Margaret Thatcher famously said that society didn’t exist. What she meant by that isn’t what she literally said – Thatcher was in for reactionary defense of “social values” as much as any right-wing cracker from that era – but rather that society didn’t have any interests worth defending. That’s true in a sense, but only after you’ve bought into a lot of other mythology about interests. In particular, the unspoken thought behind Thatcher’s quip is that individuals do have interests worth defending: in the Thatcherite idiom, that they “exist.”
That basic assumption is one that it’s hard for Westerners – and not just econ majors – to think past. The problem is that we have an idea in our head that society is a kind of force constraining individuals not to act on their “interests,” which are given. That image of society can probably be traced back to the enlightenment, which generalized a view of society as contract which had been advocated by Hobbes and raised, but dismissed, by Hobbes’ main bugbear, Aristotle. On that view, society exists as a compact of mutual self-defense by which its members agree to a curtailment of what can legitimately count as their interests so as not to fall victim to the interests of their neighbors. Adam Smith took over this view in the main, only adding that, actually, the social contract doesn’t need to curtail our interests at all, since the universal pursuit of self-interest creates a self-sustaining system. Mainstream arguments between individualists and collectivists have been carried on in those terms ever since: the interests of society (synthetic) on the one hand, those of individuals (natural, given) on the other.
I’m thinking about this now because that’s basically also the social image that E.R. Dodds imposes on the Greeks in The Greeks and the Irrational. By sheer coincidence, it happens to be close enough to the Greeks’ own social image not to be all that deeply distorting, but it’s worth asking where the differences lie. Greek thought pictures society as a koinonia, a res communis, a community in the somewhat archaic sense of “that which one shares in common.” That means, not that society is what we all have in common, but that the things that we have in common – materially, spatially, linguistically or, at the utmost level of abstraction, teleologically- are what produces us as a collective. Is there such a thing as society? Yes, on this depiction, of course there is. Are you going to tell me there’s no such thing as paving stones? As public slaves? As the Greek language?
At about the same time as Thatcher was doing a set of activities that she characterized as privileging individual interests over the (non-existent?) interests of society, the anthropologist Marilyn Strathern was making a similar kind of claim from a very different perspective. Looking at Melanesian subjects, it seemed to her that perhaps there really was no such thing as society – not for them, at any rate. While we confront society as something external and given, most Melanesian peoples regard it as the object of their production – as actually needing to be produced constantly through practices of exchange, among which the kula made famous by Bronislaw Malinowski would have to be numbered. That gift-exchange system did not, contrary to what Malinowski tried to show from a functionalist standpoint, allow a given society to survive; instead, it produced that society in a way that ensured the survival of its individual members.
That point is in a way more obviously true when it comes to Greek practices of xenia, especially in the archaic period and to the extent that Homer counts as evidence for these. Odysseus justifies his request for gifts from the Phaeacians not by making reference to a pre-existing society that unites them, but by appealing to the Phaeacians’ own interest in receiving good treatment if they, in a similar case, should ever wash up on the shores of Ithaca. Xenia doesn’t preserve a society, it produces one. If xenia could seem a bit atavistic from the point of view of Aristotle, that was only because the classical social image represented society as an accumulation of stationary objects rather than moving ones. It was still the things that produced the relations.
If we could learn to think about our own society in a slightly more material way, this would probably be salutary. We would not, for instance, ever be in danger of falling under the Thatcherite delusion that you can help people out by taking their side against “society.” After all, society is just made of the things that we hold in common. From an anthropologically-informed standpoint, that’s like saying you’re going to help someone out by setting their house on fire (or, in Thatcher’s case, by giving their house to someone else.)
Unfortunately, time’s running out for this. The reason is that tech people have started to literalize the most awful and backwards things about the enlightenment image of society. Twenty years ago, if you’d said “society is oppressing me,” you would have been using a metaphor. Now, you’re just talking about facebook: there really are all-encompassing, contractual (though the contracts are a bit more coercive than Rousseau might have hoped) fields that organize us as a collective, and these really do have coercive authority to curtail us from pursuing our interests too aggressively. Moreover, “society” in this sense really does turn out to have interests of its own, which include selling our eyeballs for ad views. Rousseau definitely wouldn’t have seen that coming.
In any case, the fact that we’re a long way from the General Will shouldn’t stop us from seeing the genealogical connection. The modern internet in many ways completes enlightenment project, stripped of every noble aspiration and repeated as farce. In this topsy-turvy world, Margaret Thatcher’s reactionary claim that society doesn’t exist turns into a salutary reminder, soon perhaps just the expression of a nostalgic wish.