Society is a concept not a thing.
What is a society? It appears to be a group of people, like a tribe or a nation state or a civilization, which is self sufficient in that it provides in its institutions all that is required to provide a distinctive way of life for a people. The trouble is, though, that these entities are not self-sufficient, as when the Arab civilization has to sell oil and is beset by the inroads of Western civilization and so grapple with what is essentially Islamic, becoming more and more like a set of nation states. And, more grandly, what is society itself, that understood as a simile for the sea in which the fish swim? What is that overarching but central and essential object for sociologists to study? Take note that in looking at that large item a choice is being made between examining the thing as a whole rather than the basic building blocks of which it is made. Biologists can look at living bodies for the various functions they undertake, such as respiration and digestion and reproduction but can also look at the life of the cell and so see that as the real meaning of biological life. Similarly, sociologists can study the role or the norm as the building block which animates society as that appears to be as the overwhelming and encompassing social entity which is indispensable to mind.
A usual and workable idea of society is that it is the intersection of all the social forces that are in play with a society and so make people familiar with it. So a society is made up of social class and ethnicity and institutions of politics and religion and the mass media, and everybody responds to these structures and so are in society whether or not people think of society as an object in itself. Society recognizes us even if we don’t recognize it. But that is the rub. People can recognize they have familial obligations and interests without thinking themselves trapped or maybe safe within its styrictures. Society is therefore the opposite or the residual of all the actual relations people have, in which case sociology sets society in opposition to the individual, ever diminishing the ability to act as individuals as when political sociologists ever more restricted the voter to make an independent rational decision about who to select by showing that voting was contingent on social class or education and less and less on beliefs or doctrines.The opposition between the individual and society as the two negations of one another is also manifested in psychological life when people are unhinged from their self directed mental decision making by the mind being invested and overcome with totalitarian or cultish thinking or by the pernicious effects of social media. It is always possible to find the pernicious cause that leads the individual to become absorbed by society, as happened when people thought that comic books were the poison that destroyed reason before comic books became regarded as an art form.
So all that society means is that it is the autonomous area outside the individual that allows it to go the well for water, which is not experienced as society even if other forces, such as social order and some technology are necessary for that everyday activity to transpire as what it will for reasons of no choosing, just its own internal dynamics, rather than a distinctive shining object of its own. If you are thinking of politics or the mass media or the rise of inflation, you are not thinking of society per se. Similarly, thinking of society as the intersection of functional prerequisites also begs the question of what society is. That is because it shifts the question of society from what it is to what are its needs, not providing what is palpable about it, as happens when life is said to start or end when the heart is beating, which is just an in dictation of the beginning or cessation of life which is different from the experience of being alive which for people means having consciousness. So the question for society isn’t what makes society tick but what makes it recognizable as society, as some essential property of the human condition.
Dealing with this matter requires slightly altering the nature of the question. The question is no longer what society is but the question of when it comes into view as a concept. When do people notice when there is society? That makes it an empirical question in that you can compare whether society is present or not on a particular occasion rather than treat “society” as a necessary or axiomatic matter, a term akin to Kant’s idea of “should”, a word he believed to be inevitable. So, in that case, “society” is like “the universe”, a word for everything, or “infinity”, which is unending numeration because you can propose the idea of that. Rather, “society” is a specific object whose absence can be noticed as an experience. There is also anarchy and there is just going to get water from the well, an everyday experience that does not require or is experienced as society even though getting water does depend on some degree of social order and some level of technology.
Moreover, society as an existent rather than just a concept which is just either there or not there, which is contrary to the Durkheimian idea that there always has to be a society as is evidenced by funeral ceremonies or the normative structure. Yes, funerals may well be a tribute to the eternality of society in that it lasts beyond the life of a person, but after the funeral ceremony and the meal afterwards, people go back to life without thinking all that often about how they are enmeshed in society. Here are some degrees of society as a level of societal embracement, though it is a set of rough approximations based on the presence or absence of features rather than a single yardstick of society.
