Abstract
This article critically engages a recent essay Jeffrey Alexander has published on ‘societalization’, whose conceptualization it finds problematic; first, because in contrast to the impression conveyed by the essay, the term itself is anything but new (as shown in a summary of six theories of societalization which precede Alexander’s by decades, in two cases, by more than a century), and, second, because the way Alexander employs the term is highly aporetic, while also being emblematic of much deeper problems that afflict the whole discipline. Following a reconstruction of the term’s morphology and the transmutations it underwent during its gradual incorporation into the English language, the article identifies an undertheorized concept of society as the root cause behind the difficulties into which Alexander maneuvers himself. It concludes with a brief sketch of an alternative that can contribute to overcoming these difficulties.
Keywords
In a recent essay, Jeffrey Alexander (2018) proposes a new theory of ‘societalization’. The present article subjects this theory to a critical appraisal. Alexander’s essay deals with an important subject, and the empirical account he provides to substantiate the theory’s plausibility appears strong. In and of themselves, the events described therein are not central to my argument; I draw on the report only to illustrate what I consider weak spots in the author’s conceptualization, on which I focus. Two such weaknesses stand out.
The first concerns the word societalization itself. Though he does not openly state this, between the lines, Alexander suggests that not only his theory of societalization is new, but also the term. If this is what he wants to say, then Alexander is wrong. Depending on who or what is included in the canon, the term has been a staple concept in academic sociology for between a century and a century and a half. It occupies a prominent position in Karl Marx’s work and much of the Marxist literature (hence the 150 years temporality), in the sociology of Georg Simmel, who in 1908 published a voluminous book wherein he basically equates the discipline with the analysis of forms of societalization, and in Max Weber’s (1972 [1922]) magnum opus, Wirtschaft und Gesellschaft, posthumously published in 1922 (hence the 100 years temporality). A contemporary classic, Jürgen Habermas, continues the tradition. In all four cases, the German term ‘Vergesellschaftung’ has been falsely translated in most English versions of their works. This is probably the reason why few English-language readers are familiar with its literal translation, societalization. There are, however, at least two native English social scientists who have of late employed the term with some weight too, namely, Bryan Wilson and Bob Jessop, plus several others who have utilized it in secondary analyses (giving us a third, 50 years temporality). Following a brief discussion of the German scholars’ mistranslations, I reconstruct, in very broad brushstrokes, the societalization theories of these altogether six authors, all of which precede Alexander’s by at least several decades.
My second point refers to the meaning with which he imbues the term societalization. As will become clear when comparing it with its previous usages, this is Alexander’s theoretic contribution, which sets him apart from all the others. There are, however, serious doubts about its cogency. The difficulties I identify can be traced to two main sources: (1) Alexander’s affliction by what I call the x and society syndrome, and (2) his subscription to methodological nationalism. Ultimately, both are reflections of an undertheorized concept of society, a deficiency Alexander shares with much contemporary sociology. His difficulties are therefore but variations of a general problem. I conclude by briefly outlining an alternative, my own conceptualization of societalization, which I believe can contribute to overcoming this problem.
A short history of mistranslations
The German original of Marx’s Kapital (1962 [1867]) uses both the noun ‘Vergesellschaftung’ and the adjective ‘vergesellschaftet’. The English version translates Vergesellschaftung as ‘association’ or ‘socialization’, respectively. It uses the term association widely for formal organizations such as businesses, professional associations, bodies of collective interest representation, philanthropic trusts and foundations, and others. As is well known, some such organizations actually call themselves societies (‘Gesellschaften’ in German). 1 But the word Vergesellschaftung, while including (meso-level) organizations, also refers to (the making of) society in the macro-sociological sense of ‘capitalist’ or ‘feudal’ society, terms that denote entire historical formations in Marx’s work. The adjective vergesellschaftet appears to be translated as ‘associated’ throughout. Occasionally, Marx also uses the word ‘gesellschaftlich’, whose literal English equivalent would be ‘societal’, but is translated as ‘social’ instead (as in ‘social product’ rather than ‘societal product’).
Why the translators chose to avoid literal translations can only be surmised. The translator’s preface to the second English edition of Capital (Marx, 1976 [1867]), which came out roughly 90 years after the first translation (published in 1887), does not even address what, after all, is a substantial diversion from the original. An indirect justification for the same practice is given by the translators of Simmel’s (1908) Soziologie. Untersuchungen über die Formen der Vergesellschaftung, whose English version became available in full only recently (Simmel, 2009 [1908]). Earlier English renderings in portions of Simmel’s work like ‘socialization’ or ‘sociation’, they say, had either come to assume different meanings in the meantime or did not resonate well with an English-language readership. 2 They therefore translated the term as ‘social interaction’ or ‘creating society’, depending on the contextual meanings Simmel himself had given the word Vergellschaftung in different parts of the book. 3
That they might just as well have chosen ‘societalization’ 4 does not even seem to have occurred to them. However, by the time they got to work, this word had already enjoyed a decades-long presence in the English literature. Its first appearance that I am aware of is in a discussion of Simmel by Theodore Abel (1929), followed by a selection of Weber’s works translated into English and edited by Hans Gerth and C. Wright Mills. This selection includes the essay ‘Class, Status, Party’, which makes extensive use of the term (both as noun and adjective) and had originally been published in 1944 in an edited volume (Gerth and Mills, 1946: vii). 5 The essay was later also incorporated into the first complete English edition of Economy and Society (Weber, 1978 [1922]: 926–55). But before its incorporation, the editors, Guenther Roth and Claus Wittich, eliminated all traces of the terms societalization and societalized, replacing them by the words ‘association’/‘associative relationship’ and ‘associated’, respectively. 6 Unlike the first translators of Marx’s Capital, who seem to have set the precedent for what by now had become a ‘deviant tradition’, their mistranslation involved an active miscorrection too. They were fully aware of the semantically correct alternatives and still decided to disregard them.
