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‘Society on its own’: the

sociological promise today
a
Pekka Sulkunen
a
Department of Social Research, University of
Helsinki, PO Box 4, Helsinki, 00014 Finland
Published online: 26 Sep 2014.
To cite this article: Pekka Sulkunen (2014) ‘Society on its own’: the sociological
promise today, European Journal of Cultural and Political Sociology, 1:2, 180-195, DOI:
10.1080/23254823.2014.956279
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European Journal of Cultural and Political Sociology, 2014
Vol. 1, No. 2, 180–195, http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/23254823.2014.956279
‘Society on its own’: the sociological promise today

Pekka Sulkunen*
Department of Social Research, University of Helsinki, PO Box 4, Helsinki, 00014 Finland

(Received 13 March 2014; accepted 7 August 2014)
Several prominent sociologists believe that the concept of society has become
inapplicable because of its Enlightenment roots in belief in progress and
rationality. This article assesses this claim. The Enlightenment critique of
Hobbes’s account of order showed that social order in modern societies is
possible without an external sovereign state. The legitimacy of the political
order is derived from the social, not vice versa. Drawing on Koselleck and
Donzelot the article discusses the totalitarian potential of democratic
societies, and argues, first, that sociology has contributed essentially to
politics of representation. Secondly, the article stresses the recent, state-
driven but individualistic progress of modern societies towards autonomy
and intimacy. Today these values are no longer ideals but taken for granted
principles of legitimation of the social order including the state. These
principles are contradictory and create conflicts. Political legitimacy can
only be maintained respecting the autonomy and right to intimacy of
citizens, but on the other hand autonomy and intimacy can only be assured
with the help of the state. Understanding these contradictions is essential
for understanding social order. The promise of sociology today involves an
effort to contribute to this understanding, holding on to the Enlightenment
idea of society on its own.
Keywords: democracy; enlightenment; society; sociology; state
The question
The social world is currently in a state that defies many reasonable expectations
about modernity. The Arab spring ended long-lasting dictatorships but did not
bring democracy. European integration has not eliminated poverty, social conflict,
and urban unrest. Democracy and the rule of law do not necessarily accompany
economic growth. Modernisation and prosperity, wherever they occur, do not
necessarily lead to rationalisation and secularism: on the contrary, religion and
transcendental values and beliefs are gaining power globally, including in
Western Europe. A highly developed division of labour and an advanced level
*Email: pekka.sulkunen@helsinki.fi
© 2014 European Sociological Association

European Journal of Cultural and Political Sociology 181
of education encourage pluralism and tolerance but do not eliminate xenophobia
and conflicts over identity.
Many of these developments fly in the face of the predictions of the classical
sociological tradition, and so it may seem preposterous to suggest, as my title does,
that, despite all these failures, sociology might still retain what C. Wright Mills
(1956, pp. 3–24) called its promise – a promise to understand the structure of
the society and the shape of history, and thereby ‘grasp the intersections of
daily experience with the unruly forces of social reality’ (p. 5). Many prominent
sociologists concluded towards the end of the twentieth century that the structures
of modern industrial society had become increasingly difficult to define, not to
speak of grasping their intersections with subjective experiences of daily life

(Rose, 1996). The rise of the new middle class, the consumer society, the globa-
lised economy, and transnational interdependency contributed to this condition.
Zygmunt Bauman (2000, p. 37) called it liquid modernity, and proposed replacing
the term society with sociality, a much more fluid category. He was quoting from
Ulrich Beck’s (1995, p. 40) moratorium on class as the structuring principle of the
modern industrial state. Beck (2005, pp. 43–50) has argued more recently that the
concept of society implies an error he calls methodological nationalism, given that
modern societies have been national unities that are no longer relevant in the glo-
balised world.
Behind these disillusioned comments were doubts concerning the sociological
tradition itself. Many placed the burden of their critiques of sociology on its
Enlightenment roots but rarely referred to the social theory of seventeenth- and
eighteenth-century authors. If we are to understand what promise this tradition
might have held and might still offer now, we must go back to the way in
which it formulated the question of social order in modern society, and how clas-
sical sociology later elaborated it.
I address these questions in this article, drawing on two well-known recon-
structions of the evolution of the sociological science of society from the Enlight-
enment, one by Reinhard Koselleck and the other by Jacques Donzelot (1984).
Koselleck’s book Critique and Crisis (1988/1959) was one among several post-
war attempts to understand totalitarianism (Stalinism and Hitlerism) in modern
society. Donzelot’s work sets out to show how Durkheim’s sociology helped to
solve the issue of total society that had tormented French republicanism since
the revolution and especially in the Third Republic. I am focusing on these two
authors, first, because they demonstrate the importance of sociology’s link to
the Enlightenment that has been so ferociously attacked by post-modern critics.
Secondly, they share the critique of the pre-sociological Hobbesian idea that
societies need a sovereign state to hold them together, as they are ‘are too danger-
ous [if left] on their own’ (Gordon, 1994, p. 64). Doing this, they also point out an
inherent problem in the Enlightenment solution: if social order emerges from the
social rather than from the political, how can social divisions be dealt with, and
how is the political to be understood in its relationships with these divisions?
These have been major concerns of modern sociology, and my argument here is
182 P. Sulkunen
that they are as relevant in our contemporary world as they have been before,
although earlier divisions are different from those of modern industrial societies.
We can identify the task of sociology today by reminding ourselves of the origin of
the problem, rather than throwing overboard the idea of society, and sociology
with it.
The sociological theory of society

