Social cohesion

Social cohesion

Western society, then, was visibly moving forward. This was precisely what those in the Enlightenment tradition had recommended. Their critics, however, asked how society might still hold together. The more stable pre-modern order was held together by bonds of class or estate that were legitimated by traditional usage. People knew where they stood, what they could do, how they should behave and on whom they could rely. Society appeared as an organic, cohesive totality in which certainty provided security and everyone knew their place.

How different was the condition of modernity! To its critics tradition suddenly appeared to count for little. It had been replaced either by a spurious and shallow rationality or, possibly worse, by momentary fashion. In modern society each individual stood alone, privatized, cut-off from wider supports and devoted increasingly to personal selfishness and material well-being. The social aggregate seemed to have been broken down into its particular components. THOMAS CARLYLE doubted whether the very term ‘society’ could properly be applied to such an aggressively individualist condition. Tocqueville pointed out that the word ‘individualism’ was unknown to our ancestors.

It was, on the whole, the conservatives who feared that individualism had cut away the ties that bound one person to another. This view had been significantly developed by the German Romantics (see ROMANTICISM, INDIVIDUALISM AND IDEAS OF THE SELF), notably by Novalis, Schleiermacher and Müller, and by JOSEPH DE MAISTRE in France, as a counter to the particularistic analysis of individualist theory. Such an approach lies behind the Romantics’ development of an organic theory of society, and is also, of course, particularly pronounced in the writings of Hegel. The emphasis on all parts of society as integral components of a social totality ran directly counter to a philosophical trend that in England and France had a few centuries of development behind it. The attempt to create an individual/society dichotomy had served anti-feudal ideology as it appeared to free the individual from traditional social bonds.

Yet to the counter-revolutionaries a philosophy of consent and natural rights seemed socially dangerous, while the abstraction of the individual from his or her social context appeared totally unrealistic. BURKE and the Romantics viewed man as primarily social and only secondarily individual. They could visualize people only in a context; in the actual environment in which they lived. Thus they put the individual back into the group, and on these grounds have sometimes been claimed as the real founders of sociology. This view is associated in our own time with R.A.Nisbet, who has embarrassed other sociologists with the assertion that the concepts and perspectives of their subject link it to both medievalism and philosophical conservatism.

In The Positive Philosophy Auguste Comte emphasized that the scientific study of society combined two aspects: social dynamics examines the laws of development while social statics considers those of coexistence. In this way sociology is heir to both Enlightenment optimism and Romantic pessimism. This concern with both progress and social cohesion is the hallmark not just of Comte’s theories but also of those of such otherwise divergent figures as Tocqueville, Marx and Durkheim.

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