SOCIETY.

The concept of society is in transition due to globalization and the knowledge associated with it. Today's views of society are not altogether new, however. Rather, they are engaged with the rediscovery of the worlds of antiquity. Since the 1970s, scholars have reached to the past to explain mainstay concepts such as society. In this manner, ancient Eastern ideas flood into the current Western perspectives on society. The turn to the archaic East also heightens awareness of the West's own archaic past. Thus the concept of society metamorphoses while it embraces a living past.

Ancient Views of Society: East and West

Until the modern era, China did not have a word for society. The current term shehui means an organized assembly. In the ancient world, China utilized the idea of wenming (civilization), which literally meant the brightness of culture or the clarity of writing. It also had the idea of zhongguo (Middle Kingdom), denoting the middle of the world on a geographical plane and the middle of the universe (between heaven and earth) on a cosmological plane. During the pre-Qin era (third century b.c.e.), Chinese society was a living matrix of ideas and events, of spirituality and materiality. James Sellmann describes this world as "hylozoistic—a living world empowered with qi [life force]" (p. 5). As a "foci-field model" or "field cosmology," the pre-Qin society was conceived as an organic complex that changed as the seasons changed.

The Chinese philosophical coupling of yin-yang was an organizing principle that connected the heavens to earth and established all worldly changes. Political decision making relied on proper timing: the right season, the right pitch of the pipes, the right state of mind. The balance of space and time was the key to harmony in the Chinese dynasties to come.

In highly stratified and patriarchal societies such as the West and Middle East, women might constitute a society within a society. While similar situations existed in the Far East, the harmonizing balance of Chinese philosophy accommodated women throughout history to occupy prominent roles ranging from calligrapher to empress.

In the Roman world, socius was a word that meant friend—hence the English word society as a modern word related to a community of friends. In the ancient world, one could not get by without friends who shared common values, common work, and common lands. Thus the Roman word communitas as applied to society symbolized the collectivity of physical and spiritual relations that bound together a people, as in the slogan senatus populusque Romanus —the Senate and the People of Rome. Roman community was bound together by a sense of civitas or citizenship as defined by the civil virtues of Rome. The English word civilization derives from the Latin and carries the sense of a social, political, cultural, religious, and philosophical whole. The Middle Ages in Europe saw the splintering of Roman civilization into church and state, or into religious and political spheres of influence. As towns began to develop and the world split more visibly into city and country, social philosophers' views on society also bifurcated.

Early Modern Views of Society

When the Jesuits brought knowledge of their explorations into China back to Europe, an organic view of society as a compendium of functioning interdependent parts started to take shape. Although this was a bare shadow of China's sophisticated civilization, it led to a Western idea of a body politic, with the state as the head, the church as the heart, and economy and other social systems as the limbs and organs of society. This organic view had far-reaching implications well into the twentieth century, especially in structural functionalist views of society. Karl Marx (1818–1883), however, regarded these developments as a definitive conflict between the generation of civil society and political community. Civil society developed conflicting classes within it that were regulated by the political community. The contradictions of everyday life were monitored by a state that favored the ruling class, and the state wore a political lion skin for the dominant class. Hence, political relations were often mediated by class relations. Hence, society began to manifest simultaneously both conflictual and consensual components. Society was forever in a state of flux.

With the division of labor, industrialization, and the quest for the development of the nation-state, a new philosophical challenge emerged in the form of one question: What comes first, society or the individual? In the ancient Western world of Greece and Rome, the individual was not so much a factor. Rather, a person made commitments to the virtues of various institutions and traditions such as the family. But with the struggle for the creation of the European nation, especially in France, the concept of the individual greatly challenged definitions of society. On the one hand, the more conservative view of kings retained the idea of society as a given, as a complete whole functioning in accord with the will of God; individuals would simply obey the laws of society and work to maintain this equilibrium. On the other hand, the more radical views of French revolutionaries saw the individual as the center of the universe with a variety of inalienable rights; society would serve the individual while maintaining the supremacy of that individual through liberté, egalité, fraternité —liberty, equality, fraternity—a battle cry of the French Revolution.