The English version of Habermas’ Theorie des kommunikativen Handelns (1984 [1981]; 1987 [1981]) uses variations of what by then was an established practice. It translates Vergesellschaftung as (1) ‘socialization’, (2) ‘associative relationship’, and (3) ‘sociation’; vergesellschaftet accordingly becomes (1) ‘socialized’, (2) ‘associated’, or (3) ‘sociated’. Once again, no justification is given for the avoidance of literal translations. To the extent that Habermas’ English-language followers and critics are fluent in German, they have repeatedly ignored this and indeed used the word societalization.
How is one to make sense of this strange history of (mis)translations? What can be ruled out with certainty is that any of the chosen renditions is substantively superior to their literal alternatives. Quite the contrary, none of them conveys the full content of the German terms Vergesellschaftung/vergesellschaftet as used and intended by the authors, some of whose nuances are therefore inevitably lost. No more persuasive is the argument that the word societalization would have been too hard to sell to an Anglo-Saxon readership, as attested by the fact that it has repeatedly been and is increasingly being used by English-speaking authors – including Alexander, who could have been spared the embarrassment of being found suggesting a novel concept when he is just selling new wine in old skins. Moreover, even granting the possibility that ‘societalization’ might initially sound a little odd in ordinary English, terms such as ‘sociation’ or ‘creating society’ can hardly be assumed to fare better. And, finally, a whole apparatus of neologisms has all along been and continues to be crafted by the social sciences in their attempts to make sense of the realities they study, because everyday language does not (yet) seem to adequately capture some of their intricacies. That is their whole point. Censuring out intuitively unappealing terms subverts this effort.
Six conceptualizations
I now proceed to summarize the theories of societalization as they unfold in the works of the six authors mentioned above in the chronological order of their appearance (publication dates are indicated in brackets after the respective names). 7 The accounts given are far from exhaustive but should suffice to provide readers with a rough idea of what an author means by the term. In the cases of the four German authors, I draw on the original works. Throughout, I refrain from giving specific page references, which are easy to verify with the help of electronic search functions.
Karl Marx (1867)
Societalization, a feature common to all societies, is a process whereby humans enter into, establish and sustain cooperative relations with one another. Central to this process is the division of labor. In tribal societies, where no private property exists, cooperative labor is directly societalized labor, meaning societalization flows straight from the need for, and mutual benefits of, cooperation, whose fruits are more or less evenly shared. In a capitalist society based upon the production of commodities, the market, for which the commodities are produced, becomes an intermediary that separates both the producers from their products (which now belong to the owners of the means of production, the capitalists, who pay the producers a wage for the utilization of their labor power) and production and consumption, thus rendering the societalization process somewhat mysterious and artificial. For the societal character of the workers’ productive labor (masked, as it is, by what Marx calls the fetishism of commodities) now becomes apparent only the moment they engage in market exchange, which requires abstraction from the manifold differences between the items sold and bought in the market to make them commensurable by a common standard, their value, expressed in money, the medium of exchange. Under medieval feudalism, the societal formation that precedes modern capitalism, societalization assumes yet another form, that of undisguised personal dependence of (mainly) serf upon lord, whose hierarchical structure constitutes the cornerstone of all relations in this type of society.
Georg Simmel (1908)
Simmel uses the word societalization as both a substitute and a synonym for the term society, which to him signifies less a distinct ontological reality than a unity constructed by the (sociological) observer who analyzes the interplay of its parts, namely, the individuals comprising the social world. Society to Simmel exists only if and to the extent that societalization actually takes place, manifest in interactions with others and in the plethora of interpersonal relations these establish (which can include the formation of groups and higher-order aggregates, such as differentiated spheres of activity specializing in particular functions). Society is thus always in the making, an emergent phenomenon. It is a powerful determinant of all other social forms which it encompasses, yet its own existence requires constant renewal in ongoing societalization processes. A special case of societalization is sociability, which has its purpose in itself. Simmel mentions friendship as an example. Most forms of societalization exhibit an instrumental orientation, however, giving them an air of superficiality because they engage the individual only selectively, i.e. in those capacities that are relevant to the pursuit of common interests between ever more distant strangers. Another aspect of the term’s meaning as understood by Simmel refers to the extent to which individuals are shaped by their social environments, on the one hand, and actively shape them, on the other, thus developing unique personalities. Today this is widely called socialization, the processes whereby individuals become members of and get integrated into society, while at the same time articulating their own selves.
