Three Selections on the Nature of Society

Auguste Comte “Society is no more decomposable unto individuals than a geometric surface is into lines, or a line into points “Without extolling or condemning political facts, science regards them as object of observations: it contemplates each phenomenon in its harmony with coexisting phenomena.. And each of them is explained when it has been connected with the whole of the existing situation and the whole of the preceding movement “It is our business to contemplate social order that we may perfect it.” –Comte, August, The Positive Philosophy, Harriet Martineau, Trans. And ed (New York: AMS press [1855] 1974):

Jeremy Bentham “The community is a fictitious body composed only of its individual members, and thus the interest of the community is no more than the sum of the interests of the individual members who compose it The notion of a body politic is a metaphor through which poetry has invaded the domain of reason ” –Bentham, Jeremy The Works of Jeremy Bentham John Bowring, ed. (Edinburgh: W. Tait; London:Simkin, Marshall, 1843): 306

Georg Simmel “There is an old conflict over the nature of society. One side mystically exaggerates its significance, contending that only through society is human life endowed with reality. The other regards it as a mere abstract concept by means of which the observer draws the realities, which are individual human beings, into a whole as one calls trees and brooks, houses and meadows, a ‘landscape’. However one decides this conflict the fact remains that… in order to satisfy their urges and attain their purposes, individuals associate in the innumerable forms of social life, all the with-one-another, for-one-another, in-one-another, against-one-another, and through-one-another, in state commune, in church and economic associations, in family and clubs.” –Georg Simmel “The Sociology of Sociability” ( Everett C. Hughes Tr.) The American Journal of Sociology, Vol. 55, No. 3 (Nov., 1949: 254