Society: Consensus and Conflict

Views of modern Western society tend to fall into two camps: consensus and conflict. Consensus views beginning with the economist Max Weber (1864–1920) and continuing into the structural functionalism of the American sociologist Talcott Parsons (1902–1979) describe society as a complex combination of static and dynamic systems. Weber identified society as a system of potential harmonization, with rational actors choosing the best means to the end of ensuring the smooth operation of society; Parsons discussed the functional and dys-functional aspects of society as it strives for a dynamic equilibrium through complementary institutional structures.

Marx is still the main proponent of the conflict theory of society, among a plethora of thinkers up to Louis Althusser (1918–1990) and beyond. Marx conceived of society as a kind of shape shifter, culminating in and overcoming moments of conflict through a sequence of class struggles: slavery giving way to feudalism, feudalism giving way to capitalism, capitalism giving way to socialism, socialism giving way to communism. Althusser divided society into repressive and ideological apparatuses. He had a rather pessimistic view of society's transformations because of its ingrained structures of dominance, especially in the overwhelming powers of the modern state.

The philosopher Jürgen Habermas (b. 1929) combined both consensus and conflict theories while exploring a legitimation crisis of modern society struggling for a communicative competence among both institutions and individual actors. These five thinkers—Weber, Parsons, Marx, Althusser, Habermas—still stand as the most prominent models of social scientific thinking regarding society today. What is attractive about their approaches seems to be an ability to connect abstract macro-level ideas about society with more concrete micro-level ideas about individual social actors within the framework of these umbrella systems.

The New Ancient World: Leibniz, Vico, and China

Given the present trend toward global communications, more attention has focused on the origins of concepts of society, especially in the works of pioneering scholars in the relations between East and West. The philosopher Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz (1646–1716) did not simply rehearse Christian views of Chinese society. Like Giambattista Vico (1668–1744), Leibniz was impressed with the Confucian view of benevolence and the harmonious society that it spawned. Like Vico, he distrusted René Descartes's and Isaac Newton's image of a mechanical universe. Leibniz was indebted to the Jesuit Matteo Ricci (1552–1610), who was similarly open-minded about Chinese philosophical and religious life. Leibniz embraced a Chinese notion of society as a living organism and popularized this image in Europe. His description of matter applies to society as well: "Thus every portion of matter can be conceived as a garden full of plants or a pond full of fish. But every branch of the plant, every limb of the animal, every drop of its humors, is again such a garden or such a pond" (1965, p. 159). For Leibniz, society was a thoroughly interdependent living entity whose every fiber was connected. Every societal institution was dependent on each other and necessary for a harmonious balance. Since every entity was composed of matter, then matter itself was infinitely interconnected. His idea of monadology was clearly linked to the Confucian idea of li (principle, form, pattern) as a primary substance that generated qi (primordial vapor or life-energy force), both of which acted upon every aspect of the life-world. He correctly perceived Chinese society as holding to a cosmology that ensured harmonious relations: "Indeed, it is difficult to describe how beautifully all the laws of the Chinese, in contrast to those of other peoples, are directed to the achievement of public tranquility and the establishment of social order" (1994, p. 47). Leibniz so much admired China's "public morality" and "natural theology" that he referred to it as an "Oriental Europe."

Whereas Leibniz was influenced by Matteo Ricci, Vico was influenced by another religious friend, Father Matteo Ripa (1692–1746). Ripa had lived for many years at the court of Kangxi, the emperor of China's Qing dynasty. When Ripa returned to Italy, he brought with him copper engravings of world maps and garden vistas complete with Chinese poetry. Ripa introduced many Chinese scholars along with an abundance of knowledge to Naples, where he established the Collegio dei Cinesi (The Chinese institute). This cross-cultural milieu greatly influenced Vico's formulation of Scienza Nuova (The new science) and his image of society that aimed to give birth to the ancient past in the present.

