2/27/2018 reificationofpersonsandpersonificationofthings | Perverted and Topsy Turvy

One may even cherish as few illusions as I do about its gravitation towards total forms and about
the decline of the individual, but the differences between a pre‑ and post‑individual society are
still decisive. In the democratically governed countries of industrial societies, totality is a category
of mediation, not one of immediate domination and subjugation. This implies that in industrial
market societies by no means everything pertaining to society can simply be deduced from its
principle. Such societies contain within themselves countless non‑capitalist enclaves. At issue here
is whether, in order to perpetuate itself under the present relations of production, it necessarily
needs such enclaves as that of the family. Their specific irrationality compliments, as it were, that
of the structure as a whole. Societal totality does not lead a life of its own over and above that
which it unites and of which it, in its turn, is composed. It produces and reproduces itself through
its individual moments. Many of these moments preserve a relative independence which
primitive‑total societies either do not know or do not tolerate. This totality can no more be
detached from life, from the co‑operation and the antagonism of its elements than can an element
be understood merely as it functions without insight into the whole which has its source [Wesen]
in the motion of the individual himself. System and individual entity are reciprocal and can only
be apprehended in their reciprocity. Even those enclaves, survivals from previous societies, the
favourites of a sociology which desires to unburden itself of the concept of society—as it might of
an all too spectacular philosopheme—become what they are only in relation to the dominant
totality from which they deviate. This is presumably under estimated in the present most popular
sociological conception, that of middle-range theory. Positivism Dispute –107

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