–19, social movements 33, 35
121, 129, 130, 146–7 social networks 36
reification 10 social obligations 81
religiosity 151 social representations 23, 134–5,
Rémond, R. 115 138–41, 155
restricted economy 97–8, 99–100 solidarity 15, 118, 126, 128
resurgent society 24, 160–81 soul 58
revelation 75 spirituality 109, 116, 118
Richardson, M. 63, 66 spiritual power 126, 128
Rieff, P. 43 Stark, R. 103
risk society 102 Stedman Jones, Susan 74
rituals 88–9 Steiner, F. 83
Ritzer, George 39–40, 41 Stiglitz, J. E. 82
Robertson, R. 7, 145, 150 Strathern, M. 61
Rodinson, Maxine 163 structuration theory 111
Rojek, Chris 11, 12, 40, 57–9, 70–1, subjectivity 111
79, 109, 142 suicidal society 172–6
Rorty, Richard 11 supra-individual society 122–3
Rousseau, J-J. 122–3, 127 symbolic classification 135
Ruel, M. 74–5 symbolic representation 138
Rumford, C. 188 symbolism 77
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
215
throwaway society 89 utilitarianism 99, 101, 103

time-binding society 110–13 utopianism 151
time-bound society 113, 114–16
time–space compression 108 vexatious society 60, 182, 185, 189
Tiryakian, E. 7 violent society 166–70
Toffler, A. 89 Virilio, Paul 16, 48, 106, 159, 162, 173,
Tönnies, F. 125–6 177; prohibition 92; techno-society
Torrance, T. F. 5, 17, 26, 53, 54, 80, 37–9
115, 116, 144 virtual community 35, 183–4
total social facts 93–4, 96 virtuality 12, 14–15
Touraine, Alan 10, 33, 35–6, 45, 64, virulent society 170–2
108, 178, 188, 191
traditional societies 141 Waldron, Jeremy 150, 187
transcendent society 126–8 Walzer, Michael 178
transgressing society 89–92 Watts Miller, W. 127–8
Trigg, R. 20, 75 Weber, M. 37, 40, 71, 75–6, 79, 125;
Turner, Bryan S. 11, 12, 40, 57–9, 70–1, ancient societies 9; divided society
79, 109, 142, 167–8, 170 130; everyday life 147; rationality
Turner, Jonathan H. 85 39; theodicy 54
Turner, Stephen 14 White, Leslie A. 84–5
Twitchell, James B. 83–4 Williams, Rowan 184–5
Tylor, Edward B. 84–5 Winnicott, D. W. 44
Wittgenstein, Ludwig 76
unseaworthy society 41–5, 48, 49 women: ordination 89; prohibitions 86,
Urry, John 7, 10, 13; animal rights 12; 87–8
collective representations 136–7; wonderful society 77–9
complexity 33–4, 49; différance 91;
emergent order 160; global level Yang, M. M. 100
162; individuals 62; Internet 145;
Islamic jihad 35; post-societal soci- Zafirovski, M. Z. 61
ology 9; social constructions 47–8; Zelizer, V. 105
species specific model 183; Zizek, Slavoj 7, 157–8, 162, 171,
Thatcher's statement 139; time 173–80, 188, 190
112, 113 Zohar, D. 50
US Constitution, First Amendment 20,
149
216

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