A war is a clear appearance of and an actualization of society. People within a nation can all feel compelled to at least assert that they are in support of a nation’s actions and to express some engagement in its efforts. We are all Germans or Brits or stigmatized as war malingerers or even traitors. People are aware ever since the French Revolution that the nation is mobilized and to be thought of as a collective entity dedicated to the nation’s war aims that since the American Civil War are existential in that the civilization in which they exist is now questionable. Moreover, wars do not just make people think about their nations as societies; they organize so as to carry out warfare even if it meant in World War II spending endless amounts of money and using War Bonds only to slake inflation rather than to in fact pay for the armaments that were paid for by the government by going into deeper and deeper debt. Governments build tremendous flotillas of ships and organizations of soldiers so as to confront and destroy navies and armies comparably equipped by the other side, as id the peoples and materiel were potlatches in a Kwakiutl society whose purpose is destruction, except in warfare the purpose is to preserve the society, one theme in the Cold War being “Better dead than Red”. The spirit can be high and the feelings noble and the mobilized forces magnificent despite the slaughter that will entail and so people can feel that they were of the “Greatest Generation” for having participated. So the grandeur of war is identified with society itself, other things, like making a living or writing a book, as pale by comparison. No wonder people love war movies however awful they feel over having come back from war.
Another structure in society that makes society in itself highly visible as overarching and everywhere apparent aspect of that global entity called “society” is courtship despite the fact that courtship seems a very personal thing, just the opposite of society in that in the modern world courtship involves people finding a spark of personal engagement because of their particular qualities rather than arranged meetings presided over by elders who think more of an economic and social match of a couple rather than their personal affinities. Modern courtship involves the most personal of feelings, both sexual and individually peculiar, and so invokes the individual rather than the societal. But that is not the case even on cursory inspection. People engaged in dating behavior that is serious minded in that there is the contemplation of long term relationships rather than one night stands or brief vacation like interludes, where people just pursue their pleasures, are repeatedly engaged in judging whether one’s advances to the other party are thought to be too forward or too reticent so as not to give offense to the other party. How far does one go either sexually or in unburdening one's secrets? Too much can offend and too little can seem prim or stiff and cold. People are, therefore, highly aware of those issues concerning norms and customs to be negotiated and yet these are constantly in alteration in the course of short as well as longer times, some people assuring themselves that the rules of courtship are millenia old and others sure that dating practices are as current as what their friends or recent books tell them they are or winging it on their own, navigating without instruction but following the zeitgeist, which is another name for “society”. You rely on society because there is nothing else that is sure as reliable. And yet people will engage in courting again and again until they think they get it right and think themselves having failed if they do not meet society's engrossed personal decision making. Some people may find it easy to swim within the currents of courtship or are more perfunctory in making decisions and so being rid of the distress, but most people think their single or multiple courtships to have been a great adventure where one tried to be brave, forward and decisive in making a decision.
The transition between courtship and marriage is a profound one even if the time is short because it means removing from the tempestuous troubles of social pairing into tube steadier waters of family, which is no longer centered on society but in the institution of family, which some people regard as so strong a matter of absorbed interest and fidelity that some would think the family the only institution, work and culture just exigencies or pastimes when the meaning of life was sitting at tube kitchen table making small talk or nothing at all. A married woman once told me that she was grateful to be settled with her husband, soon to have a child, and no longer beset by whether or not to sleep with her boyfriend. That might have been a time when initial sex was regarded as a big deal, but there are surely other aspects of society that might lead to anxiety for young couples, such as whether to live together or to alter a career or to move elsewhere. Decisions, decisions, ever to be made or rejected and reconsidered for a lifetime. Sometimes people decide, in courtship, that there is a mismatch in social abilities or in career ambitions. Courtship is exhausting however are its pleasures because so many and deep are the fissures of people as they are guided by the uncertain trumpets of society.
