Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Theodore Schatzki is Associate Professor of Philosophy at the University of Kentucky.

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The Site of the Social

the pennsylvania state university press

Contents

Acknowledgments............................ixPreface....................................xiSocial Orders..............................1Practices..................................59The Site of the Social.....................123Becoming and Change........................189Coda.......................................265List of References.........................269Index......................................283

Chapter One

Order is a basic dimension of any domain of entities. Things tend not to form random aggregates of continuously metamorphosing matters, but instead to hang together as clusters of interrelated determinate stuff. Order is the basic disposition of a domain of entities, the way that things are laid out or hang together in that domain. Conceived this abstractly, moreover, order is neutral vis--vis atomistic and holistic construals of any given field. Whether a domain, say, is composed of elements externally joined in larger molecular conglomerates or is a space of varying intensities and unarticulated continua from which determinate phenomena precipitate, order is the basic layout of matters in that domain, a layout embracing their relations, specifications, and boundaries.

Social thought has long concerned itself with social order, the layout of social life. For example, the constructive portion of Plato's Republic, the inaugural work of social inquiry, begins with a question of order. Given that human settlements are founded on the need to exchange goods to overcome the individual's lack of self-sufficiency, how must labor be divided so that people's combined efforts maximize the quantity and quality of their possessions and consumables? Plato's account of the best division of labor addresses fundamental features of the ordering of human groups. It begins with the specifications that humans are creatures of need and that objects are satisfiers of those needs, and with the presumption that humans and nonhumans are joined through three relations: exchange, consumption, and use. It then argues that the best satisfaction of needs is secured if labor is apportioned in line with the principle that people perform that job to which their skills are most suited. Plato thereby advocates a particular distribution of activities among people who share specific needs, possess varying talents, and relate to one another through social transactions of certain kinds. He thus favors a particular social order, a particular way that social things-people, jobs, consumables, and use objects-should hang together.

Theoretical interest in social order is more commonly said to commence in the modern era, above all with Thomas Hobbes's Leviathan. As is famously recounted, Hobbes gave the search for order a particular orientation. Plato had distinguished a city of health, where only the necessities of life were satisfied, and in a temperate manner, from an inflamed city, which pursues desires beyond necessity and seeks to satisfy them luxuriously. Noting that few people are likely to be satisfied with the simpler, more moderate lifestyle, Plato conjectured that the fevered city eventually instigates war to procure the larger territories needed to feed its habits. Much as in Jean-Jacques Rousseau's The Social Contract, an intact functional social order precedes and makes possible the pursuit of armed conflict. War would be impossible without the prior establishment of the economic relations and division of labor that compose the transfamilial social ordering from which the desires subtending it can grow.

Hobbes, by contrast, so portrayed humankind's natural endowment-the faculties, capacities, desires, and passions that nature allots to any functional human being qua individual creature-that war is the inevitable consequence of the joining of individuals in all social orders that lack a certain ingredient. According to Hobbes, human beings are roughly equal in mind and body, and this equality implies that they have like hope of attaining their individual ends. This latter equality, in turn, brings them into opposition when their ends and preferred means coincide or are mutually incompatible, and, therewith, into war as soon as they grasp that oppugnancy is their shared situation. Not only does that which underlies war exist independently of social order (except perhaps familial orders) rather than, as in Plato, developing once social order is established. The constant threat of the eruption of conflict also undermines the establishment of social orders, including the simple exchange relationships and division of labor that Plato ascribed to his primitive cities of health. In the state of nature, Hobbes wrote, neither industry, nor culture, nor navigation, nor building, nor knowledge, nor society exists. Indeed, taken to its logical conclusion, this view implies that in the state of nature there can occur only that desperate attempt at individual provisional self-sufficiency that Plato seemed to consider impossible or, perhaps, nonhuman.

War results from the competition and diffidence (and love of glory) that naturally attend the physical commingling of similarly endowed and similarly minded individuals in a world of scarcity. It seems, consequently, inevitable. The issue for Hobbes, then, was how to guarantee peace or at least nonovertly violent human coexistence. Social order, equated with this state of affairs, became a social good. Hobbes therewith bequeathed to modern thought its typical concern with social order. Moreover, by proposing that the means of achieving the desired condition is the consolidation of force in the hands of a central sovereign, Hobbes handed to modern thought the now-familiar idea that social order is the province of politics and government.

Things more or less stood here throughout the heyday of the modern natural law tradition, from the mid-1600s to the early 1800s. Even today, social order is widely understood both inside and outside the academy as nonovertly violent human coexistence. The rise of modern social science prepared the ground, however, for more cognitive-ontological and less political notions of order. Although the emergence of organized social studies was tied to concerns of state, it spawned accounts of the components, structures, and principles of social life that no longer overtly addressed what today would be identified as questions of political theory. As attention to these matters gained momentum and depth in the twentieth century, the idea that social order-the basic structure, organization, or layout of social life-constitutes a distinct social scientific issue gained steam. A prominent theorist has even recently dubbed the nature of ontological-cognitive order the central problem of social thought, explicitly contrasting this asseveration with Talcott Parsons's famous declaration of the centrality of the neo-Hobbesian problem of normative order.

Still today, however, nonpolitical order often goes unarticulated as a distinct issue. Theorists regularly ponder the basic features of social life, but the trenchancy of Hobbes's legacy obstructs appreciation that such reflections are, among other things, explorations of order. What, nonetheless, reveals that theory is in fact concerned with social order, and that different accounts of basic social...