Let us start from what is now the prime target among critics of modern sociology
and its theory of society. Talcott Parsons drafted the theory in The Structure of
Social Action (1937) with a view to explaining the potential of social order in
modern conditions. His presupposition was that order could not depend on the pol-
itical structure. The Hobbesian solution to the problem of order (the problem of
war and violence in the state of nature)1 was itself a problem, since it assumed
that only the state could achieve social order. This is what sociologists have
never accepted, and most do not accept it now. Modern sociology stipulates that
the social order must stem from the social, and the political order must obey its
laws, not vice versa. Modern society must govern itself on its own. The sociologi-
cal theory of society is not neutral on the issue of democracy, which is why dicta-
torships have never tolerated it. In the words of Parsons (p. 93), ‘This is not the
solution in which the present study will be interested.’2 Why not?
This denial of interest in the Hobbesian solution prompts us to consider its
background in the history of ideas. Reinhard Koselleck (1988/1959) contends in
his Kritik und Krise that Enlightenment critics reacted to the crisis of absolutism
arguing that the political is not the source of social order but its effect. Koselleck’s
argument was that Hobbes, the political theorist of absolutism, separated politics
from ethics, following the traditional distinction in Christian theology between the
inner and external worlds of humans; man can only judge external acts, whereas
the inner realm, such as intentions and conscience, is God’s, and therefore of
higher moral worth. Hobbes turned this Christian duality around and argued
that intentions and conscience were a private matter and a source of conflict
rather than of peace. Conscience degenerates into the idol of self-righteousness:
it is the source of evil itself even when it is based on religion. In war there is
no telling what is objectively good and what is evil, and the naturally human
wish for peace is not sufficient in itself to temper the thirst for power. Therefore,
Hobbes argued, the state performed the necessary role of the ‘mortal God’ who
judged mankind’s passions with sovereign reason (Koselleck, 1988/1959,
p. 32). Man is split into two halves, the private and the public. The private is of
no interest to the state: it is a secret of no importance to social order, and corre-
spondingly, the state is morally neutral (pp. 36–39, 53).
The Hobbesian solution, then, excludes from the state everything we now
include in the social: morality, higher causes, community, identity, and passions
about them, and even justice. And vice versa, it attributes social order entirely
to the state, which is not dependent on the social at all. The state is the public
executor of order and peace. On the other hand, human virtues, passions, and
intentions are indifferent to the social order unless they violate the will of the
sovereign. Even the sovereign may err, but never breaks the law – because he
or she is the law. ‘It is true that they that have soveraigne power may commit Ini-
quitie, but not Injustice … ’, Hobbes wrote (quoted in Koselleck, 1988/1959,
p. 36).
Enlightenment criticism aimed to remove the disjunction of the state from the
social, and the critique came of age in classical sociology. John Locke initiated the
emancipation of the social in distinguishing between Divine Law as the measure of
sin and duty, Civil Law as the measure of crime and innocence, and Philosophical
Law or the Law of opinion or reputation as the measure of virtue and vice. The last
of these originates in the interior of human conscience, in the space that Hobbes
exempted from the realm of the state. For Locke this interior no longer remained
within the individual: through conversation and common judgement it gained the
character of laws that received their obligatory power from the unspoken accord of
the citizens, ‘by a secret and tacite consent’ (Locke, 1894, para. 10, quoted in
Koselleck, 1988/1959, p. 55). For Locke, as Koselleck puts it, ‘The private and
the public are not mutually exclusive; as a matter of fact the public realm arises
from the private one.’ (Ibid). The social enters the doors of the political. Later
in the mid-eighteenth century, Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s (1998/1762) idea of the
volonté générale, the general will, was the culmination of this critique.3 It
placed individuals’ conscience and passions at the heart of the political sphere:
although emanating from society it assumed absolute power and subsumed every-
body, even the lawmaker.
Koselleck did not discuss the work of David Hume and Adam Smith, but the
work of each of them is relevant to this debate. Both argued against social contract
theories on the basis of their assumptions about human nature. Their contribution
to the modern sociological theory of society is a topic in itself, but here I wish to
point out just one aspect of their argument. Both maintain that the justification of
political power, however despotic, emanates from society, although not in the form
of a contract:
… as force is always on the side of the governed, the governors have nothing to
support them but opinion. It is therefore, on opinion only that government is
founded; and this maxim extends to the most despotic and most military govern-
ments, as well as to the most free and most popular. The soldan of Egypt, or the
emperor of Rome, might drive his harmless subjects, like brute beasts, against
their sentiments and inclination. But he must, at least, have led his ‘mamalukes’
or ‘praetorial bands’ like men, by their opinion. (Hume, 1987/1777, p. 32)4
The natural ‘opinions’5 concerning the right to property and power, and the public
interest (in social order) are consolidated by the ‘love of dominion and habit’
invested in human nature, although people do not discover them beforehand or
foresee their operation so as to make a social contract. Governments are formed
casually and imperfectly, not by a linear process, but by a ‘perpetual intestine
184 P. Sulkunen
struggle between authority and liberty. Even the most absolute monarchies are
never unrestricted in their power’ (Hume, 1987/1777, pp. 39–40). Mikko
Tolonen (2013) has recently shown that Hume joined Mandeville and Rousseau
in their criticism of the Hobbesian ‘selfish theory’, to turn upside down the idea
that the political society (sovereign absolutism) is the guarantee of social order.
Now the political order becomes the effect of society, not its cause. This is
already quite close to later sociological understandings of modern society.
Smith’s theory of justification is similar. In The Theory of Moral Sentiments he
sees justice as a fundamental social virtue that plays a crucial part in giving rise to
the institution of government. It is maintained by the moral sentiments of anger
and hatred aroused in all humans who experience, or even witness, undeserved
blame or unjustified acts of violence and greed. Justice requires that individuals
are recognised as autonomous agents, persons with dignity. Smith explicitly
explains that justice does not imply equality of authority among individuals.
Humans have a natural inclination to admire wealth and power, but to gain the
loyalty of others, men of rank should attempt to recruit their admiration and sym-
pathy through appropriate comportment, manners, style, and aloofness. Smith ridi-
cules Rousseau for utopianism thus: ‘ … to suppose that kings are the servants of
people, to be admired and obeyed or resisted, deposed of and punished as the con-
venience of the public may require, is a doctrine of reason and philosophy, but it is
not the doctrine of (human) nature’ (Smith, 1976/1790, pp. 50–61).
In one way or another, then, Enlightenment critique derives the political from
the social. Locke and Rousseau stressed the procedural aspect of moral approval of
the government; Hume and Smith stressed the natural moral sentiments of humans
that give priority to justice and social order over the allurements of the present and
the frivolous temptations of private passions.
Koselleck’s interpretation highlights one problem in Locke and Rousseau, and
after them in debates about the revolution conducted in the salons of Paris by the
famous political thinkers Turgot, Diderot, and Abbé Raynal (Gordon, 1994), as
well as Thomas Paine in England (Thompson, 1991/1963). The question that
haunted these intellectuals was the very same balance between liberty and auth-
ority that Hume had in mind. They could see that revolution was necessary, but
acknowledged that its consequence may not be freedom. The authority of a repub-
lican government must be founded on the general will, but the general will could
only exist if it was total and exercised with despotic power. Thus, the belief that the
state and the law represent the will of the people, to which everyone must submit,
has the potential to turn into totalitarianism and terror. Koselleck argued that the
elevation of the social into and even above the state was a utopia of the Enlight-
enment. It led in the end to the escalating Cold War between ‘liberal-democratic
America and socialist Russia’, both ‘retracted in the Enlightenment … as the
common root of their claim to exclusiveness with its moral and philosophical legit-
imations’ (Koselleck 1988/1959, p. 1).
Koselleck was not the only post-war critic of Enlightenment republicanism.
Karl Popper (1956, p. 535) considered Rousseau’s romanticism to be ‘one of
the most pernicious influences in the history of social philosophy’, and saw the
concept of the general will to be a predecessor of Hegel’s notion of the Spirit of
the Nation (p. 240), which was central in his justification of absolutism. Claude
Lefort’s (1986, pp. 278–287) analysis of totalitarianism in the Soviet Union also
rested on the idea that abolition of the sovereign leaves an empty space that
will, in certain historical conditions, be refilled with the imaginary of the
People-as-One and the bureaucracy, mandated by the Party-as-One behind it. In
this way the state becomes again consubstantial with society, with totalitarian
effects. A common element in such theories was that totalitarianism aims at elim-
ination of differences, and as a consequence symbolically denies the existence of
real inequalities (Lefort, 1986, p. 280).