Max Weber (1922)
All three types of societalization distinguished by Marx, one of the two authors from whom he borrows the term (the other being Simmel), also appear in Weber, who, however, expands its usage considerably and not only systematizes it more thoroughly, but applies it to all manner of non-economic affairs/pursuits as well. This begins with the men’s houses and councils observed in Iroquois and other tribal bands and associations, whose societalization serves primarily political rather than economic functions. It continues through sedentary, pre-modern civilizations, where it manifests in various forms of feudal societalization (most importantly in the multifunctional, relatively autarkic and often armed, oikos-like household of the lord); in religious societalization (centralizing local gods, thus progressively extending the spatial and social reach of deities; organizing monks into cloisters, who establish their own orders and bureaucratic control with a hierarchy of offices and role specializations); strata-typical societalization (e.g. in the form of coalition-building within and against particular strata, sub-strata and ‘houses’ – but also, of course, in maintaining and elaborating strata-specific forms of sociality); military societalization (in war; for raiding the peasantry and/or other plundering campaigns); the societalization of occupations in guilds, and so on. And it extends with much greater force into the modern era, where it becomes at once more intensive and extensive.
Societalization can be small-scale or large-scale, simple or complex, open or closed (e.g. when pursued for monopolistic opportunity hoarding), ad hoc or strategically planned, short-lived or durable. The medieval European city is an internally and externally differentiated administrative unit that societalizes the relevant sections of its inhabitants into citizens who regulate their common affairs in a polis-like association (reminiscent of the civil society of ancient Greece), which assigns them equal legal rights and later becomes a model for the nation-state. Under modern conditions, societalization often takes the form of organized collective action, and any type of organization is itself an outgrowth and embodiment of societalization processes. Organizations can be informal or fully formalized with (mostly) voluntary and (sometimes) compulsory membership. Examples are trade unions and employers’ associations, single companies and joint stock holdings, cooperatives, political parties and their factions, professional associations, and many others – last but not least the huge, if administratively dispersed, state apparatus.
What all forms of societalization have in common, albeit to vastly differing degrees, is their orientation toward rational interest coordination; in short, their artificiality, impersonality, instrumentality, and technicality. This distinguishes them from communalization, a second type of relation-building activity that Weber, drawing on Tönnies’ (1979 [1887]) society and community dichotomy, introduces in his outline of interpretive sociology. Both types are ideal types, meaning they almost never appear in pure form. The perhaps closest proximate case of pure societalization is epitomized by the logic of contractual market exchange which, as in Marx and Tönnies, lies at the center of Weber’s attention. Another parallel to Tönnies is that he postulates an historical trend of increasing societalization at the cost of communalization, which gradually retreats into the background without ever getting totally submerged by the former.
Bryan Wilson (1976)
What in Weber constitutes a continuum between poles, ranging from consensual group action sustaining a ritually affirmed order to the unadorned pursuit of interest-rational calculus, are sharply demarcated opposites in Tönnies, who, however, employs the passive nouns community and society. Owing to his reservations about using the (seemingly static) concept of society, a term he uses mainly for intermediary and other types of organizations, Weber prefers the dynamic concept of societalization, a preference he shares with Simmel.
Wilson’s account mirrors and updates Tönnies’ perspective. He is probably the first native English-language sociologist to use the word societalization with some degree of systematicity. 8 To him, society is a genuinely modern phenomenon. Using the same concept for tribal collectivities comprising a few hundred members and such highly complex and much larger constructs as the United States of America with several hundred million people makes no sense, in his view. The pre-modern world knows only communities. The modern world, by contrast, is a world of societies. Wilson thus posits a shift from community to society; a shift, moreover, that is irreversible and hence to be accepted.
Central to societalization as delineated by Wilson is a Weberian-style process of rationalization, which goes hand in hand with secularization and a massive expansion of the scope for social interaction. The world of communities is a religious world, and as societalization progresses, religion becomes largely obsolete. In its stead emerges an impersonal world of differentiated and increasingly autonomous societal spheres or systems (such as politics, economy, science, law, and education), which follow abstract, realm-specific rationalities and reduce human agency to narrowly focused role performance. Gone are the days of holistic life led in continuity with the past and according to customary laws, which exercise moral control and secure social cohesion. As religion is weakened by the societalization process, it no longer can provide legitimation for the overarching order. Its demise also corrodes the affective ties that bind together the members of the tight-knit, neighborhood-like local parish/village community or other face-to-face congregations. And while this is not without its drawbacks because even a highly rationalized society cannot fully dispense with the social cement whose moral foundations it relentlessly hollows out, there is nothing to be done about it – a conclusion echoing Weber’s gloomy notes in the final passages of his Protestant Ethic.
Jürgen Habermas (1981)
The Marxist Habermas, who is strongly influenced by Weber and the Critical Theory of the Frankfurt School, adds to his intellectual ancestors’ perspectives on societalization a dose of Mead-inspired micro-sociology, of Parsonian and Luhmannian systems theory, and of phenomenological lifeworld analysis, the latter of which he reinterprets through the prism of linguistic philosophy, enabling him to substitute the concept of lifeworld for what remains of community after it has been divested of the strongly anti-modernist sentiments informing Tönnies’ account. Tönnies’ dualist conceptualization of social relations stages a comeback in Habermas’ system-lifeworld dichotomy, however. This dichotomy replicates the juxtaposition of a sphere of strategic action guided by instrumental rationality and a sphere of communicative action guided by a rationality oriented toward achieving/generating interpersonal understanding, (moral) consensus and solidarity. Over time, the two spheres become increasingly decoupled from one another, with the latter finding itself at risk of getting ‘colonized’ and ultimately destroyed by the former.
