The End of Society
The main impact of the idea of modernization, in both its positivist and its liberal version,
came from its assumption that all social structures and systems of social control are
crumbling. Modern societies can no longer be
― 57 ―
defined by principles, values, and norms but instead are defined by change, the triumph
of instrumental rationality, and the destruction of all absolute principles. Positivists believed
that these evolutionary changes would lead to a scientific society governed by political
engineers. Liberals predicted that society would be transformed into a market in which all
goods and services would be priced according to their utility.
But this confidence in reason and change could not exclude a deep-seated anxiety: how
would it be possible to introduce order into change, that is, to maintain the unity of society,
the continuity of law, and the possibility of education in a society that would be like a stream
in whose waters one cannot step twice?
Beyond the diversity of its thinkers and schools, sociology is a general interpretation of
modern society: its central purpose is to understand the interdependence of order and
movement. We must be clear on what classical sociological thought was if we want to
understand the importance and the novelty of neomodernist thought, which challenges the
solutions that were elaborated by classical sociology during the period of Western
industrialization. What we call classical sociology was actually a limited moment in the history
of social thought, a moment from which we are probably departing, that was built around the
central notion of society.
Modernity can be defined as a process of growing differentiation of economic, political,
and cultural subsystems. But the concept of society gained a central importance during the
long period that corresponded to a limited development of modernity, when economy, politics,
and culture were still closely interrelated. In merchant societies, the state was intervening
into economic life to protect roads and ports, to check weights and measures, and to ensure
the reliability of currencies. European national states eliminated the power of feudal landlords,
private wars, and all obstacles to the circulation of people and goods. They imposed the realm
of law over their territories. Of course the state was not only a maker of laws and a judge. It
was an absolute power and a maker of wars as well. But the idea of the national state and a
direct correspondence between a nation and the state gained ground, first in England and
France, then in Sweden. Finally, it triumphed with the American and French revolutions and
the Rousseauian ideal of the people's sovereignty.
Before the Renaissance, social thought was the comparative history of civilizations, that
is, religions. From the sixteenth to the nineteenth centuries it became political philosophy.
Society meant the polity for Hobbes, Locke, Montesquieu, and Rousseau. Tocqueville was
more the last of these great political philosophers that the first sociologist. These political
philosophers opposed the social to the nonsocial as order to chaos.
The idea of the national state as a unifying principle was then, at a
― 58 ―
higher level of modernization, replaced by the idea of capitalism, because the central
agent of social change was no longer the national state but the bourgeoisie. The concept of
capitalism is not a purely economic one because it identifies the economic structure with the
process of global change. This identification supposes the existence of strong links between
"civil society" and the state, between economy and politics. The idea of society finally
appeared as a combination of the national state and capitalism. Thus the idea of society, like
the earlier idea of the national state, is an effort to link what the process of modernization
tends to separate: economics activity, political and military power, and cultural values.
Durkheim among the great classical sociologists has the most anguished awareness of
the decomposition of social order and of the necessity to give the idea of society a central
role, both in sociological analysis and in the reconstruction of social order. Parsons, in
contrast, was more optimistic and gave us a triumphal image of society. He identified society
with rationality without sharing Weber's and Durkeim's preoccupation with the consequences
of modernization.
The idea of society is to a large extent a myth. It tries to overcome the growing
separation of the main elements of social life by introducing a central principle of social
organization. This sociologism is criticized by those who observe that modern societies are
built on power, exploitation. and was as much as on rationality, law, and science. I am not,
however, directly interested in these well-known criticisms. My central preoccupation is with
the consequences of contemporary hypermodernization, a development that appears to
destroy all unifying myths that try to bring together individualistic culture, constantly
changing economic activities, and a state that is more and more directly defined by its
political, military, and economic competition with other state. The importance of the idea of
society is that contemporary hypermodernization appears to destroy it, and it is doing so as
rapidly as industrialization destroyed the idea of the national state and led to the notion of
society.
The main characteristic of contemporary modern society is the extreme separation
between the state and social life, a separation that can no longer be overcome by another
unifying myth. This separation is felt very intensely in Europe, the continent where the first
national states were created. The economies and cultures of European nations have become
transnational; their citizens use a higher and higher proportion of foreign products and, even
more important, they are subordinated to the nuclear superpowers. The separation between
the state and social life was felt less intensely in the United States during the years
immediately after World War II, which explains the broad influence of Parsons's sociology. But
from the 1960s on, American citizens became conscious of
― 59 ―
the separation between state and society. But unlike European countries, their own state
had acquired imperial influence, had become a nuclear superpower, and thus could no longer
be reduced to a political institution like congress or municipal bodies.
At the same time that military power and international strategy are separating
themselves more and more from internal policies, mass consumption is overcoming the
barriers of social and economic stratification. Although some sociologist maintain oldfashioned
ideas in this area, socioeconomic status clearly has decreasing predictive power in
explaining consumption patterns and political choices. Often it is more useful to consider
upwardly or downwardly mobile groups or ethnic subcultures than socioeconomic strata in
explaining social behavior.
These observations are sufficient to describe the analysis of those who believe in the
waning of social movements. Their central idea is that social movements have existed only
inasmuch as they were at the same time political movements. They believe that only action
against state power gives unity and a central importance to protest movements, which
otherwise tend to be diverse and limited. Peasant movements in seventeenth-century France
became important only because they opposed state taxes in addition to the domination of the
landlords. If it had not been unified by political action, especially by that of the socialist
parties, whose main purpose was not to transform working conditions but to conquer political
power, what we call the labor movement would have been only a series of limited protest
movements. The predominant role of political action in the labor movements is demonstrated
by the fact that socialist parties have played their most important role in countries where
unions were relatively weak and where purely political problems were more central than social
problems, for example, the Austro-Hungarian Empire and France. The idea of socialism as a
global social movements has been more actively developed in these countries than in Great
Britain or the United States. This observation leads many to conclude that a social movement
is actually a mixture of social protest and political action. This mixture often leads to
contradictions, as demonstrated in the Soviet Union during the first years after the revolution.