To those familiar with Zygmunt Bauman’s work, Koselleck’s emphasis on the
continuity between Enlightenment critique of absolutism and the potential of tota-
litarian terror in the republic will be less surprising than it first appears. Society on
its own has a tendency to become repressive under the assumption that it is gov-
erned by the general will. Bauman’s critique of modernity, especially in Modernity
and Ambivalence (1991), is based on philosophical and psychological premises
concerning modernity’s yearning to constrict ambivalence in the search for cer-
tainty (echoing here the work of Hannah Arendt and Erich Fromm). This led to
the twentieth-century nightmare of manufactured homogeneity through the elim-
ination of strangers, and the suppression of the difference and the ambivalence
they generate. The Holocaust was not the work of a pre-modern backlash of des-
potism: it was, for Bauman, a logical result of modernity itself, with the political
emanating from the social (Bauman, 1992).
The republican potential for totalitarianism did not need the historical experi-
ence of Nazism or Stalinism to be recognised. French revolutionaries were already
aware of the problem. Jacques Donzelot explained this paradoxical threat in his
book L’invention du social: the general will of the people, replacing the will of
the sovereign, may turn against the people itself (Donzelot, 1984, p. 51). Old
social ties, especially guilds, corporations, and the local community, were
destroyed, but nothing replaced them in the new social order. The sovereignty
of all citizens confers on the state an unlimited power and destroys individual
liberty. In Rousseau there was nothing between the individual and the general
will as executed by the Republic. The revolutionaries of 1848 were still immersed
in the ideology of the contract, but for them the Republic had become a problem
instead of the solution. The state was at the same time everything and nothing:
deriving its authority from the will of the people, it concentrates all the power
of society, yet its sovereignty rested unalienably with the citizens, which gives
everybody the right to reject this power. This ambivalence concerning the republic
explains the mix of extremely contradictory positions in the political discourse of
the 1848 revolutionaries. Utopian followers of Charles Fourier tended to see in the
republic nothing but the Ancien Régime in a new guise, while centralists like Icarie
de Cabaret would see the state as the good guardian of individuals’ comportments
as well as their consciences (Donzelot, 1984, p. 56). Accusations continued to
186 P. Sulkunen
pour over Rousseau’s contractualism in the Third Republic. It allowed nothing
between the individual and the state. The disaggregation of society allied the lib-
erals, the socialists, and conservatives in a fierce critique of the idea of the volonté
générale. One theme that animated socialist thought was that the contractual
republic elevated all individuals, even the wage labourer, into ‘an assembly of
kings, while in economic terms the worker is a kind of slave’ (Jean Jaurès in
1893, cited by Donzelot, 1984, p. 67).
Donzelot showed that Durkheim’s thesis of solidarity and the primacy of the
social finally opened the way to the politics of representation. The social in Dur-
kheim has primacy not only over the state but also over the individual. It is the
social that creates the individual in his or her solidarities with other individuals,
and as such individuals act as political agents, citizens of the republic. In
modern industrial societies with a high degree of differentiation and a strong div-
ision of labour these solidarities should be ‘organic’, based on differences between
groups, rather than ‘mechanical’, based on similarity and tradition (Durkheim,
1984/1893). The state was neither just a guarantee of the legal order as the conser-
vatives claimed, nor an instrument of class oppression to be taken over by the
revolutionary working class, as claimed by the radical left. Its task was to
assure and strengthen the solidarities in society, ‘no longer the subject of
society but its priest, its Church, not pretending to be its god’ (Donzelot, 1984,
p. 86).
The theme of solidarity appeared everywhere in the last decades of nineteenth-
century France, in ceremonies of inauguration or commemoration, in agricultural
exhibitions as well as graduations in colleges and schools. Durkheim’s contri-
bution, especially in the Division of Labour (Durkheim, 1984/1893), and
Suicide (1997/1951) gave it a scientific and more exact formulation. Léon
Duguit, professor of law and student of Durkheim, argued that solidarity is the
law of organisation of society, and the task of the state is to serve this law. The
state is a social fact (cf. Durkheim) but is no more sovereign than the individual,
which is the product of solidarity. Now the political rhetoric also changed, liberals
and conservatives jointly promoting the idea of solidarity within the nation. The
right deplored the destructive effects of the social state on the family and tra-
ditional ties of solidarity, the left arguing that the social state is the key to solidar-
ity, but possible only if supported by the working class and its associations. The
social question was born. (Donzelot, 1984, pp. 94–103).
Donzelot’s account demonstrates what sociology has had to offer as the
science of modern society. The idea of solidarities within the social as the
primary source of social cohesion fed into subsequent sociological debates over
conflict and integration theories, power, mass society, and pluralism. These
debates and approaches have largely addressed the issues raised by this very start-
ing point: if societies govern themselves on their own, how can they deal with the
inevitable differences within the social, and how is the political related to them?
This is not the place to elaborate on how different approaches have been related
to each other and the various roots of modern sociological science of the social
order. This first part of my argument is just a modest reminder that this science
should be seen as the continuation of social philosophers’ turn away from Hobbe-
sianism in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Instead of criticising the
Enlightenment as the Other of post-modernism: the glorification of instrumental
reason, planning, order, naively idealised infinite progress, and so forth
(Gordon, 2001), the kernel of modern sociology as a science of society should
be identified in it. As sociology emerged from the Enlightenment it was
haunted by the question of how to incorporate the sovereignty of the post-absolu-
tist state with its source, the sovereignty of citizens with their differences and
inequalities. My second argument is that the same question is relevant today,
not only in countries toppling down old dictatorships and trying to build up
societies that can maintain themselves without external force, but also in advanced
democracies.
Critique and crisis