Key to Habermas’ reinterpretation of the lifeworld concept is what he calls the process of communicative societalization, resulting in the rationalization of worldviews and in the individuation of the person (through socialization à la Mead, where societalization is at once a process of individuation, giving rise to the dual self with its ‘me’ and ‘I’ components). So societalization, while clearly containing an instrumental dimension, is a twin process that affects and raises to a higher level of development the non-instrumental, normative and identity-forming elements of human sociality as well. Moreover, as does instrumental societalization, so communicative societalization too generates its own institutional infrastructure (the public sphere with its print and electronic media, the legal order with its secular norms, and others). In this sense, then, what was ‘community’ as distinct from ‘society’ in earlier theories gets incorporated as lifeworld into a much more broadly conceived society, of which it now becomes an integral part.
Bob Jessop (1990)
Jessop, another Marxist, credits German colleagues with having introduced him to the concept. He appears to be the second English-language social scientist who actively appropriates the term societalization and gives it a distinct meaning – curiously, without any apparent awareness of its deep anchoring in Marx’s own work. His understanding of societalization, which, according to the author’s introduction, underwent a gradual change over time, can be gleaned from an anthology of essays. The first of the two meanings Jessop discerns in these essays (having been written from 1985 onward) upon rereading them is what he calls its literal and totalizing sense. On this understanding, societalization refers to the processes and practices in which society itself is produced and reproduced. The problem with this interpretation, as he later sees it, is that it can give rise to an essentialist conception of society. The second meaning, called partial and favored by Jessop, focuses more on realm-specific institutional orders (such as economy, politics, and law) in society without directly invoking the latter, which is merely treated as the horizon for a multitude of variegated, quite independent societalization ‘projects’, with each pursuing its own agenda. Jessop substantiates this second meaning’s presumed advantage as follows:
Marxists are concerned primarily with capitalist or what more generically could be labelled economic societalization. If this were complemented by other ‘axes’ of societalization, then it would allow Marxists to tackle a long-standing weakness in their analyses, namely, the tendency to view non-economic institutional sectors as epiphenomenal to the capitalist economy; in short, their reductionism. Inspired by Luhmann’s systems theory, Jessop suggests going beyond paying mere lip service to such sectors’ relative autonomy and granting them real autonomy by taking seriously their self-determination – or what Luhmann calls autopoiesis. One could then see distinct rationalities at work within, and shaping the operations of, different such orders. For example, if the state’s primary function is to secure social cohesion, then this will drive its peculiar logic of societalization, and this logic cannot simply be inferred from the needs of capitalism. Still, the economy could remain the dominant system in the long run. But other systems would emerge as social configurations in their own right, as much dependent on the economy as the economy depends on them. So rather than being determined by strict verticality, the interrelations (or mutual couplings) of institutional orders can now be construed more laterally.
Alexander’s societalization, sociology’s society
I now turn to Alexander’s (2018) theory of societalization. This theory is embedded in a dualist conception of society comprising two main spheres, one ‘civil’, the other ‘non-civil’ – essentially a watered-down version of Habermas’ lifeworld-system dichotomy, which it revises and reformulates in simpler, if normatively more ambiguous terms (Alexander, 2006). Societalization is a mechanism that intermittently bridges the gap or crosses the boundaries between spheres, which, during times of self-inflicted weakness on the part of non-civil agents, become permeable but are later sealed up again. The weaknesses that set societalization processes in motion result from offenses and abuses committed by (mostly powerful professional) members of organizations associated with various non-civil spheres, such as religion, the media, and the economy. The examples Alexander uses to corroborate his theory’s propositions are pedophilia in the Catholic Church, phone-hacking by reporters of the tabloid press, and the fraudulent banking methods that led to the financial crisis of 2008. Where such practices get problematized, they are mostly handled quietly by internal, sphere-specific bodies putatively set up to exercise, or offices formally in charge of, self-control, but factually often concerned above all with covering up sensitive issues and protecting the affected sphere or organization against external scrutiny and intervention. Societalization drags these issues into the open, thrusts them into the spotlight of public attention, thus making them into problems for ‘society at large’, whose integrity they ‘endanger’ (Alexander, 2018: 1050). The exposure itself is typically done by investigative journalists who scandalize the practices in question. This can trigger a chain of events that brings into play an array of civil society actors and institutions and may result in regulation and punishment of the incriminated spheres/identified perpetrators (the latter of whom can be both individuals and organizations and sometimes include civic authorities found to be complicit with them). Overwhelmed by their onslaught, non-civil sphere agents temporarily (have to) give in to the pressure and make some concessions, after which, however, they soon rebuild defense lines to regain control over what they regard as their own affairs with which no outsiders must interfere.
Alexander construes societalization as a five-stage process that begins and ends with ‘steady state’, where the spheres are largely left alone. His empirical account appears well-crafted and is not at issue here, as indicated in the introduction. I do, however, have doubts about its conceptualization. The problems I see all revolve around an undertheorized concept of society and the relations between society and the civil and non-civil spheres, on the one hand, and among the latter two spheres, on the other.
