Social Theory and Social Ties
As to the question which gave rise to this work, it is that
of the relations between the individual personality and social
solidarity. What explains the fact that, while becoming more
autonomous, the individual becomes more closely dependent
on society? How can he simultaneously be more personally
developed and more socially dependent? For it is undeniable
that these two developments, however contradictory they may
seem, are equally in evidence. That is the problem which we
have set ourselves. What has seemed to us to resolve this
apparent antinomy is a transformation of social solidarity
due to the steadily growing development of the division of
labour.
(Emile Durkheim 1964a [1893]: 37–38)
How is social order created? How is social order maintained? What
makes people live together in peace and initiate mutual ties? What are
the origins of the trust that is needed to be able to exchange goods
and services? What are the psychological, social, and cultural conditions
for the development of social ties? Those are the old questions to
which social science – as advanced by its classical as well as its more
modern authors – has attempted to find answers. The theme of social
order has not exclusively been a central focus in the sociological
discipline, but also in anthropology. In addition to Durkheim, Weber,
and Parsons, who took primarily (but not exclusively) Western society
as point of departure for their analyses, ethnologists and anthropologists
such as Malinowski and Lґevi-Strauss have studied the conditions
for the genesis of a common culture. Processes of reciprocal exchange –
of gifts, goods, and services – and the sense of moral obligation originating
in these processes proved to be the basis of many non-Western
societies.
In speaking of social order as a “problem,” Talcott Parsons identifies
two conditions at its root. First, people have limited capacities to
sympathize with their fellow human beings: there is a constant tension
between the moral obligations they feel toward other people and
the impulse to promote their own interests. What is desirable from
a normative perspective does not necessarily correspond to our actual
needs, wishes, and desires; this may be called a moral shortage. Second,
people inhabit an environment that provides insufficient resources to
fulfill the needs of all members of society; here, a material shortage,
apr oblem of scarcity, is involved. “The problem of order is . . . rooted
in inescapable conflict between the interests and desires of individuals
and the requirements of society: to wit, the pacification of violent
strife among men and the secure establishment of co-operative
social relations making possible the pursuit of collective goals” (Wrong
1994: 36).
The more society is in a process of change, the more social science
is concerned with the concepts of cohesion and solidarity. Therefore, it
is not surprising that at the end of the nineteenth century sociologists
were analyzing the consequences of the transition from traditional to
modern society for social cohesion and solidarity and anthropologists
were wondering on which principles culture and order in non-Western
societies were based. Which were their main ideas, and what can we
still learn from them? Why is the theory of the gift a theory of human
solidarity?