To justify the second argument, three historical facts must be considered at the
outset. First, there is a tendency to underestimate how recent was the birth of
the politics of representation even in Western Europe. When Durkheim was
working out his theory, parliamentary democracy was still only emerging.
Before the Second World War, universal citizenship under the rule of law was
still a project and political participation an ideal. This was the case even in the
Nordic countries, where the foundational myths of nation building were associated
with the images of free-holding farmers, urban old middle classes (petite bourgeoi-
sie and the educated groups), and gradually also wage labourers (Stråth, 2012).
The threat of totalitarian rule in the name of national unity was lurking around
the corner, and was almost realised in Finland in the 1930s (Alapuro, 2012). Con-
tinental deviations from these ideals are only too well known.
Secondly, the Enlightenment critique of the primacy of the political does not
always apply directly. States, even if monarchical, were often important in build-
ing the social in the first place. Nordic ‘absolutism’ at least was never sovereignty
above religion as Hobbes thought. Gustav Wasa I, the Lutheran founder of the
Swedish monarchy and the state church of Sweden, presented himself as the
King of the Swedish people. Aage Sørensen (1998) describes how the Kings of
Denmark-Norway also joined forces with Lutheran Pietism from 1660 until the
mid-nineteenth century. Nation building in the late nineteenth century again
required the support of the people (Slagstad, 1998; Stråth, 2012).
My third and most important point is again more general. The media and many
critics contrast the welfare state with individualism, but in fact the state has been
the most influential mechanism through which modern society produces the indi-
vidual. The French socialist leader Léon Bourgeois formulated the Durkheimian
premise well: ‘Whereas liberalism takes individuals as the instruments of progress,
solidarism understands the individual to be the final goal … Society, with its state,
commits itself to resolving the iniquities that it produces through faults in its
188 P. Sulkunen
organisation’ (cited by Donzelot, 1984, p. 111, my translation). State-driven indi-
vidualisation through education was commonly at the heart of the nation-building
process in the Nordic countries too (Stenius, 2012).
The great paradox of modernity, the consequences of which we are now living
with, is that progress towards a society on its own, with autonomous individuals as
the source of its authority, took the paternalist state as its vehicle. Parliamentary
rule gradually extended its range of application to include the social question in
all its dimensions: reforming the family, dealing with poverty, organising social
insurance, caring for health and hygiene, and education (Dean, 2010). The
social question involved extensive legal regulation of the labour market, which
interfered with the purely contractual and individualistic cell-form of the wage
labour system and politicised it (Castel, 1995, pp. 213–232). The authority of
the state allowed control of individuals’ lives in all areas of family and sexuality,
housing, consumption, work, and leisure. Consider, for example, the amazing
restrictions on alcohol use in the late nineteenth century and early twentieth
century. These were supported by mass movements that were not only moralising
about drinking but connected their purpose with other reforms like the living wage,
universal suffrage, education, and social insurance (Sulkunen, 2009, pp. 57–69).
The economic liberals of the Enlightenment, Turgot and Smith and their ideo-
logical followers in England (Polanyi, 1957/1944, pp. 93–129; Thompson, 1991/
1963, pp. 101–103), already understood that even if the capitalist state might be
minimal in economic terms, it needs to be a centralised one to serve competitive
accumulation. The response to the social question and the legal protection of the
labour market required a territorial state with a delimited population (Dean, 2010).
The problem of sovereignty that sociology inherited from the Enlightenment was
that even relatively democratic nation states tend to be inherently homogenising
and centralised (Hobsbawm, 1992, Chapter 5). Extreme examples were eugenics,
requirements of linguistic homogeneity and the obligation to go to war in the inter-
est of the nation state. Majority rule, the principle of democracy that followed from
the procedural tradition of Locke and Rousseau, took precedence over the prin-
ciple of liberalism that would have followed from Hume and Smith.
Yet the justification for the state’s penetration into the social, even the private,
was the education of autonomous citizens. Emile Vandervelde, a Belgian leader of
the socialist Second International and a temperance politician, formulated it in this
way:
We want men who have sensitivity to their misery to make it disappear; we want men
who are not asleep but awake; men who have a clear intelligence and a firm will. We
fight alcohol not only because the ravages it causes but also because it poses an
obstacle to the emancipation of a class who, for us, holds the future in its flanks!
(Vandervelde, 1910, pp. 49–50)
Alva and Gunnar Myrdal, the ideologists of the Swedish welfare state, were clear
about the task of the state in support of autonomous individuals. They
recommended state-driven measures to ‘improve the quality of human material’
such as parents’ training programmes, child care counsellors, home economics
classes in schools, nationally planned curricula, nutritional requirements, rational
consumer instruction, and home standardisation. Yet they justified the plan in their
book The Crisis in the Population Question (A. Myrdal & G. Myrdal 1935, p. 309,
author’s translation) in this way:
Our contemporary social order is built on the ability of self-determination, by giving

