Individual And Society Essay ⋆ Political Science Essay Examples ⋆ EssayEmpire

The interdependent relationship between the individual and society has been explored by classical philosophers and modern researchers, beginning with Aristotle’s description of humans as social animals about twenty-five hundred years ago. At the heart of this exploration is the puzzling question of how society enters into each individual and how individuals enter into society. A central theme in Greek discussions was the balanced organization of society, so that each individual could find his or her proper role, for example, as reflected in Plato’s The Republic, in which individuals receive training appropriate for the social position they are to occupy in an imagined ideal society. In 1516, Sir Thomas More (1478–1535) discussed another imaginary, perfect society, Utopia, in which wealth, work, and responsibilities are distributed equally and there is no private property, social classes, or even currency. Of course, utopias or perfect societies require citizens who can sustain them, and the question of how to teach people to live in and support better societies continues to be a central theme in contemporary research.

Social Contracts

The interdependence of the individual and society was highlighted in particular in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries through discussions of the social contract by Thomas Hobbes (1588–1679), John Locke (1632–1704), David Hume (1711–1776), and Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712–1778). It is to Rousseau that we owe the origin of the term social contract, or du contrat social. These authors were writing at a time of great industrial, economic, political, and social change and faced the challenge of justifying obedience of individuals to societal authorities. According to the logical social contract, it was assumed that sometime in the historical past, an actual contract had been agreed on between individual members of society and their rulers. This must have been the case because humans are fairly equal in their physical and mental abilities, and only through consent could leaders have obtained the cooperation of the majority to live under their authority in organized societies.

But why should individuals consent to enter into a social contract with a central authority? To this question, Hobbes (2008) provided the most direct and forceful answer: because individuals are born selfish and aggressive, and in a state of nature in which there is no central authority, life is “nasty, brutish, and short.” Each individual must give up certain rights to a strong central authority so that the central authority can provide protection and prevent a war of “all against all.” The Hobbesian tradition of assuming corruption and war to stem from inborn flaws in the individual is very much alive in psychologist Sigmund Freud’s (1856–1939) writings, depicting human personality to be initially dominated by the id, which is selfish, aggressive, and governed by the pleasure principle. According to this tradition, which is very much alive in modern research, we should look to inborn characteristics to explain not only individual behavior but also the state of society. For example, from Francis Galton (1822–1911) in the nineteenth century to Richard Herrnstein and others in the twenty-first century, one set of researchers has argued that intelligence is basically inborn and social and economic inequalities reflect inherited ability differences. According to this logic, people at the top are there because they were born more intelligent than others.

Corrupt Society

Rousseau set a very different tradition to explaining the relationship between the individual and society. People are born free, yet everywhere they are in chains; individuals are born good, yet there is corruption and greed everywhere. The reason, Rousseau argues, is because of the corrupt state of societies. It is corrupt institutions and cultures that create corrupt individuals. Later, Karl Marx (1818–1883) would argue this corrupt state of affairs is upheld by an ideology and false consciousness, the inability of individuals to correctly perceive their own class membership and interests, and that the role of the central authority is to protect the interests of the ruling class.

This emphasis on the power of the environment to shape human behavior is endorsed by the Lockian tradition of viewing the newborn mind as a blank slate, a tabula rasa. In the twentieth century, B. F. Skinner (1904–1990) and other behaviorists attempted to establish a science based on the laws of learning and to demonstrate empirically how the blank slate takes shape through environmental stimuli.

Individual Behavior And Engagement In Society

The decline of behaviorism and the rise of cognitive science and cultural studies have meant that the relationship between the individual and society is now studied with two major questions in mind. First, what are the universal brain characteristics that enable individuals to become active and engaged members of society? Second, what aspects of the environment enable society to enter into the individual and to regulate behavior? The first question has led to the study of possible prewiring in the brain, which enables human language acquisition, moral thinking, and the like. This line of research is particularly influenced by the ideas of Noam Chomsky and by the availability of new brain-imaging technologies. Research on stem cells, robotics, and biotechnology raises the possibility that in the future, researchers will be able to make more direct and effective interventions in cases of brain abnormalities.

Although individuals do arrive in the world with their brains in some ways prewired, research also highlights brain plasticity and the foundational role of society in shaping individual behavior. In addition to the focus on biological characteristics of individuals, then, there is also research on the second question stated above, namely, those aspects of the environment that enable society to enter into the individual and to regulate behavior. Two examples are the discussions by Richard Dawkins of meme machines, a cultural unit that can be transmitted from one individual to another, and research by Fathali Moghaddam on the means by which values and other aspects of culture are spread. The rise of religious fundamentalism and terrorism has focused particular attention on sacred carriers, such as the Islamic veil and the Christian cross, that individuals believe serve to connect them with holy powers.

Bibliography:

Blackmore, Susan, and Richard Dawkins. The Meme Machine. New York: Oxford University Press, 2000.
Dawkins, Richard. The Selfish Gene. New York: Oxford University Press, 1989.
Hobbes,Thomas. Leviathan. Austin,Tex.:Touchstone, 2008.
Moghaddam, Fathali M. The Individual and Society: A Cultural Integration. New York: Worth, 2002.
The Republic. Translated by G. M. A. Grube and C. D. C. Reeve. Indianapolis, Ind.: Hackett, 1992.
Rousseau, Jean-Jacques. The Social Contract. Miami, Fla.: BN, 2007.

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