No sociology can do without a concept of the human person. Even various forms of determinism or those who most determinedly pronounced the ‘death of the subject’ have such concepts: humans are taken to be fully malleable, mutable, and mouldable by ‘social forces’. Those who view them as träger or fully permeable membranes simply conceptualize them in this way. This chapter deals with the different conceptions of personhood (usually) endorsed and advocated by some who call themselves ‘Relational Sociologists’ and those calling themselves ‘Social Realists’. In my view, these two approaches are complementary and can work in synergy; otherwise this book could not have been written.

In both approaches, ‘personhood’ is intended to cover the full gamut of concepts regularly used in social theory: ‘selves’, ‘agents/agency’ and ‘actors’. In other words, the ‘person’ stands for the full human being. The generic dispute in social theory is about the balance of properties and powers that should be accorded to the ‘social’ rather than to the ‘individual’. Both Realists and Relationalists are rather touchy about the term ‘individual’ because it is viewed as contaminated by its place in the history of thought and its association with neo-liberalism and ‘individualism’. Relationists prefer to talk about ‘selves’, or ‘persons as powerful particulars’ (Rom Harré); Realists about people in their ‘concrete singularity’ (Roy Bhaskar). In themselves these terminologi- cal differences are not important and I will try to respect this shared squeamishness by not using the noxious term ‘individual’.

What is important is whether or not our singular selves are credited with their own properties and powers – potentialities, liabilities, capabilities, creativity, suffering, intentionality, and reflexivity inter alia – and where and how these are held to originate. At first glance, Relationalists and Realists appear to give the same answer. These originate from our human embodied constitution and life in the real world with which we necessarily have to interact in order to survive and, better, thrive.

In ordinary life, we, qua individuals, often speak in the plural referring to a ‘We’. People say: we had lunch together, we went on holiday together, we wrote a book together, we furnished our house together, we had the same opinion about that, and so on and so forth. This ‘we’ is a term whose referent remains unspecified and serves only to indicate who was involved in an event. Its reality is taken for granted in everyday life. If one asks people to say what constitutes the ‘we’ they are talking about, most likely they will indicate a number of individuals and/or give a list of names, starting or ending with I myself. In ordinary language use, the ‘we’ appears to refer to an aggregate of people, seemingly wanting, doing, or thinking the same thing.

However, most philosophers and social scientists agree that the ‘we’ cannot be a simple aggregate of individuals who are supposed to share an idea, an action or a purpose. There must be more than that, but when they try to give an explanation of what lies behind the ‘we’, they also differ greatly in their accounts of it. The understanding of what constitutes the ‘we’ – in terms of intentions, beliefs, opinions, attitudes, orientations, thoughts, and actions – is crucial in comprehending most, though not all, aspects of the social. Therefore, it becomes essential to reach a clearer and sounder view of the ‘we’ as a social subject.

In this chapter, we begin (please, note that whenever one of us speaks each of us does so as part of a ‘we’) by considering the notion of the ‘Plural Subject’, which has received a lot of attention as a generic answer to the question about who and what the ‘we’ is that is so influential in social life. We want to show that the explanations of ‘Plural Subject’ theorists are both ill-founded and inadequate for the job.

In search of ‘other goods’ that confer solidity on a robust democratic civil society

For some years now the social sciences have highlighted the existence of a type of goods that are neither material things, nor ideas, nor functional performances but consist, instead, of social relations and, for this reason, are called relational goods.

This chapter proposes, first of all, to clarify this concept and, subsequently, to show that such goods can be produced only by specific social subjects, which we call ‘Relational Subjects’. We shall then see in which sense and in which way Relational Subjects, and the goods they generate, can contribute to making civil society more robust: that is, no longer the typically modern civil society – the bourgeois society of the market – but an ‘associational’ society able to sustain a mature democracy as a welfare society's form of governance.

It is important to emphasize from the beginning that the type of goods that we call relational cannot be traced back to traditional or premodern forms of social organization, because they require conditions that only modernity has created by making individuals more free and guaranteeing a considerable amount of social mobility. For a long time these goods have been dismissed or even repressed by capitalistic society as well as by societies dominated by dictatorships. Today they are emerging as the yeast of an advanced democracy. They are created precisely where relations between consociates are tendentially symmetrical (not hierarchical), free, and responsible (not constrained by authoritative norms or powers), not mercantile, in the sense of being dictated by the pursuit of individual profit.

Empirical studies show how widespread they really are. These are goods that are invisible to the naked eye (they are intangible goods) and are continually sought by people, but they come into existence only under particular conditions.

Every theory about the social order necessarily has to incorporate SAC: Structure, Agency, and Culture. The problem in hand will govern which of the three is accorded most attention, so the acronym SAC is not a general rank ordering of priority between the three elements. This is a logical point; if something is deemed indispensable to something else, it makes no sense to ask if one element is more indispensable than the others. If all are necessary, then they have to be recognized as playing some role in every social theory. Indispensability means that social life comes in a SAC – always and everywhere.