citizens the collective right to self-government, and not only in political terms: every
person in our modern society stands alone more than ever. There is no longer an inti-
mate, solidary, narrow circle to rely on, such as the family, the village or the church.
Individuals must therefore be able to plan their conduct and to build visions for their
future living, as well as to take responsibility for many of their decisions.
The institutions of representative democracy were barely established when the

idea of society on its own faced a new type of crisis. The capitalist state was
not neutral. Universality requires sameness, and modern sameness has been
built on male-dominated family individualism among the petite bourgeoisie, inde-
pendent peasantry, and the old middle classes. As Foucault (1991, pp. 98–102)
wrote, the patriarchal family was turned from the model of governance to its
instrument and object. In the Nordic countries the normative ideal was endorsed
by the close ties between the state and the Lutheran Church. The state’s lack of
neutrality was the source of the new crisis, a subject of sociological critiques in
the 1960s and 1970s. Sociologists revealed the selectiveness of social control in
welfare, health, education, criminal justice, and police practices. They criticised
the state for not being neutral regarding gender, ethnicity, good taste, or even pol-
itical opinion. An extensive wave of liberal legal reforms correcting these injus-
tices followed throughout Western Europe when the new generation of
sociologists gained intellectual power (Sulkunen, 2009, pp. 119–140).
The neo-liberal turn in Western politics during the Reagan–Thatcher era
brought a new element to the critique, defining state penetration into the social
as a cost the society can no longer afford. When we look more closely, behind
the discourse about cost was discontent with ‘squeezing out the choices of
private consumers’ (Pierson, 1991, p. 180). This concerned not only the micro-
level choices of individuals but the governance of society as a whole. Gerda
Krippner has shown in her study of political justifications of the suddenly deregu-
lated American financial market in the 1970s that politicians and leading experts
had very little to say about the economic benefits of the free market of credit. Their
problem was rather that they no longer felt they had the moral authority to set pri-
orities in the way resources should be allocated between different industries,
housing, public services, and consumption. They believed the financial market
had to be deregulated because their mandate from parliamentary politics was
insufficient for the technical and moral management of society that credit
regulation involved (Krippner, 2011, pp. 58–85). A similar moral crisis of
public authority was a key factor in the financial liberalisation also in the
190 P. Sulkunen
Nordic countries (Sulkunen, submitted). Society should govern itself, on its own,
and the deregulation of markets was the only solution to resource allocation and
finance. Critics commonly understand neo-liberalism as a political doctrine that
recommends the free market to state involvement for economic reasons. It is
associated with ‘conservative’ governments like those led by Ronald Reagan in
the USA and Margaret Thatcher in the UK, but also in other European countries.
Quotation marks around ‘conservative’ are necessary, however, because in many
ways these governments represented change, even radical change to the state-
driven modernisation that dominated capitalism since the Second World War,
whereas it is difficult to say what these governments were about to conserve. In
their views individual freedom, self-responsibility, and the right to choose one’s
way of life without state paternalism, were the dominant values, not traditionalism
or moral prudence.
It should be noted that the two most visible advocates of neo-liberal economic
policy, Friedrich von Hayek (1959) and Milton Friedman (2002/1962), although
Nobel laureates of economics, argued for their position in moral rather than econ-
omic terms. For neo-liberals the market has been a solution to a moral problem;
not necessarily an institution with intrinsic value, nor an instrument to advance
the interests of those who are strong on the market. The moral problem was
