Postsocial

Sociality as a Historical Phenomenon: Expansions and Retractions

The current retraction of social principles and structures is not the first in recent history. One of the great legacies of classical social thought is the idea that the development of modern society involved the collapse of community and the loss of social tradition. Yet what followed was not an asocial or nonsocial environment but a period of high social formation—a period when the welfare state was established, societies became societies of (complex) organizations and structures, and social thinking took off in ways that stimulated institutional changes.

The first region of expansion of social principles during the course of the nineteenth century and throughout the early decades of the twentieth was that of social policies, and this was linked to the rise of the nation-state. Social policies as we know them today derive from what Wittrock and Wagner (1996) call the “nationalization of social responsibility” (p. 98ff.)—the formulation of social rights alongside individual rights and the positing of the state as the “natural container” and provider of labor regulations, pension and welfare provisions, unemployment insurance, and public education. A second region of expansion, connected to the first, was that of social thinking and social imagination. A corollary of the institutionalization of social policies were new concepts of the forces that determine human destiny: They were now more likely to be thought of as impersonal, social forces. Rather than assuming the automatic adaptation of individuals to changing environmental conditions, these ideas focused on the prevailing imbalances and their social causes: the social causes of occupational accidents would be an example (Rabinbach 1996). Sociology played an important role in bringing about the shift in mentality through which individuals came to be seen as the bearers of the individual costs of collective structures. When Mills (1959) argued for a “sociological imagination,” he tried to capture in one concept the phenomenon of societal processes that individuals do not recognize but that affect and change their lives. A third area of expansion of social principles and structures was that of social organization. The rise of the nation-state implied the rise of bureaucratic institutions. The growth of industrial production brought with it the emergence of the factory and [Page 586]the modern corporation. The advent of universal health care became embodied in the clinic, and modern science in the research university and laboratory. Industrial, nation-state societies are unthinkable without complex modern organizations. Complex organizations are localized social arrangements serving to manage work and services in collective frameworks by social structural means. A fourth area of expansion was that of social structure. The class differentiation of modern society is itself an outgrowth of the Industrial Revolution and its political consequences as well as of processes of social and political measurement and categorization.

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