Social relations

We have to identify the concept which corresponds to a world of shifting boundaries and changing collectivities. It needs to express both the erection and dismantling of barriers and to leave open the possibility of the transformation of social entities in the course of human activities. We find it in the idea of social relations.

No matter how vast the society—for instance Asian or even world society; or separate, perhaps a ghetto; or focused, say, for the protection of birds; or general, as with ‘the family’—social relations are involved. Indeed, we can see all these societies or groups as different ways in which relations between people take shape and persist over time in a recognisable form. The idea of social relations conveys the vast variability and potential range of human society and societies without prejudging their unity, the boundaries between them, or their duration.

We have social relations with enemies as much as with friends. We may interact with people half way round the globe as much as with our next-door neighbour. We can relate to previous or coming generations, even if they can no longer, or cannot yet, respond.

The Englishman Herbert Spencer (1820-1903), who more than anyone else popularised sociology world-wide in the nineteenth century, gave this illustration of connectedness over space and time: ‘A derangement of your digestion goes back for its cause to the bungling management in a vineyard on the Rhine several years ago.’ ¹⁹

He conveys how important the organisation of social relations is in its consequences for people’s lived experience. They may not realise this, nor want it either. Society does not happen just as people wish it. It often confronts them as a fact. Equally people may also often try to blame someone else for something they could have avoided. Spencer plausibly illustrates how far-off social causes can make you sick. But does his choice of example unintentionally reveal British xenophobia? Is he blaming the consequences of a heavy night on the ‘Huns’?

We can then go further in defining of sociology. It may also be defined as the study of people in their social relations. When we talk about ‘societies’ in the plural we have in mind the ways social relations both unite and divide people. The divisions between the British and the Germans, for instance, are displayed within their relations with each other.

So relations between people may constitute a business firm, but its existence depends also on their relations with other people, like customers, suppliers, or even competitor firms. Its rivals relate to it in the special system of relations known as a market, where they may not know each other personally but still find themselves constrained by unknown others.

All types of human groups or associations from families to nation-states depend equally on internal and external social relations. In a school, relations internal to it, between teachers and pupils especially, depend on relations outside it, with parents, examination authorities, funding agencies and the state. Put another way, families cross the boundaries of schools; are both in them and outside them.

Human social relations are always incomplete in the sense that they always have to be renewed through what people do. They are none the less real for that. In the last twenty years purely mathematical work on rational choice has shown that it is advantageous for individuals to recognise pre-existing social relations. Indeed the idea that society might arise as a result of individuals, independently of existing social relations, agreeing to establish them through a social contract, is a fiction from an old modern time. Social relations, and this has been part of a longer tradition of common wisdom about society, are not under the control of the parties to them. With computer simulations in our time social scientists can show that alliances and coalitions have properties of their own which the parties to them ignore at their own cost.

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