The globe

In a series of stages in the twentieth century a new collective consciousness has arisen where the globe, rather than national territories, appears as the arena in which the fate of the human species and society will be determined. The concerns of the early twentieth century were dominated by the idea of class conflict producing a crisis of social order. In mid-century the frame for understanding the human condition was very much set by nation-states projecting their solutions to internal conflicts as world-wide recipes.

But these ideas of conflict within society prepared the way for a global vision. We only need an external shock to recognise that implied in the oppositions of us and them, men and women, capitalists and workers, there is a larger unity. We understand that these are relations which variously divide and unite people wherever they are. This is the message of the Palestinian Edward Said who has pointed out that ‘the East’ is an age-old construction of the West in its bid to control the whole world. ‘West’ and ‘East’ imply each other and cannot exist apart.

Numerous shocks in the late twentieth century, from the threatened nuclear apocalypse after the Hiroshima nuclear bomb in 1945 through to the collapse of the Soviet empire and the recognition of the threat of global warming, have brought a sense of a collective fate in relation to the globe as a whole. With global awareness these structural oppositions in society cede primacy to a concern for our collective relations with the environment.

Once we consider all human beings as belonging to one great society there are no outsiders. For much of this century sociologists followed the dictum of Émile Durkheim (1855-1917), the founder of French professional sociology, who sought to explain the social solely by the social. But when we consider the globe as a whole plainly the physical conditions of human existence have an intricate influence on the shape of society. In the late twentieth century world-wide public concern seeks to shape society to accord with sustainable development even as economic growth seems to run out of control. These are contradictions within all our lives rather than a conflict between ‘them’ and ‘us’.

The German sociologist Ulrich Beck calls this contemporary condition ‘risk society’, where we calculate opportunities and threats to ourselves in a world which we do not control. This alerts us to the break from an earlier period of history, the Modern Age, when the progress of human society was considered as a continuous expansion of human control, over nature and over society itself.

This was very much a reflection of the outlook and interests of nation-states as they sought to shape society to the needs of the international system of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Then, nation-state, country and society were taken to mean the same thing. When the question of the relation of individual and society was addressed it was treated as a problem of how the nation-state could ensure the commitment of its citizens to its requirements.

‘Socialisation’ once meant the raising and education of children to become adult members of the nation-state. Now education means the constant process of enhancing the capacities of people to play an independent and responsible part in shaping a world where they choose among societies. Citizenship in the Global Age measures nation-states by the needs of humankind.

Human society in practice

Social relations

We have to identify the concept which corresponds to a world of shifting boundaries and changing collectivities. It needs to express both the erection and dismantling of barriers and to leave open the possibility of the transformation of social entities in the course of human activities. We find it in the idea of social relations.

No matter how vast the society—for instance Asian or even world society; or separate, perhaps a ghetto; or focused, say, for the protection of birds; or general, as with ‘the family’—social relations are involved. Indeed, we can see all these societies or groups as different ways in which relations between people take shape and persist over time in a recognisable form. The idea of social relations conveys the vast variability and potential range of human society and societies without prejudging their unity, the boundaries between them, or their duration.

We have social relations with enemies as much as with friends. We may interact with people half way round the globe as much as with our next-door neighbour. We can relate to previous or coming generations, even if they can no longer, or cannot yet, respond.

The Englishman Herbert Spencer (1820-1903), who more than anyone else popularised sociology world-wide in the nineteenth century, gave this illustration of connectedness over space and time: ‘A derangement of your digestion goes back for its cause to the bungling management in a vineyard on the Rhine several years ago.’ ¹⁹

He conveys how important the organisation of social relations is in its consequences for people’s lived experience. They may not realise this, nor want it either. Society does not happen just as people wish it. It often confronts them as a fact. Equally people may also often try to blame someone else for something they could have avoided. Spencer plausibly illustrates how far-off social causes can make you sick. But does his choice of example unintentionally reveal British xenophobia? Is he blaming the consequences of a heavy night on the ‘Huns’?

We can then go further in defining of sociology. It may also be defined as the study of people in their social relations. When we talk about ‘societies’ in the plural we have in mind the ways social relations both unite and divide people. The divisions between the British and the Germans, for instance, are displayed within their relations with each other.

So relations between people may constitute a business firm, but its existence depends also on their relations with other people, like customers, suppliers, or even competitor firms. Its rivals relate to it in the special system of relations known as a market, where they may not know each other personally but still find themselves constrained by unknown others.

All types of human groups or associations from families to nation-states depend equally on internal and external social relations. In a school, relations internal to it, between teachers and pupils especially, depend on relations outside it, with parents, examination authorities, funding agencies and the state. Put another way, families cross the boundaries of schools; are both in them and outside them.

Human social relations are always incomplete in the sense that they always have to be renewed through what people do. They are none the less real for that. In the last twenty years purely mathematical work on rational choice has shown that it is advantageous for individuals to recognise pre-existing social relations. Indeed the idea that society might arise as a result of individuals, independently of existing social relations, agreeing to establish them through a social contract, is a fiction from an old modern time. Social relations, and this has been part of a longer tradition of common wisdom about society, are not under the control of the parties to them. With computer simulations in our time social scientists can show that alliances and coalitions have properties of their own which the parties to them ignore at their own cost.