To elaborate, I begin with Alexander’s explanation for the emergence of what he calls societalization. ‘At the most general level’, he asserts, ‘the reason is social differentiation’ (Alexander, 2018: 1066), which results in the separation of various ‘spheres’ (also called ‘fields’, ‘systems’, ‘institutions’, or ‘domains’ in the essay). The spheres that matter in the context of his discussion are ‘the world of mass communication’, the ‘religious world’, and ‘the economy’ (p. 1050), as already mentioned. But what exactly are these spheres separated from? With the partial exception of the communication sphere, all three fall into, and hence must be sub-spheres of, the non-civil sphere. This separates them from the civil sphere. However, they are also separated from ‘the whole that overarches’ the various ‘parts’ into which the differentiation theoretical school of sociology says modern society is differentiated, a school from which Alexander explicitly distances himself while at the same time affirming its key premise, that of differentiation. For as much as he aims to ‘challenge this widely shared…vision of obdurate division’, his very concept of societalization depends on the existence of the ‘walls of institutional separation’ (p. 1070), without which there would be nothing to breach, surmount or tear down by societalization.
In fact, the separation implied by Alexander’s construction is arguably much stricter than that postulated by differentiation theory, which, while granting the various spheres ‘autonomy’, nonetheless treats them as ‘subsystems’ of society (p. 1070). Following his dualist conception of society, Alexander would probably concur. But his concept of societalization does not permit this. For if he did, he would have to claim that societalization societalizes what are already societal problems. They would be societal problems because they emerged within society. But the notion of societalization makes sense only if that which is being societalized was not societal prior to its societalization. Had it been societal from the outset, then what could Alexander’s societalization possibly add? Another, ‘second’ layer of societalization perhaps?
This puts him in an awkward position. Religion, the media, the economy, politics, science, education or whichever socially differentiated sphere comes to mind, are all evidently sectors of society (just as they can all become sites of misconduct and scandals, making them into potential targets for ‘societalization’ campaigns à la Alexander). They do not operate in extra-societal spaces. Nor do they engage in non-social/non-societal activities. Qua societal sectors, everything they do brings into play societal forces/expresses society. How could it not? Alexander’s account suggests otherwise. And in so doing, it not only removes the practices it deems ‘social’ (rather than societal) problems from society, it also ‘expels’ the spheres that generate them. Into what? Where if not in society are the spheres and the activities they bundle to be placed instead?
The dilemma into which Alexander maneuvers himself with his construction replays a familiar story. In the social sciences it widely takes the shape of what can be called the x and society syndrome. Linguistically, this syndrome expresses itself in phrases such as ‘economy and society’ (the – correctly – translated, but misleading title of Weber’s book), which come in virtually unlimited variations referencing every differentiated ‘sphere’ or ‘system’ of society: politics, law, science, education, religion, medicine, media, sports, and others. The conjunction ‘and’ that connects the two nouns in these phrases also disconnects their referents by opposing them to one another. Economy and society suggests the economy is a non-societal sphere, something that operates within its own boundaries, but outside society, and likewise for all other spheres, fields, sectors, systems (whichever term is preferred) that suffer from the fallacies engendered by the x and society syndrome.
Its imaginary is mirrored internally by the self-(mis)understandings of many such spheres and their representatives as being insulated from the social/society, which in their constructions of reality figure as disrupting (if not downright corrupting) forces against whose intrusions they must be shielded as much as possible. Just consider the markets or economies of neoclassical economics, the science of science textbooks, the way that medicine views and portrays itself, and so on. Alexander’s religious and media worlds add illustrations from further fields.
Sociology reacts to these depictions in one of two ways, both of which are highly aporetic. The first reaction is to question their analytical validity by demonstrating how all these spheres are deeply interwoven with social forces. Call this the ‘bringing society/the social back in’ perspective. Numerous studies in economic sociology and the sociology of science belong to this genre (Kuchler, 2019). The second reaction is to accept the depictions as more or less factually accurate but to highlight the costs of differentiation and to turn the normative evaluation of society/the social on its head: rather than society/the social being the culprit that threatens the proper functioning of socially purified institutional orders, it now becomes the savior which cleans up socially decoupled spheres that are out of control and/or the victim of such spheres’ anti-social demeanor. Call this the Durkheimian perspective. Polanyi’s (1957 [1944]) plea to re-embed the (‘deregulated’ capitalist) economy combines elements of both perspectives.
Alexander’s account falls into the second category. Societalization is an attempt at self-defense against ‘egregiously anti-civil’ acts committed by ruthless agents of non-civil spheres which are perceived as ‘threatening to society itself’, because they undermine its ‘moral and institutional foundations’. But society does not seem to possess the strength to immunize itself against such threats once and for all. It gets the upper hand only until ‘non-civil’ spheres ‘fight back’ (Alexander, 2018: 1050–1), ‘resisting societalization’ (p. 1063) and eventually reconstructing ‘the separation between spheres’ (p. 1051). As before, Alexander probably means a process of intra-societal separation. Yet, taking his claim that non-civil spheres resist societalization literally, this would imply de-societalization (an analogue to Polanyi’s disembedding), just as ‘steady state’, assuming the spheres manage to ‘return’ to it (which he says they regularly do; Alexander, 2018: 1051, 1065), implied a pre- or non-societal state, hence separation from society.
This raises the question as to what constitutes the ‘overarching whole’ Alexander invokes against a macro-sociological tradition which, as he bemoans, ‘has had surprisingly little to say about “society”’ (p. 1070). What are the characteristics and components of the society that envelopes the various parts, and what remains ‘inside’ it after the differentiation process has externalized society’s non-civil sphere(s)? Alexander has no answers to these questions. Nor does he contribute much to filling the void left by a sociology whose lack of theorization about society he aptly criticizes. In fact, he nowhere even explicates his own concept of society.