Without being strict about definitions for a moment, leave out ‘Structure’ and the contexts people confront then become kaleidoscopically contingent; omit culture and no one has a repertoire of ideas for construing the situations in which they find themselves; without agency we lose activity-dependence as the efficient cause of there being any social order. In consequence, contingency or determinism would have a clear field – one cleared of social theorizing.

During the last quarter of a century, the ranks of SAC deniers have swollen dramatically. As Doug Porpora maintains, the meta-theoretical stance of denial rests upon conflation. Instead of distinctive properties and powers pertaining to Structure, Culture, and Agency, any pair is conflated with one another, thus ruling out examination of the (changing) interplay between them and its theorization. The guiding metaphor becomes that of ‘flows’ or ‘liquidity’ – and it depends upon a prior dissolution of all three components of SAC. Thus, today's leading trope of ‘liquid modernity’ explicitly depends on an eclectic combination of denials of ‘Structure’ (replaced, for example, by theoretical assertions about ‘destructuration’ in the work of Beck), denials of ‘Culture’ as anything more than what people carry in their heads (endorsed by Elder-Vass), and of ‘Agency’, rendered fluid by notions of serial self-reinvention, thus severing ties with personal and group ‘identities’, ‘interests’, and ‘commitments’.

The range of Relational Subjects

Examples of ‘social subjects’ can be organized in a framework based on the level, type, and degree of mediation of their relations. The degree of mediation runs from a minimum (face-to-face, direct relationships) to a maximum (hyper-mediated, indirect relations, as in social mass movements). We will distinguish between three levels; micro-, meso-, and macro, where the type of mediation varies with the specific qualities of the social relations in play. Of course, various other typologies are often used; the most simple differentiates four types of spheres: mediations in the life world sphere – in the family, kinship, friendship, acquaintances; mediations in the sphere of civil society – in voluntary associations and organizations; mediations in the economic market; and mediations in the political-administrative system and its apparatuses. The three criteria of level, type and degree are intercorrelated but are not identical and are mapped in Figure P.1.

Instances of Relational Subjects at the micro-, meso-, and macro-levels

At the micro-level: the couple and informal relations

The couple – as a stable relation between two partners – is a Relational Subject if and to the extent to which the two partners act with reference to their relation (to its structure, its needs, and its conditions), being oriented to it rather than considering the relation as a function of the Selves involved. The same holds for informal relations (kinship, neighbours, friendship, etc.).

Each partner is increasingly a Relational Subject the more his/her concerns and actions are ‘centered’ on the relation with the Other. The couple as such is a relational social subject if and to the extent to which their relation as partners emerges as a reality distinct from the two individual subjects and, in turn, influences each of them.

The likelihood is that Part I has raised as many questions as it has answered. Perhaps for some readers this stems from our decision to introduce our concepts through ‘lifelike’ and recognizable subjects in fairly common situations. We hope that this worked, but it does not dispense with the need for conceptual precision. In fact, a consequence of choosing this mode of presentation is that the more vivid the characters used for exemplification, the greater the eventual need to discipline them conceptually. An anecdote used to circulate about Habits of the Heart, which excelled in pushing ‘recognizability’ much further than we have done with ‘David and Helen’. Colleagues would reply to ‘How are you?’ by saying ‘Oh, I'm having a very Brianish week’. All the same, no character vignette can replace the need to sharpen concepts into generalizable tools and to differentiate between a subject's circumstantial and particularistic features and those that pertain to the group or category that he or she is meant to exemplify. Conceptually, if one stands back from such vivid encounters (where the novel, film, and theatre outshine us), we sociologists are legitimately pressed to answer a range of issues about typicality, origins, historical specificity, causation, and so forth.

Our strategy in rounding out what is conceptually lacking is to condense these issues into a version of ‘frequently asked questions’ and responses to them. Because the issues themselves are complex and often require excursions into cognate areas, snappy answers are possible but not sufficient. In this Prologue to Part II, there are (at least) five FAQs arising from the previous text that the chapters constituting the second part of the book seek to answer. It may prove helpful to list them here and then to indicate briefly how they will be dealt with in Chapters 3–5.

The rationale for this book

Increasingly, theorists of many different persuasions are presenting themselves as ‘Relational Sociologists’. Yet it is difficult to see how there could be a sociological theory that was not concerned with relations in some sense of the term. The problem is that those appropriating this adjective for their theorizing mean very different things by it: ontologically, epistemologically, and methodologically. When Relational Sociology is proclaimed as a ‘manifesto’, the expectation is that its signatories will be endorsing at least the main planks of an ‘explanatory programme’; but even this is not the case. Moreover, ‘manifestos’ issued in any domain are promissory notes; what they promise is to perform a task better than did their predecessors. The trouble here is that the best known versions of ‘Relational Sociology’ – largely North American – do not even address the scope of this enterprise as traditionally conceived in the discipline.

