For me growing up, SOCIETY was not an abstraction: it was very real. I didn’t need to read Durkheim to understand social facts. My mother was a constant reminder. The purpose of life, she said, was to leave Society better than one finds it. And, to me, coming from her, that was a Fact!
The purpose of life, she said, was to leave Society better than one finds it. And, to me, coming from her, that was a Fact!
No wonder, then, that–in deciding the direction of my future studies–I was drawn to the social sciences. By sampling these disciplines, I hoped to discover my true place in the world. The result? I found economics especially reassuring because, according to economists, individuals and outcomes were clearly defined and predictable. Nonetheless, I kept asking myself, where in all of this is the social order? On the other hand, my sociology courses–taught in the tradition of Talcott Parsons–were all about social order. However, the emphasis on continuity and consensus came at the expense of individual agency and the possibility for radical upheaval–a real disadvantage, given the revolutionary changes that occurred throughout the late sixties and early seventies, in which I enthusiastically took part.
A Sixties Collage
Political science seemed to me, at the time, to be the ideal discipline–the most holistic and relevant to events occuring around me. Not only did political science focus on individuals, groups, and institutions; it also characterized and sought to explain the conflict among them. Alas, however, the failure of academic political scientists to correctly interpret the War in VietNam, and to develop appropriate strategies to cope with it, precipitated the discipline’s tumultuous retreat behind the seemingly safe bastions of methodological individualism, manageable, reductionist questions, and strict quantitative analysis. Fortunately, for me, I ended up at the The Office of Technology Assessment, where addressing real-world problems took precedence over disciplinary disagreements.
In the years that followed, I discovered that finding the real me was by no means a matter of identifying the right theory. But neither was my identity a biological or sociological given. To the contrary, as I now know as a result of years of life’s experience, I am emergent: my being is constantly evolving in the context of my life experiences and interactions with others–marriage, motherhood, friendship, work and play.
To the contrary, as I now know as a result of years of life experience, “I” am emergent: my being is constantly evolving in the context of my life experiences and interactions with others.
Imagine, then, what pleasure I had this summer reading R. Keith Sawyers book, Social Emergence: Societies as Complex Systems. In his book, Sawyer not only rescues Durkheim from his critics; he also provides a theoretical basis for the way that I now think about myself in relationship to society. Tracing Durkheim’s concept of social facts back to the notion of emergentism Sawyer contends that Durkheim has been misinterpreted by those who viewed his work through the lens of Talcott Parsons’ value integration. Sawyer argues, instead, that Durkheim, as well as Comte, conceived of ‘society’ and the ‘individual’ in a complex, emergent relationship–the product of continuous interaction and reaction.
My mother’s emphasis on social facts can also be viewed in emergent, experiential terms. In her early thirties during the Depression, and her early forties, during the Second World War, my mother must have learned that the survival of SOCIETY had a lot to do with cooperative behavior, as well as sacrificing the individual for the sake of the whole.