It is, however, not difficult to ascertain it when reading the essay carefully, which leaves little doubt that Alexander is a methodological nationalist who equates the nation-state with society. So the ‘Americas’ and ‘Britains’, wherein he locates the ‘civil spheres’ and ‘civil societies’ which enact and orchestrate the societalization scripts of his case studies, are not just countries known by name, they are also the ‘societies at large’ (Alexander, 2018: 1049) that ‘contain’ them.
What else do they contain? One might think of the resident populations because the societies of methodological nationalism tend to be conceived as territorially bounded entities consisting ‘of actual people and relations between people’ (Luhmann, 2012 [1997]: 6), but this would be too broad. Alexander seems to opt for the citizenries, i.e. for those subsets of the population that share the national passport, which qualifies them most unambiguously for societal membership amongst methodological nationalists. Assuming, in line with conventional wisdom, that countries also have economies, political systems, legal systems, education systems, etc., one could include the non-civil sphere(s) as well. This, as shown above, would go against the gist of Alexander’s argument, but most likely be true to his intentions, once again giving us an intra-societal differentiation between the civil and the non-civil spheres. Alternatively, the civil society which does the societalization work would have to confront the non-civil sphere in society’s external environment.
Either way, one follow-up question this provokes concerns the relationship between ‘civil society’ and ‘society’. Does civil society act ‘on behalf of’ the ‘larger’ society when kicking off societalization processes? This conclusion, which Alexander strongly suggests by treating societalization as a reaction of society against threats to ‘itself’, is not without problems. For one thing, if society is to comprise the citizenry in its entirety, then this must also include the perpetrators against whose conduct societalization efforts are directed, but whose resistance shows that they are anything but agreeable to these efforts. Who or what authorizes civil society then – which clearly needs a mandate if it is to ‘defend the more universal interests of society against the particularistic interests’ (Alexander, 2018: 1061) of ‘non-civil’ spheres, rather than being, say, just a ‘moral crusader’ (Eder, 1985) acting on its own behalf? This problem is further compounded by Alexander’s remark that societalization campaigns are typically initiated by ‘the civil sphere’s elites’ (Alexander, 2018: 1066; italics added), i.e. by tiny minorities of what must already be small ‘sub-societies’ within society. Are these elites a kind of ‘vanguard’ society of civil society? Or perhaps even the larger society’s ‘true core’? If yes, what qualifies them for this role? And how is one to differentiate between civil society initiatives that do and do not contribute to society’s ‘common good’ (p. 1067)? After all, as Alexander (2006) is only too aware, following the ‘binary logic’ of its ‘discourse’, ‘civil’ society itself repeatedly engages in rather ‘uncivil’ acts. Moreover, even huge scandals often leave sizeable segments of the citizenry completely indifferent. It is therefore far from clear how much input society – which or whose society? 9 – has into Alexander’s societalization, how much ‘society’ this societalization actually contains.
How is one to deal with observations and questions such as these theoretically? Answering them presupposes an adequate theory of society, for which one searches in vain in much of the sociological literature. The result is a social science that incessantly conjures up ‘society’, but only in passing and as a largely residual category. This society is the unquestioningly presupposed container society of methodological nationalism, into which analysts, mostly empiricists unwilling to step out of the comfort zone of middle-range theory, throw whatever they see fit for their reference problems, but whose analytical status is rarely, if ever, systematically explored. Synoptically, the multiply fragmented society emerging from this empiricism combines to produce an arbitrary assortment of ‘tagged’ societies, such as ‘capitalist’ (or ‘industrial’) society, ‘democratic’ (or ‘autocratic’) society, ‘knowledge’ society, ‘information’ society, ‘schooled’ society, ‘litigious’ society, ‘health’ society (but also ‘patriarchal’ or ‘racist’ or ‘aging’ or ‘risk’ society) and many more, with all such labels meant to typify the same society, yet nobody wondering how a single society can be so many different ‘societies’ at the same time and what, other than encompassing them all, makes it into a society. 10 Being a country known by name seems to suffice. So the container is both too full and empty. For if society can be everything at once, then it is really nothing at all. Ultimately, the society of methodological nationalism is a vacuous concept to be filled with content by the analyst at will. Hence its theoretical arbitrariness.
Alexander is no exception to this predicament. Neither does he have answers to what are undeniably legitimate questions nor does he seem to note the puzzles his theory of societalization throws up. His problems are emblematic of a difficulty afflicting the whole discipline, a direct consequence of sociology’s contingent choice to construe society in the image of the nation-state. This theoretical disposition reflects a Durkheimian legacy which haunts it to the present day. 11 Durkheim’s Division of Labour (1984 [1893]) is in important respects a reaction to Tönnies’ community and society dichotomy (Giddens, 1971), which he reads as implying modern society lacks any genuine morality and solidarity, traits that Tönnies qualifies as distinctly communal, i.e. as matters of the past. Durkheim wants to show that this is mistaken. Contra Tönnies, he claims that each societal formation generates its own morality, congenial to and congruent with its basic structure. The structure of modern society, as he sees it, is characterized first and foremost by its unprecedented division of labor, Durkheim’s phrase for what Parsons (1964) would later call functional differentiation. The morality that corresponds to this type of society is his ‘organic solidarity’, in whose light the ‘mechanical solidarity’ encountered in earlier, segmented community-type societies appears not only as but one of several moralities, but also as rather unappealing.
