Gesellschaft

Historical Background

In Ancient Greece, the terms associated most directly to society are κοινωνóα (community/society), ρώ λιζ (city/state), oÏkoz(family/household), and ϕιλώα (friendship). All four terms are of central significance in the ethical theories of Plato and Aristotle. According to Aristotle, the terms κοινωνία, πολιτική,and ρώλιζ are synonymous. There are societies based on nature (husband/wife, parents/children, master/slave) and [Page 1074]others based on agreement (some laws of a city-state). According to Aristotle, human beings are political animals, which implies that human beings can only be eudaimonious (live a good life) within a city-state, a civil society. It can be discussed whether a ρώλιζ is a type of society or community. The political leaders have to be free male citizens who rule above other free male citizens who are their equals; unfree slaves; children who are not yet free human beings; and free women who are slightly subordinate to free male citizens. It is clear, however, that for Aristotle, human beings were divided up into the free and the unfree, without there being the concept of equality of all human beings, which is closely linked to the concepts of human rights and human dignity.

In Roman antiquity, the notion κοινωνία πολιτική was translated as communitas, conciliato, societas civilis, societas humana, and societas by Cicero. Cicero was the first to hold that all human beings are equal because of their dignity as human beings, and he did refer to all human beings as belonging to the societas humana, or to the societas, and when referring to all human beings, he normally employed the term societas. It needs to be stressed that it can be problematic to employ the term society in order to refer to humanity as a whole, because in that case, a sociological notion and a term for a species is being mixed up, as L. Gumplowicz has already pointed out. When referring to human organizations that have more in common(family, friendship, city-state), Cicero, on the other hand, tended to use communitas more often. It would be misleading, however, to hold that Cicero already had a clear-cut distinction between societies and communities. It can only be said that he employed the term societas to refer to all type of human organizations, the largest being the group consisting of all human beings and the smallest being related to family and friends.

From the 13th century onward, the Aristotelian κοινωνία πολιτική was translated as communitas, communication civilis, or politica. In the same century, Thomas Aquinas introduced the distinction between a public and a private society, which can be related to Aristotle's ρώλιζ/oÏkoz distinction. During the Enlightenment, Hobbes identified the civil society with the Greek ρώλιζ. A similar position was presented by Locke in the Second Treatise of Government, in which he wrote a chapter titled “Of Political or Civil Society.” In the same century, English moral philosophers (A. A. C. Shaftesbury, A. Smith) employed the term society to refer to civil societies. Around 1800, German writers (Herder, Goethe, Schiller) used the term to refer to civilized humanity in general. Kant identified the state(civitas) with the societas civilis, and Hegel, in his philosophy of law, understood the state (synthesis) as the combination of family(thesis) and civil society (antithesis). A basic thought in Marxist theory is also concerned with societies. It is claimed that the history of all past societies is the history of class struggles.

...