Following the logic of this analysis, if political action and social protest now tend to be
more and more separated, social movements must disappear. Liberals, when they go beyond
a superficial apology for technological progress and abundance, defend an idea that is as
powerful as the ideas of progress and rationalization that were introduced by their
predecessors. This idea is the triumph of individualism, that is, the separation between
individual needs and aims and state problems. Individualism destroys not only the public
space, from institutions to socialization agencies, but also the very possibility of social
movements. On one side, liberals
― 60 ―
say, we see the presence of individuals, with their sexuality and violence as well as their
need for security and their efforts to climb up the social ladder. On the other side is the state,
which is first of all a military power and which is often able to absorb social life and
manipulate it, as in communist countries, or to identify itself with nationalist and religious
forces, as in many Third World countries. Protest movements appear against the state. They
range from the dissidents and the refuseniks in the Soviet Unions to the mass movement in
the United States opposing the Vietnam war and include movements opposing the permanent
threat of nuclear war. But these antistate movements cannot be identified as social
movements.
This hyperliberal view is highly original and creative. It has been reinforced by the
necessity to find a way out of structuralist pessimism. If social domination is complete, if the
whole of social organization functions as a system of social control that maintains inequality,
privileges, and power, if social movements are impossible and social actors illusory, and if
nothing exists but integration, manipulation, expulsion, and stigmatization, then the only
possible exit is individualism. This was Barthe's and Foucault's answer at the end of their lives
and it is also the "California" answer. It is an aesthetism, the search for pleasure, friendship,
and voluntary groups, and it is directly inspired by ancient Greece. According to this view, the
real objective of the new social movements is to get rid of society, not to transform it. The
new social movements are very far from the social movements that struggled for political
freedom and social justice, that is, the social ideas corresponding to the unifying myth of the
past. The new social movements recognize as their central value the autonomy of individuals
and groups. They try to express this autonomy by withdrawal, sectarian behavior, or
terrorism. No longer do social movements seek to control the main cultural resources and
models of society through conflicts in which enemies are defined by a process of social
domination. This liberal criticism of the so-called new social movements is much more
interesting than the vague analysis that lumps various currents of opinions, revolts, social
demands, innovations, and antistate campaigns together under this name.
The hyperliberal view is far removed from both nineteenth-century optimism and the
ideology of classical sociology. This latter body of thought believed in the progressive triumph
of civil society over the state and the churches and the parallel development of social and
economic integration with social and political movements. This ideology has been particularly
strong in the United States, where it is another version of the American dream: the effort to
build a society that is at the same time economically dynamic, politically democratic, and
socially open to organizational demands and protests. This is why classical sociology was
more
― 61 ―
influential in the United States that in Europe, especially between the two world wars
and during the 1950s.
Before I consider the issue of the existence of new social movements, we must recognize
as a partial conclusion that the image of a civil society in which opposite and complementary
social movements conflict with each other while sharing the same confidence in the idea of
progress is an illusion. This illusion, however, is still alive. It was directly present in Italian
unionism between 1969 and 1975 and in the ideology of self-management that culminated in
the LIP strike in France during this same period. These unionists sought to free their
movement from the control of political parties and to create a society dominated by face-toface
conflicts and negotiations between management and workers. But we know today—and
we should never have forgotten—that the state never can be reduced to the political
expression of civil society and cultural demands cannot be identified with programs of social
transformation.
Culture, society, and state power are more and more separated from each other. The
consequence is that no social movement can bear in itself a model of an ideal society. Their
actions are limited. Either the cultural and political unity of the national society is strong,
which limits social conflicts and movements, as has generally been the case in the past, or
this unity is weak or absent and nothing can integrate cultural demands, which are more and
more individualized. The history of modernization is not the victory of the market and
economic actors over states and churches but the decomposition of community, the growing
separation of state economic activity, and personality problems. At the end of the
decomposition of "society," defined as interrelated economic, cultural, and political systems
that are integrated by institutions and socialization processes, it seems logical to announce
the end of social movements, which are destroyed by the double triumph of individualism and
state power and can no longer transform a society that has disappeared.
If we consider not only the most industrialized countries but also the rest of the world,
the most important collective movements today are not social movements, such as socialism,
communism, or unionism, which have been largely transformed into the ideological bases of
state power, but rather the Islamic movement and, more broadly, the movements calling for
identity, specificity and community that link cultural demands and state power and suppress,
generally in a violent way, public space and social movements. The world appears divided into
two parts: Western countries that are dynamic, individualistic, anomic, and deprived or freed
from collective action, and Third World countries that are dominated by cultural or even
religious nationalism. In between these two parts the communist world crushes both
individual demands and collective
― 62 ―
action; its use of the vocabulary of the labor movement only emphasizes communism's
destruction.
In such a situation, is it not logical to consider that social movements take place only in
historical settings in which principles of social integration and open social conflicts coexist?
Without a principle of social integration based on a legitimate state, no central social
movement can be created; without open social conflicts and a recognized plurality of
interests, social movements are reduced to rebellions. Social movements were, according to
this view, directly linked with societies integrated by unifying myths—of the national state or
society—as well as with autonomous economics relations. We now observe their
decomposition in countries where an absolute state tolerates no diversity and imposes its rule
in the name of a communitarian destiny.