To overcome the dangers he associates with Tönnies’ dualism, Durkheim has to merge what Tönnies wants to keep separate. He does so in the concept of a national society, which incorporates both – the society of differentiated function systems and the ‘imagined’ (Anderson, 1983) community of the (ideally united) nation(s). This is the root cause of the problem. To understand why, we first have to look at the perceived dangers this concept is meant to address. Two such dangers seem particularly worrying.
The first has to do with the differentiation process itself, understood as both a proliferation of newly emerging societal systems which specialize in performing particular functions (such as economic, political, scientific, educational, etc. functions), and a concomitant cultivation of perspectival monisms, which combine inward-looking, self-centered styles of reality construction with an outward-looking expansionism, thus at once fostering centrifugal dynamics and subjecting ever greater parts of the social world to their own, decidedly particularistic logics of operation. Second, in so doing, this very differentiation process dissolves the erstwhile unity of purpose in sociality, of instrumental and normative ‘reason’, which premodern formations fuse in ways that become discernible only after their gradual disentanglement. This disentanglement involves a shift toward technical, realm-specific rationality, which enhances each system’s performance enormously, while at the same time releasing every single system from the constraints of general morality and solidarity. The classical case used for illustrating this trend is the demise of the moral economy of medieval Europe and its replacement by a capitalism that, in Marx’s idiom, reduces the relations between participants to the ‘cash nexus’. Later observers extend this observation to other fields, including politics, which, as Luhmann (1994) puts it, all fashion themselves a ‘higher amorality’. Not only do they shed what to them becomes an external imposition, they celebrate their ‘emancipation’ from it as progress.
This development has been a cause of concern amongst numerous intellectual commentators. Its traces can also be found in Alexander, whose distinction between the (moral) civil and the (amoral) non-civil sphere barely camouflages his sympathies and antipathies. More important than the sentiments of intellectuals, however, are the associated dangers. In the Durkheimian tradition of sociology, these dangers combine to produce the ‘integration’ problem. What can bind together society’s ‘drifting’ parts into a harmonious, seamless web, what can prevent the jointly progressing forces of differentiation and individualism (that differentiation also promotes) from thrusting society into a dismal state of anomic disintegration? These are the central questions driving the Durkheimian school of thought. And its unswerving answer for more than a century has been: only a common morality can do this. So if morality/solidarity were indeed on their way out, then society would be in dire straits. But it is not. All we need do to fix modern society’s perils is to give morality and solidarity their due – theoretically by granting them a central place in sociological analyses, practically by re-moralizing the pertinent fields and regulatory institutions.
The trouble with this ‘solution’ is that it does not work, as Alexander’s own case shows only too well. His express intention behind the introduction of the concept of societalization is to demonstrate ‘the continuing relevance of…solidarity in contemporary societies’ (Alexander, 2018: 1073). That is easy enough to see. But does he deliver? I doubt it, not least because in the end he himself seems to admit defeat by letting his societalization sequence culminate exactly where it begins: in ‘steady state’. Steady state, as will be remembered, is the state of institutional insulation, where the ‘boundaries between civil and non-civil spheres’ are fully intact. And this is the normal state. Returning to steady state therefore means back to normal. Every now and then non-civil spheres have to weather outbursts of ‘civil outrage’ (p. 1065). These are, no doubt, a nuisance. But they invariably fade away, after which business as usual resumes.
Business as usual in the non-civil spheres (Alexander’s term for modern society’s function systems) has no place for ‘feelings of togetherness’, does not cater to people’s needs of ‘belonging’ and solidarity (p. 1073). It only caters to the systems’ own needs. In fact, it has to do so, because independence from the pressures of the ‘civil sphere’ (Alexander’s equivalent expression for community) 12 is an essential condition of their success. 13 For this reason, all attempts at theoretical integration of society and community have failed. This begins with Durkheim, who never proved the causal connection between the division of labor and organic solidarity. Based on a logically deduced need for solidarity, he merely postulates it, assumes it into existence, as it were (which is not to say it does not exist). Parsons, with his construct of the ‘societal community’, likewise manages to glue together society and community only by the force of words, by ‘theoretical fiat’ (Alexander, 1983: 158), a verdict its author might just as well apply to himself. And Habermas’ system-lifeworld integration (which upon second glance really becomes a disintegration) has hardly fared any better. The systems it was meant to tame, or the societies it was meant to warn, remain unimpressed.
Note that these failures are all corollaries of commitments to the concept of a national society, a concept to which one may or may not subscribe. The nation-state as an empirico-historical reality may well need to integrate societal and communal aspects of sociality. The very combination of the words that give it its name suggests as much, signaling, as it does, the construct’s inherent hybridity. To the extent that the nation-state’s hybridity accounts for it, this is a practical integration problem, and if one accepts the recurrent sociological failure diagnoses, then the picture looks quite bleak on this front too. What lessons is one to draw from these diagnoses? That one has to try harder? Or perhaps that the construct itself is a monstrosity, beyond any serious hope of rescue?
Regardless, nothing forces sociology to adopt or emulate it. True, it is widely used, and colloquially whenever someone speaks of society, then the referent almost always seems to be a country. And it is also true that nation-states face many problems. As a social science, however, sociology needs to formulate its own problems and tailor its analytical toolkit accordingly. Nobody expects chemists or physicists to have their scientific agendas determined by their residential affiliations or allegiances. There is no compelling reason why sociologists should be denied a liberty granted others without question. And if society’s function systems can emancipate themselves from the exigencies of the nation-state (as is now also impressively demonstrated by the globalization literature; Sassen, 2007), then why can’t sociology do the same? The discipline is, after all, just another social system – a subsystem of the science system. So its problems are first and foremost scientific problems, not practical-political ones.
