Book contents
1 - THE EMERGENCE OF PRACTICE
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 17 September 2009
Summary
When considering the nature of social life, social theory has always availed itself of two master concepts, those of totality (whole) and the individual. As often noted, this penchant debuted in the Republic, where Plato tied his discussion of justice, education, psychology, art, and social existence generally to an analogy between the individual and society as a whole. Although this analogy remained a powerful metaphor and organizing principle in subsequent thought about social life, its two terms disengaged in the modern era and have often been developed independently. Most modern social theorists have promoted either the individual or the social whole as the fundamental ontological phenomenon, and sought to analyze the other once equally insistent concept on its terms. This bifurcation solidified in the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries with the association of the divergent political ideals and agendas of liberalism and socialism with the two paths of social ontological conceptualization. The opposition between these two ontological-political schools of thought has waned today. But the division in ontological proclivities still deeply rends social thought.
In the meantime, challenges have arisen to the integrity of the concepts defining the ontological front. Various currents in contemporary thought join in disparaging both the supposition of wholeness in social life and its construction in social thought. Many of these currents also undermine the unity and integrity of the individual subject and thereby problematize any construal of social existence as simply interrelations among individuals.
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- Social PracticesA Wittgensteinian Approach to Human Activity and the Social, pp. 1 - 18Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 1996