Sociology came into being to seek answers to four questions about the social order: ‘Where have we come from?’, ‘What is it like now?’, ‘Where is it going?’, and ‘What is to be done?’ These are all realist questions: there is a real social world with real properties inhabited by real people who collectively made the past and whose causal powers are already shaping the future. One way in which Weber expressed the vocation of sociology was to discover why things are ‘so’ and not ‘otherwise’. In other words, the purpose of the discipline was explanatory. Both authors of this book situate themselves uncompromisingly in this tradition and in their previous works have struggled to contribute something to answering all four key questions. This distinguishes us from nearly all of those today who term themselves ‘Relational Sociologists’ and who retreat further and further from trying to explain anything. We can illustrate this most pungently by simply asking: ‘What do those proclaiming their approaches to be distinctively “relational” contribute to our understanding of what is happening today in our one global society?’ We are not exigently demanding a grand theory, but more modestly asking for a statement of their explanatory programme.

What are the drivers of Relational Subjects? Evaluating social relations

The Relational Subject is not only s/he who acts reflexively taking into account her/his relations with significant others, but is s/he who operates on/with/through social relations. Therefore, it becomes essential to understand how operations happen and are configured. We can translate this issue into the question: what is the role played by social relations in fostering that particular kind of sociability which constitutes the ground on which Relational Subjects can emerge?

Sociability can be defined as trust and cooperation among people who act in terms of reciprocal symbolic references and connections. Empirical research reveals that sociability is a complex factor that creates and enhances collective subjects, but social scientists are divided into two strands of thought.

According to the first strand, the enhancement of collective subjects does not need any network of social relations, or at least takes place without depending upon social networks, because what is necessary and sufficient is held to be the sharing of a common culture (e.g. civic or civil culture) among individual people. That is why collective subjects are quite often assimilated to social movements (such as the Greens or the Anti-Global movement). This simplistic assimilation should be questioned, because in many cases it could be incorrect and misleading. Social theory needs to distinguish between different kinds of social movements. On one hand, there are those movements that commence and consist in a protest and end with it (for instance, movements against the war in Vietnam or Iraq) or consist in reclaiming a right or seeking a vindication that, once obtained, is enjoyed by the individuals in their private lives (for instance, a movement that seeks the abolition of a tax or defends the existence of a public park and its use by individual citizens).

Introduction

Often the ability to state a problem is as important as the capacity to solve it. To that extent, Mead's conviction that the processes of socialization and reflexivity (which he called ‘inner conversation’) were necessarily intertwined was a breakthrough. It promised to provide leverage upon inescapable issues: how were ‘individual and society’ connected? How did the social order enter into the constitution of the human being? How was the tension between singular impulses and social normativity resolved? In his responses, Mead never relinquished his belief that the process of socialization also entailed processes of reflexive reception and reflexive reasoning on the part of subjects. This I consider to be his great achievement, despite serious doubts that his key linking mechanism between socialization and reflexivity, the ‘generalized other’, remains responsible today, as he himself came to question after the First World War. Therefore, it seems a squandering of his patrimony that those forming the line of Mead's successors – Parsons, Habermas, and Beck – should all have abandoned reflexivity in their accounts of socialization.

There are also two root difficulties in this long tradition of conceptualizing socialization. The first is that human subjects are cut off from linguistically unmediated relations with the world, as seen in Chapter 3. Habermas, endorsing Mead, encapsulates this when he says that everything the self is emerges because it ‘runs through the network of linguistically mediated interactions’. Intentionality, which is quintessential to meaningful action, is required to make a detour through the medium of language and thus linguistic inter-relations: ‘the linguistic socialization of consciousness and the intentional relation to the world are mutually constitutive in the circular sense that each presupposes the other conceptually.’

To give such epistemological primacy to language precludes any other mode of relational contact between human subjects and the different orders of natural reality (see Chapter 3).

Why the recurrent worldwide economic crises?

Do the recurrent worldwide economic crises have a sociological explanation?

The world crisis of the financial economy that broke out in September 2008 – first in the USA and then in Europe – has been interpreted in many different ways, though mostly from a strictly economic point of view. Basically, the crisis has been attributed to a ‘malfunctioning’ of financial markets, obviously widely resorting in the process to moral considerations concerning economic actors failing to behave ethically. Solutions have been seeking to identify new rules capable of moralizing markets.

Politics has been assigned the task of finding practical solutions, that is, measures to be implemented by national States and formulated by international agreements among States. International monetary authorities have been called upon by governments to act as fire brigades (i.e. to bail out banks and financial agencies from bankruptcy). Governments have adopted measures to limit the crisis's effects on unemployment as well as increases in national poverty rates.

We still lack a sociological interpretation of the crisis per se, differing from interpretations centred upon economic, political, and moral factors. Certainly many sociologists have provided sound analyses of the crisis, but their explanations have focussed mainly upon the interplay between the economic and political systems, without comprehending the very social features of the crisis. Other sociologists, for instance the supporters of the so-called theory of ‘reflexive modernization’, have dealt with the crisis in an abstract way, that is, as a historical stage in which modernization radicalizes itself, turns onto itself, and becomes a problem to itself.

Sociological analyses have often been confused with moral ones. Take, for instance, the proposals regarding a new economy with a ‘human face’, drawing economic behaviour from philosophical anthropology (in particular from a ‘personalistic’ anthropology rooted in both Catholic and Islamic thought).