Society is defined by its participants

The argument

The argument locates the nature of a society in the choices of the people who compose it rather than in any feature a society possesses independently of them. The members of a society define what that society becomes. A society has no existence apart from the people in it and no properties they did not give it: its laws were enacted, its norms adopted, its institutions built, and each of these could have been otherwise. The members therefore have the agency to build the society they want, and what they build is what the society is. Two illustrations show how far the results can diverge. If the individuals in society decide that they want a society that constrains the worst of human behavior, they may pass laws to that end and socially condemn the behaviours in question, producing something organised around restraint and mutual protection. If instead they want to establish a nationalist society that derives its value from a shared territory, they may establish a very different society, organised around belonging, boundary, and a common claim to place. Neither outcome follows from anything other than what the participants chose. The same raw material, which is to say people living alongside one another, produces either, which is why the character of a society is a result rather than a given. This has a direct consequence for the question of what society is. If each society is constituted by the choices of its own participants, then there is no single thing the word names. Society is defined by its participants, and because participants differ, society means different things to different people.

Context

The participants or members of a society are not passive. They define themselves through a series of self-observations and self-definitions which are constantly shifting.

Premises

Counter-arguments

A society is not reducible to individual behavior. It is greater than the sum of its individual parts. This is evident in the role society plays in modifying the individual’s behavior. We change our behavior according to the rules of a society. We adopt the conventions of the society we are in. This ‘collective conscious’ shows that the individual does not define the society, the society defines the individual. The individual does not decide to pass laws that reflect their values, the collective consciousness passes laws that shape the individuals’ values.

Rejecting the premises

[Rejecting P1] The collective shapes the individual, not the other way around.

Framing

The individual is not a passive actor in society. They have agency and shape the space that the 'society' occupies.