3 Individual

Individual as a political sociological category

The previous chapter looked at how political sociologists engage in the denaturalization of everyday categories, situating them in historically specific socio-political contexts. In this chapter, this approach will be applied to one of the most problematic categories of social analysis, namely, the individual.

While sociology began demarcating its field of study in the foundational works of Émile Durkheim by distinguishing itself from psychology and individualistic explanations of social phenomena, it nevertheless made constant recourse to individualism as a modern current responsible for a number of social ailments (Durkheim 1997, 2005). Early sociologists emphasized the power of social norms over mental processes in shaping the individual’s behavior. The externality of social facts to individual existence lays bare the coercive character of the social and, therefore its inherently political character (Durkheim, 1982). Involving both formal and informal mechanisms of sanctioning—imprisonment, excommunication, shaming, banishing—social relations are permanently pregnant with potential scenes of regulation.

The ability to claim the status of the normal and impose the stigma of the abnormality on select populations then constitutes the goal of ongoing political dramas based on social performances (Goffman, 1959, 1963; Foucault, 2003). Yet early sociologists collapsed abstract determinations of social facts with their concrete manifestations in the typical institutions of their time—state, family, trends, and conventions—operating with conservative assumptions that reinforced the normality of inherited social formations. More than a century before the academic foundation of sociology, one of the founding figures of the modern philosophy of individual experience, Immanuel Kant, refuted this bias towards the past as a constitutive erasure of human freedom, which he saw as the condition of possibility of truly moral action (Kant, 1781/2009, p. 398). In opposition to the glorification of the individual as the ground that allows the emancipation of human freedom and rationality from its enchainment to social conventions and dogmas solidified by communal forces of sanctioning, Durkheim diagnosed an extreme form individualism—namely, atomism—as the progenitor of the modern experience of alienation and anomie that proliferates in the absence of social bonds maintained through recurrent social rituals.

Thus, while being rejected as a unit of analysis to ground sociological method, the figure of the individual played a significant role in the formation of sociological discourse and its political reading of the modern condition. The problematic of the individual demonstrates how political sociology weaves together a trans-disciplinary field. Inhabiting this problematic zone, the figure of the individual provides a fertile ground to introduce major themes of political sociology and its critical attitude that underpins its work of denaturalizing the givens of social experience.

Critique of the individual

From philosophic critique to political economic critique

When Immanuel Kant wrote his critique of pure reason, he explored the conditions of possibility of experience. He discovered that in order to organize myriad sensory stimuli into meaningful perceptions, subjects must already be equipped with some analytical tools, namely fundamental notions (e.g. causality) that would allow us to configure disparate phenomena that takes place in space and time. Accordingly, causality is not an intrinsic quality of objects; it is the human rational organization of sensory data that discovers/projects a causality within/onto what’s otherwise a mere succession of occurrences. With this approach, he paved the way for the modern theoretical enterprise called critique. Critique as a research methodology involves the uncovering of necessary assumptions that one can extract from what presents itself as evidently true. Following Kant, scholars from different disciplines argued for many more elements to be necessary for an individual to have a rational experience.

Individual and history

This theoretical work of inquiring into the necessary conditions for possible experience did not reach its conclusion with the exploration of mental categories of rationality. Following Immanuel Kant, G. W. F. Hegel introduced a larger context—namely, history—into the picture. Hegel pointed towards history as the prerequisite for any individual experience. Hegel’s method differed from Kant, in that he found the subject not in a static position of reflection but in a wild movement composed of flux. The Hegelian subject was a constantly thinking subject animated by dramatic encounters with limitations, negations, and appropriations (Hegel, 1807/1977). For instance, in the movement of thinking, the subject recognizes its thinking activity through an awareness of the medium of thinking—i.e., language—in its objectivity. In realizing this medium as an instrument of communication, the subject recognizes the alterity that imbues this objectivity and thereby its distinction from subjectivity while also being its ground. With this realization, the identification of subject, language and thinking is shattered and exposing cracks of alienation (the experience of subject losing its supposed unity and self-sameness) through which shines the lights of history within the self-differentiated consciousness of the subject. One speaks another’s language (Fanon, 2008).

Thus, the self is not an autonomous entity but a dependent one. The subject is not self-constituted but becomes a thinking being through what’s offered by another. Language is not the product of one’s thinking but conversely, one’s own thinking is the product of someone else’s language. We do not speak language, but language speaks us! In facing its late arrival to the scene of experience, the individual recognizes historical time as the condition of subjective time. Through this process, thinking is discovered to be not only a matter of understanding but an act. By thinking through language, one acts (the self changes through its awareness of what makes her up), and is simultaneously acted upon.

Not only, as the primary product of its thinking essence, subject’s words are discovered to be a part of a negotiated reality (Gramsci, 1971), but also the very freedom of activity that defines subject’s moral character that allow subject to decide on what’s right and what’s wrong is contingent upon a struggle onto death with other individuals who possesses this freedom and the ability to set moral criteria to guide behavior (Hegel, 1977, pp. 104-119).

A truly free exercise of reason requires that the subject recognizes no limits to its rational process. Yet in following its course, the subject encounters another who is at work in a similar way—another subject who is realizing its own rational potential through the execution of free choices. In this encounter, both become the limit of the other. Hegel argues that the true meaning of freedom is actualized in struggle-unto-death, understood as the ultimate limit of one’s own ability to act freely. The consequences of this implicit story behind social interactions determines one’s hierarchical standing.

As a summary statement of all the social forces that one chooses to submit to, rather than ‘fighting them to death’, with its freedom and for its freedom, Hegel’s elaboration on the critical philosophy of Kant, transforms critical contemplative/descriptive philosophy into critical, dialectical, historical and social theory. What do we accept as necessary to survive? What material forces determine this acceptance? To what extent ideas play a role in our perception of what’s necessary for survival? And how do we define the minimal conditions of survival?

Individual and work

Existing in a body, and existing through a body, the thinking subject is predicated upon bodily subsistence. Thrown outside of its discursive flow into its material, sensuous and energetic engagement with its environment, the individual is thereby placed within the conditions necessary for such subsistence. This is called work. The critique of the individual paves the way for the analysis of the social organization of work (Marx & Engels, 1970). By analyzing the division of labor, surplus production, accumulation, private property, and exploitation, individuals’ differentiation into historically irreducible class positions is laid bare.

Branching out through further reading

In this section, we will offer paths beyond the themes, terms, and problematics explored throughout the chapter. The works presented here furnish opportunities for personalizing the study of political sociology as well as alternative directions for further research. The relation of recommended works to the chapter is multivalent, ranging from critical elaborations of the central ideas to illustrative expansions of research inquiries. Exposure to this work will lay bare the ungeneralizable transdisciplinarity of political sociology. There is an inexhaustible series of disciplines, cultures and events from which political sociological research emerges. By branching out, we shall break new fronts and discover the fuzzy and heterogeneous beginnings of fundamental inquiry.