Vico was interested in myth and language, especially in tracing etymologies of words to their ancient roots and then awakening them in modern contexts. In other words, language was a conduit for the past to become the present. It is language that gives life its poetic character. Hence Vico characterized society in terms of a "poetic cosmography," a mapping of the world of gods, heroes, and humans. As a humanist, Vico did not believe in the dominance of rationalism through physical and mathematical sciences to the exclusion of the arts of philosophy and history. Through each of these vehicles, humans could attempt to recover the essence of society. This fundamental societal essence is what Vico called "conatus," a primordial beginning or striving "proper to the human will" (p. 101). Vico endeavored to discover this beginning through various stages of history: the age of gods, the age of heroes, and the age of men. Each held its own nature or birth: divine imagination, heroic nobility, and modest conscience. Likewise, each represented a kind of government: theocratic, aristocratic, and human. Finally, each offered a language: divine poetic, heroic blazoning, and articulate speech. In his linguistic configurations, Vico is clearly indebted to both ancient Chinese and Greco-Roman thought. Divine written characters (hieroglyphs) were used "by all nations in their beginnings" (p. 341). These "poetic universals" were followed by heroic "imaginative universals" that spoke of noble events and then by human words.

The Chinese, for example, retained the number of pictographs in circulation for daily use from the large lexicon of classical and literary characters. Like the Egyptians, the Chinese maintained "the vanity of their imagined remote antiquity" (p. 21). This included the elevated speech of heroic singing reflected in the tones of the Chinese language and the recording of their first histories in verse. In many ways, Vico tried to emulate this style in his own works. He describes the Greek use of the dragon Draco, probably one of Gorgon's serpents attached to Perseus's shield (later Athena's shield) and eventually the writer of Athenian law in blood, as that which "signifies the rule of the laws" (p. 228) in the time of heroic aristocracies. He then compares this with the Chinese dragon used as a royal emblem and a symbol of civil rule, while marveling at the poetic convergence of East and West.

Phenomenology and Society

John O'Neill, who has made a significant impact on social sciences and humanities since the 1970s, develops Vico's ideas into a new phenomenological view of society. O'Neill recognizes Vico's call to enter language and thereby "renew" society through every word: "Thus etymology is the music of Vico's wild sociology inviting us to hear our beginnings in the birth of language" (1974, p. 37). Vico's Chinese-inspired metaphor of the body politic replaces a mechanical scientistic one. In attempting to recreate the "public functions of rhetoric," O'Neill revises Vico's project by identifying three levels of body politic in modern society: bio-body, productive body, libidinal body. The first refers to the institution of the family through the discourse of well-being; the second refers to work through the discourse of expression; the third refers to personality through the discourse of happiness. In addition, O'Neill maintains that "on the one hand, we have the bodies we have because they have been inscribed by our mythologies, religions, philosophies, sciences, and ideologies. But, on the other hand, we can also say that we have our philosophies, mythologies, arts, and sciences because we have the body we have—namely, a communicative body" (1989, p. 3). Influenced by Maurice Merleau-Ponty, O'Neill's idea of society takes shape by way of a communicative body as a reciprocal crossing of experience somewhere between idea and flesh. It is the visceral grounding that is the heart of a society in constant flux. O'Neill is not afraid to cross spatial and temporal borders in his embrace of global thought, both East and West. His influence is wide, reaching into political theory and philosophy.

Building upon a similar understanding, Fred Dallmayr invites scholars to move "beyond orientalism" in discarding the Eurocentric views of society. Dallmayr is concerned with the recognition of non-Western cultures in the current shaping of a "global village." Phenomenology helps shape "cross-cultural 'co-being' in a shared world—where the issue is neither to distance the other into the indifference of externality nor to absorb or appropriate otherness in an imperialist gesture" (p. 52). A strategy for understanding a global society necessitates a comparative political theory. Hwa Yol Jung's Comparative Political Culture in the Age of Globalization (2002) follows Dallmayr and O'Neill in evoking phenomenology to explain a cultural hybridization of East-West views of society. Inspired by Merleau-Ponty and Martin Heidegger, Jung promotes an idea of "planetary thinking" whereby a "global citizen" (homo globatus ) engages in a world beyond the nation-state. Jung writes, "For the transversalist, globalization means to decenter Western hegemony and disclaim Western superiority thereby empowering the non-West to participate fully in the new worldmaking as an act of hybridization or imbrication" (Jung, p. 14). The writings of O'Neill, Dallmayr, and Jung go a long way to providing a new global understanding of the concept of society.

See also Chinese Thought ; Civil Society ; Communism ; Globalization ; Marxism .

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Jay Goulding