A blog post by Hartley Dean, Emeritus Professor of Social Policy, LSE
—
The human species we know full well is endangered by threats of its own making from impending global and national crises; climate change, systemic inequalities and failing public services. And yet its response is impaired not only by the insidious grip of unthinking populist sentiment, but also by an underlying fetishised perception of individual human sovereignty; a blindness to our essential social interdependency or ‘sociality’. This short article will endeavour to elaborate upon the possibility of a radical humanist approach to social welfare centred on the realisation of human sociality.
‘Sociality’ is not to be crudely understood as a synonym for sociability, though it has been suggested that it might be taken as a synonym for Aristotle’s zöon politicon or Seneca’s homo social. In the 17th Century, Grotius contended that the foundations of human society are to be laid not through divine revelation, but human ‘sociality’; the social connectedness through which we mediate rationality and emotion. In the 19th Century, Darwin contended that while other animals might exhibit sympathy and pleasure in ‘society’ with other members of their own species, only humans can be ranked as ‘moral beings’. In the 20th Century, philosophers have explored the essential ‘inter-subjectivity’ that characterises human existence. Psychologists have offered the concept of ‘ontogenetic sociality’; the foundational relationship between the species-specific development of the human organism and the processes of socialisation by which socio-cultural activity is maintained and developed. However, the most encompassing discussion of sociality is one that may be distilled from anthropological insights to be found in the philosophical writings of Karl Marx.
Marx identified four interdependent constitutive characteristics that define the essence of the human species, of which sociality is one; the others being ‘consciousness’ (he argued – against Cartesian dualism – that while thinking and being may appear distinct, for humans they also form a unity); ‘work’ (by which he was referring to human beings’ creative metabolism with nature); and history making (in the sense that humans, uniquely, make their own history and every human is a part of history). Sociality, therefore, is central to the ways in which human beings recognise, care for, collaborate with and sustain one another as thinking, creative beings in a world in which, as a species, we are uniquely capable of purposeful impact. Honneth has argued that the human story may be understood as a struggle for recognition and that in the social interactions that constitute a ‘good’ or ethical human life, mutual recognition may be achieved at the level of intimate relationships, through love; at the level of community relationships, through solidarity; and at the level of relations with distant strangers, through rights. The argument I am seeking to develop is that the development of social rights – whether as citizenship rights or as a component of international human rights – is to be understood as an expression or manifestation of human sociality.
Why, however, in the benighted course of human history has sociality, as an essential human characteristic, not been more obvious? An explanation may, in part at least, be found through a deeper analysis of a phenomenon identified – in a variety of contexts – with the terms fetish and fetishism. A fetish may be described as an artifice or ideal immanently vested with the power or authority – whether for good or for ill – to shape or distort the perception of human relationships. Fetishism began as an anthropological concept relating to the mythologies and beliefs in exterior magical forces that in early human societies governed gift giving and customary social maintenance practices. Similar explanations have been applied to the immanent functions of religion. All world religions seek to impose on believers some version of the ‘Golden Rule’; do unto others as one would have done unto you. Liberal Enlightenment philosophy frames versions of a similar injunction in the language of rational imperatives. Psychoanalysts adopted a notion of fetishism when positing involuntary mechanisms that divert or displace the interior drives to which human beings are ‘naturally’ subject. Rather differently, in the field of political-economy, Marx applied the term fetishism to describe the ways in which monetised conceptions of value and the commodity form distort our fundamental understanding of human need and social relationships: fetishisms that alienate and dehumanise We can extend that interpretation to consider how a fetishised understanding of individual freedom or sovereignty may entail the denial of the fundamental interdependency that defines the human condition. Human beings can care for and about one another; not only because they may be (in part at least) genetically hardwired to do so, not because they may be commanded to do so (whether by spirits, God or the Law), not necessarily because they calculate that it will be good for themselves, but because they are human. They are social beings that uniquely learn, work and – in an historical context – make their lives with each other.
However, our sociality is constrained by a hegemonic cultural context that at the level of much political and popular discourse promotes personal autonomy but does so without embracing the social interdependency on which human freedoms depend. Dependency, particularly dependency on state welfare provision may be stigmatised. Far-right political discourse is perpetuating the deception that human beings are – or should be – ‘naturally ’ disinclined to share the costs of combatting climate change; of mitigating poverty and social injustice; of ensuring universal provision for education, health and social care; of meeting the needs of refugees and those affected by geo-political and climate-related disasters in distant parts of the world. What might play some part in the subtle ‘war of position’ necessary in the face of our prevailing crises is a switch in perception; a Gestalt switch that might achieve greater recognition of human sociality. Sociality, however, (which might be thought of in terms of ‘care-fullness’) is interdependent with our consciousness (or thought-fullness), our work (or creative-ness) and our species being (or human-ness).
———————————-
Hartley Dean is Emeritus Professor of Social Policy at the London School of Economics. He had been for 12 years a welfare rights worker in Brixton, South London, before moving on to a 40-year academic career researching, teaching and writing about social justice issues.
His forthcoming book, Sociality: Social Rights and Human Welfare to be published by Routledge, will be available for pre-order from 17 October, 2024 from https://www.routledge.com/Sociality-Social-Rights-and-Human-Welfare/Dean/p/book/9781032587912