mistrust in the concept of the general will represented by majority rule. Von
Hayek’s (1959, pp. 103–117) distinction between liberalism and democracy (as
majority rule) was fundamental to his critique of the modern state as the enemy
of freedom.
Deregulation and the roll-back of the public sector is not the end of that crisis.
When people take their autonomy for granted they start to claim the right to inti-
macy, too. Intimacy means separation from others, a sensitivity to authentic self-
hood, distinction, and identity, in other words difference. This is the source of what
Luc Boltanski and Eve Chiapello call the ‘artistic’ in contrast to the ‘social’ cri-
tique of capitalism. Whereas social critics grumble about injustices, insecurity,
and wretchedness, artistic critics bemoan ‘the lost sense for beauty and grandeur
effected by standardization and commercialization, not only of everyday things,
but also objects of art (bourgeois cultural mercantilism), even humans’ (Boltanski
& Chiapello, 2005/1999, p. 84). The term ‘artistic’ refers to the aesthetic version of
the romantic modernism that emphasises intimacy, i.e. authenticity of experience
(beauty) and distinctness of the person (artist or connoisseur). The same tradition
was identified by Colin Campbell as a constituent part of the student radicalism of
the 1960s in his landmark book The Romantic Ethic and the Spirit of Modern
Consumerism (1987).
This genre of criticism, too, has been hostile to the state, even if often
pronounced from the political left. Therefore it does not translate well into positive
social science or socialist politics, but flourishes among intellectuals instead.
Feminist writers and Marxist theorists have disparaged the welfare state that helps
the ‘transcapitalisation’ of society.6 With state support, commodity relations pene-
trate the private to the benefit of capitalist reproduction and class reconciliation.
Today the state-driven programme of citizens’ autonomy is no longer a dream
but reality taken for granted. Paternalistic efforts to educate members of society
to assume self-responsibility while enjoying freedom from traditional ties no
longer provide the legitimacy they had in Vandervelde’s or the Myrdals’ time;
on the contrary they tend to be interpreted as violations of autonomy already
gained. Preventive alcohol and drug policies, safety regulations, health counsel-
ling, and child rearing programmes easily evoke criticisms of the ‘nanny state’.
On the other hand, such efforts are felt to be necessary to defend the very
same autonomy they seem to offend. Consequences of risk behaviour inevitably
fall not only on the individuals directly concerned but also on society, as health
and social expenses and other types of harm to others. This is one reason why
responsibility for such efforts is often devolved to ‘participatory’ organisations
representing directly the ‘voice and choice’ of citizens in matters of their own
welfare. Instead of a state standing for the general will of the people, the
subject of governance is hybrid and assembles different societal actors – the
state, markets, Civil Society Organizations (CSOs), communities, and citizens
– in new, contractual alignments (Sulkunen, 2007).
This hybrid mode of governance is one attempt to solve the Enlightenment
dilemma: how can the sovereignty of the state be established without detractions
from the autonomy of its source, society with its own solidarities. It is an attempt,
not a total solution, since it generates conflicts that can only be discussed in
abstract terms of justice, or in even more abstract terms of goals that everyone
can accept: health, welfare, and security. These conflicts are aggravated by
claims for intimacy and right to difference. One person’s intimacy may cut into
another person’s autonomy, and vice versa: defence of everybody’s autonomy
in public-health-oriented consumer policy significantly undermines some consu-
mers’ intimacy. Authenticity and identity in sexual behaviour, ethnic traditions
or religion may also violate other people’s sense of autonomy. Debates concerning
homosexual marriage, religion, the state and the church, language, and many other
issues are examples of conflicts arising from differences that are difficult to adapt
to sameness.
Is democracy still possible?