A promising point of departure for a sociological concept of society which does not even raise an integration problem is the Tönnies-Weber tradition with its strict separation of society and community. Whatever one makes of Tönnies’ substantive case about society (of which, upon inspection, little is likely to survive the test of time), no scholar following the analytical path his bifurcation opens would seriously entertain the idea of searching society for meaningful bonds of solidarity, which for such a scholar would border on making a category mistake. Instead, the search would have to be directed elsewhere, and the most promising candidate would be a contemporary equivalent to Tönnies’ community.
Having pointed out several weaknesses in Alexander’s conceptualization, I conclude with a brief sketch of yet another concept of societalization, my own, which I believe has several advantages over Alexander’s, not the least of which is its greater sobriety.
An alternative
In skeletal form, I first presented this concept elsewhere (Schmidt, 2014). Here, I flesh it out a bit more, borrowing elements from several of its precursors discussed above and adding a few others, drawing on additional sources. As just indicated, this concept eliminates all residues of communal sociality. With Simmel, Weber and Jessop, it shares a certain reluctance toward essentialized conceptions of society, emphasizing instead the dynamic aspect of society-formation; with Marx, Weber and Wilson, it places the accent on instrumental, systemic reason and relations. And from Luhmann, who does not use the term societalization, it obtains a communication-theoretical grounding of society, plus the conviction that methodological nationalism is untenable. 14
The society of methodological nationalism is always already there, easy to locate in time and space, but hard to pin down in theoretical terms. Luhmann’s concept of society suggests otherwise. On this reading, society must constantly be made and remade, and societalization processes are the ‘makings’ whereby diffuse forms of sociality get transformed into the higher-order social aggregates we call society. Over time, these (often multifunctional) forms are broken down into numerous, historically variable and apparently increasing specifications addressing different reference problems, which organize themselves into distinct subsystems of society.
The differentiation of societalization processes into technically narrowed, coded specifications has not gone unnoticed in the social sciences, which observe them under labels such as politicization, economization, juridification, scientization, religionization, educationalization, mediatization, medicalization, etc. Regrettably, though, the way the social sciences conceptualize these processes is misleading, contrasting them, once again, with society, 15 and often also pitting them against it by suggesting they somehow invade, degrade, pollute, undermine and derail society – none of which makes any sense from the perspective adopted here, which puts the emphasis on their constructive, society-building role rather than on the destructive effects they also have in virtually unlimited abundance.
Consider the case of economization, a term which, like many of the above expressions, is largely used pejoratively in the social science literature. The problems that critics using the term and its various cognates (marketization, commodification, commercialization, monetization, etc.) want to point out are real enough. Conceptually speaking, however, this begs the question as to where the society they want to see protected against economization comes from or is to be found in the first place. It suggests that all or much of (some pre-) ‘existing’ society increasingly gets economized, rather than economic society itself being a product of economization, whereby the economic subsystem of society constitutes itself as a distinct ‘society’ (or ‘world’) within society. In other words, what the pertinent literature widely assumes to be done by the economy of society to society would not even be conceivable were it not for the existence of a differentiated economy in society that only emerges and then reproduces itself in ongoing, never-ending processes of economization – never-ending, to wit, until they end if they ever come to a halt. Should that happen, then there would be no more economy as we know it. But until then, its maintenance depends on their continuation. No economization, no economy.
The same argument has been made about medicalization/medicine (Engelhardt, 1986) as well as about scientization/science (Drori et al., 2003), and it can be made about all systems. Each system’s mode of societalization – of (political, religious, educational, etc.) society-making – observes reality through selective filters and organizes it according to what matters to the expectations this selectivity reflects, generates, reinforces and stabilizes. By connecting suitably coded communications, it contributes to establishing and autocatalytically reproducing a society of differentiated, self-referential function systems. So society exists only in and through its own operations, through societalization processes without whose perpetuation it would simply vanish. No societalization, no society.
Self-referentiality in the present context means first and foremost self-centeredness. That is the reason function systems have no use for general, external morality and boundary-transcending solidarity. These obviously play a secondary role in and for a sphere’s organizations (businesses; hospitals; universities and research institutes; churches and their equivalents; newspapers; etc.) as well as for such organizations’ role actors (managers; physicians; scientists; clerics; journalists) with their corporate identities, offices and codes of ethics, but they define neither. What defines them are sphere-specific rationalities (economic rationality; medical rationality; scientific rationality; religious rationality; media rationality), which also make a system, organization, role-type recognizable – to themselves as well as to external observers.
That systemic rationalities have no use for (non-systemic) morality and solidarity need not mean nothing does. Stripping society of these aspects of sociality does not therefore entail claiming their irrelevance. It only entails suggesting ‘society’ might not be the best placeholder for locating them theoretically. Nor does it entail any value judgments. A de-moralized society is not inherently ‘better’ or ‘worse’ than a moral one. It is simply different and refuses to be benchmarked against standards which do not resonate with its own reality constructions.
And what is the societal whole that overarches the parts? The societal whole is the sum-total of society’s function systems – whether they are ‘integrated’ and well-coordinated (the less likely case) or not.
Footnotes
Declaration of conflicting interests
The author declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Funding
The author received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
