Culture and Social Theory by unknow

Author:unknow
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Political Science, History & Theory, Social Science, Anthropology, Cultural & Social
ISBN: 9781560002758
Google: -M-EngEACAAJ
Goodreads: 2573607
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 1996-01-30T00:00:00+00:00

The Egalitarian Perspective: The Social Actor

Wishing to make use of Hobbes’s egalitarian man in a state of nature, the first group of interpreters we will discuss claims that Hobbes’s conception of man as an antisocial power seeker captures only those qualities of human nature that man has acquired in a special sociocultural setting. Thus, on this reading, the argument that people need an absolute sovereign to create social peace loses widespread applicability. “While his propositions are not universally valid, they are more nearly valid for his and our time.”36

According to these critics, Hobbes’s argument rests on premises that are created by the very same society the theory was supposed to explain. Since it is impossible to explain the emergence of a phenomenon by referring to qualities of that very phenomenon, his conclusions that a steep inequality is required for social peace cannot be supported. This school of critics might agree that Hobbes’s conclusions follow from his premises, and agree that the theory is an attempt to understand the creation of the state. But his premises, and more specifically his conception of human nature, are false; thus it follows that his conclusions are false.37

Further, these critics are anti-individualistic. In their view, an individual cannot be conceived of outside a social setting since all her basic features are products of an interaction with other human beings. The only inherent quality that can be assumed, they think, is some kind of sociability as a presupposition for the social interaction to start in the first place. Since man is a product of his environment he is also malleable. This holds up the promise for social change as a means to change humans. If this is true, they reason, the society must have more than purely instrumental value for the individual. These egalitarians view society as the foundation for an individual’s identity.

The argument has appeared in several forms of which the most famous is that of C. B. Macpherson, who calls Hobbes’s description of human nature “an unpleasantly accurate analysis not of man as such, but of man since the rise of bourgeois society.... Hobbes’s analysis of human nature, from which his whole political theory is derived, is really an analysis of bourgeois man.”38 Macpherson saw Hobbes’s notion of man as inherently glory seeking, as an attribution of a human quality that is “largely a product of the social relationships set up among members of the upper classes by the Renaissance encroachments of capitalism on the older order.”39 Of Hobbes’s other basic postulate, Macpherson maintains that the idea that “the competitive search for gain is a constant drive dominating the whole character of the individual... [and] is clearly derived from the behavior of man in bourgeois society.. .in contrast to pre-capitalist society.”40

David Gauthier argues that Hobbes’s conceptions of social relationships as “contractual,” human activity as “appropriative,” and human rationality as “utility-maximizing,” form the “deep structure” of Western Culture. How, then, Gauthier asks, has Western society kept from disintegrating? This remarkable feat of holding a society

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