The first part of my argument is that modern sociology is a continuation of the
Enlightenment critique of the primacy of the political as the harness of social
order (but not necessarily the stereotypical assumptions of Enlightenment ration-
ality, etc.). The second part of the argument is that the outcome of that critique, the
idea of society governing itself, is still relevant even in advanced democratic
societies today. Supposing that the dividing solidarities of class and nation in
modern industrial societies are today as insignificant as post-modern critics of
sociology maintain, what has the idea of society on its own still to offer? What
happens if the autonomy of citizens, the source of the legitimacy of political
power, is felt to be violated by state authority while the state is also expected to
192 P. Sulkunen
protect individuals’ welfare, health, and security against violations by other
members of society? What can sociological research contribute to understanding
the contradictions between intimacy and autonomy discussed above?
These questions highlight the need to analyse, again, the relationship between
the social and the political. The first theoretical possibility available among socio-
logical traditions is a return to the totalitarian state. This is the apocalypse dreaded
by mass-society theorists (Baudrillard, 1983/1978; Mills, 1959). Following the-
ories of totalitarianism exemplified by Claude Lefort above, and the potential of
totalitarianism in the Enlightenment tradition that Koselleck pointed at, they
have feared that solidarities within the social may dissolve. This would leave an
empty space to be filled by a power elite strong enough to oppress away differ-
ences in the name of the People’s unity and common interest. In my view this
is unlikely, as totalitarian rule is incompatible with the principles of autonomy
and intimacy (Sulkunen, 2012).
The second option is deliberative democracy, where stakeholders are invited
to participate in the formation of specific policies (Gutmann & Thompson,
1996). This is an appealing option because it stresses agency and participation.
No submission to the general will is necessary, because issues are raised and dis-
cussed only among those who are immediately concerned, by virtue of interest
or belief (the environment, animal rights, healthy living, peace, human rights).
The weakness of this solution is that it is excessively responsive to power:
only those with high stakes and strong resources can effectively participate in
it. ‘Resilience’ (Hall & Lamont, 2013), ‘agonistic conflict’ from below
(Mouffe, 2005, pp. 98–107), and counter-democracy of the street (Rosanvallon,
2008) are also frequently proposed as alternatives to the moral crisis of the state.
I include these propositions in the type of communicative democracy that delib-
erations and consultations also represent, with similar doubts as to their capacity
to replace representative democracy as the form by which society governs itself
on its own.
We are left with some new kind of representative democracy. An obvious
lesson is to learn from Hobbes. Intimacy has little to do with maintaining social
order. Unlike the normative state in its rather recent past, the state should be
neutral as regards authenticity, identity, and difference in articulating the
common good. At the same time it should be strict as regards fairness and
justice. The state can maintain its legitimacy only if it respects the autonomy of
its source, the citizen. Transparency, electoral fairness, and impartiality concerning
the rights of citizens are therefore not only moral goods, but indispensable for
social order in societies governing themselves on their own. The market alone
cannot guarantee these conditions.
The difficulty is the high degree of symbolisation of differences as regards
autonomy and intimacy. If there is a sociological promise today, it is to disclose
and politicise the negotiable interests and boundaries underneath the non-nego-
tiable imageries of identity, belief, and authenticity that organise the solidarities,
even in advanced contemporary democracies.
Funding
This work has been supported by the Helsinki Collegium for Advanced Studies, University
of Helsinki, Finland.
Notes
1. It is often thought that the state of nature in Hobbes is one in which humans are with no
society, and sometimes he himself thinks in this way. However, Bernard Mandeville
remarked in the Second Part of his Fable of the Bees that the passions that lead to
the bellum omnium contra omnes (“perpetual and restless desire of power after
power, that ceaseth onlly in death” [Hobbes 1971/1611, p. 34]), were already a
product of society. Rousseau (1998/1755, p. 56) adopted the same criticism of
Hobbes from Mandeville. This point is essential in the turn away from Hobbes in
Mandeville’s thought and more widely in early eighteenth-century social thought
(Tolonen 2013, pp. 41–42). The corrupting effect of society is echoed in Léon Bour-
geois’ view that ‘society, with its state, commits itself to resolving the iniquities that
it produces … ’ (my italics; see section ‘Critique and crisis today’ in this paper). For
this reason, the ‘natural state’ here is not the state of nature, properly speaking.
2. This is the prime target of Bauman’s (1991, p. 190) critique: ‘ … sociological theories
of modernity (which conceived of themselves as sociological theories tout court) con-
centrated on the vehicles of and conflict-resolution in a relentless search for solution to
the “Hobbesian problem.” This cognitive perspective (shared with the one realistic
referent of the concept of “society” – the national state … ) a priori disqualified any
“uncertified” agency … as a destabilizing and, indeed, anti-social factor … prime
importance was assigned to the mechanisms and weapons of order-promotion and
pattern-maintenance: the state and the legitimation of its authority, power, socialisation,
culture, ideology etc.’ In my opinion, Bauman’s caricature misrepresents the Parsonian
project in an essential respect: it would not accept a state-centred – in a way a Hobbe-
sian – solution to the problem of social order.
3. Rousseau (1998/1762, pp. 39–41).
4. Members of the military body originally comprising Caucasian slaves that seized the
throne of Egypt in 1245 and continued to form the ruling class in that country
during the eighteenth century. Praetorian bands were the bodyguards of ancient Rome.
5. We would now call them principles of justification.
6. The term, originally Durchkapitalisierung, comes from a German author Joachim
Hirsch (1980).
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On: 28 October 2014, At: 15:48

European Journal of Cultural

‘Society on its own’: the

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‘Society on its own’: the sociological promise today

Department of Social Research, University of Helsinki, PO Box 4, Helsinki, 00014 Finland

(Received 13 March 2014; accepted 7 August 2014)

© 2014 European Sociological Association

speak of grasping their intersections with subjective experiences of daily life

The sociological theory of society

real inequalities (Lefort, 1986, p. 280).

Critique and crisis

Our contemporary social order is built on the ability of self-determination, by giving

The institutions of representative democracy were barely established when the

Is democracy still possible?

Sørensen, A. (1998). On kings, pietism and rent-seeking in Scandinavian welfare states.

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