Is a particular match a good match? Some people are out of their league and some are good enough and everybody has to decide which qualities are discrediting, whether snoring or a mole or a religious or political belief or whether a person has decent table manners. Judging someone a good match requires assessing all the social orders so as to judge people palatable and so presumes society as the compendium of all the social orders. A black woman fifty years ago is stigmatized as a possible spouse for a white man but is compensated by charm and clarity of purpose and good education. Everything is in the mix and that is why it can be said that society as a whole is in operation.
Another highly visible appreciations of society are some kinds of ethnicity even though many ethnic affiliations have little or occasional salience and so do not engage in the speculations about society, or because its cultural products are subject to the marketplace rather than because it ought to exist for its own sake, which is the view native ety, as happens with Americans who have to engage ingeneological research to find out that they were long ago came from France or Germany, or have medium salience, in having Greek or Turkish heritage, as when a Greek contributes to the Dukakis campaign or feels slighted when people recall the Armenian genocide. Some ethnicities, however, are more like Jews and African-Americans in that their ethnicity is always or nearly always salient and that the social world that surrounds them deals with all aspects of social life, not just their particular customs and beliefs, and so is an approximation of what it means to be a society. So Woody Allan jokes that every inflection by a gentile is given to be a comment on Jews and African Americans are often understood as the basic issue in the history of America, slave labor financing American prosperity, rather than one particular group within the dynamics of America and African Americans playing a small part of some of those, as in the Westward Expansion. But to presume or hint that an ethnic group is a society it makes demands for self sufficiency and culture, the ethnicity a sufficient reason for being because it is, after all, a or the society itself, rather than from alien influence.because, for example, it has an interest in politics but is not the main issue in politics, or treats its culture as something essential in itself rather than subject to the marketplace, Native Americans wanting their cultures subsidized and protected from alien influence.
Most ethnic groups and tribes are absorbed into a larger social structure, such as the nation state and so are no longer societies in themselves. That happened to the Gascoynes in France and to a shift from Arab to national identity in Saudi Arabia. But some groups insist on remaining distinctive societies, the Jews malingering for four thousand years and the African Americans fighting among themselves not whether they are a distinctive people, but what are the terms they can make with their others without losing their distinctiveness as a society.
Another social force that might convey or intimate society is economic activity. It is, like society, invisible, universal and objective in that populations collectively act on the basis of reasoned self interest rather than particular impulses. Economics is therefore similar to demographics or, as some sociologists have said to me, like meteorology, low and high fronts jousting with one another like armies engaged in battles, individuals hiding themselves from the heat and the cold that is descended upon them from the atmosphere. That, however is to get it wrong because economic life is an assault on social structure, an outside force that stabs a person with a layoff or wins a person like a lottery, rather than a set of qualitatively set structures of social life which give it the feel of a society, it containing ethnic groups and educational institutions and mass media and other forms of organization. Rather, economic activity is understood as trend lines like inflation or job creation or gross domestic product which are not resolved with one another into a comprehensive formula but serve only for speculation about when doom or prosperity wil;lhappen: tea leaves rather than defined descriptions. Moreover, economics lets in the idea of consumer confidence to mean people prone to use their savings and income for non-economic reasons and so economic life cannot be restricted to what makes a rational analysis of scarcity and so must rely on other social forces such as national character to explain why the Chinese save while the Americans spend. Economic forces, however, are not without any salience for society in that current public opinion pollsters attribute a judgment on the economy for other aspects of society, such as a badly functioning Congress. But that is misnaming rather than addressing society as that gaudy bangle which sums social life together.
As my examples make clear, society is elusive because it is a concept rather than a social force or a social structure. It is whatever is all encompassing in social life and it is indicated rather than proven by consulting intimations of the whole ball of social wax so far as people are also limited in that they do engage in particular social forces and social structures that crowd out addressing society in itself, society like a sun which has to be shielded lest it go blind, which means have no actual recourse in managing the actual structures people manage, which happens when society becomes a word that becomes so encompassing that people cannot be independent actors, which happens in totalitarian and utopian societies, people’s actions understood as inevitable even if not ordained.