If the self is formed within a world of language, institutions, practices and relationships, then society cannot simply be the collection of individuals who happen to inhabit it.
It has a structure of its own.
This possibility had been emerging for some time. Hobbes had imagined political society as an arrangement constructed from relations among individuals. Rousseau had asked how forms of social association could preserve freedom. Hegel went further, treating the institutions of social life as moments in the development of human freedom itself.
But the nineteenth century made another possibility increasingly visible:
society could be studied as something that generates patterns of its own.
This is not the same as saying that society is a thing.
It means that relations among people can produce consequences that no individual intends.
Markets are an obvious example. People buy, sell, work, save and consume for their own purposes, yet their interactions can produce prices, inequalities and cycles that no participant individually controls.
Language provides another example. No individual invents a language simply by speaking it, yet every speaker participates in maintaining and changing it.
Institutions behave similarly. They are made by people, but once established they constrain the people who inhabit them.
The relation is circular:
people make social structures, and social structures make possible particular forms of people.
This was a profound change in the philosophical possibility-space.
Society could no longer be understood adequately either as an artificial construction imposed upon independent individuals or as a natural organism existing independently of them.
It could be understood as a relation that becomes structurally consequential.
Marx made this possibility especially powerful by analysing social relations through material production. What appears at the level of individual choice can depend upon relations of ownership, labour and exchange that organise the choices available to individuals in the first place.
Durkheim would approach the problem differently, arguing that social facts possess a reality that cannot simply be reduced to individual psychology.
Their theories are very different.
But both make something newly visible: the social world has patterns that cannot be understood simply by adding up the intentions of its members.
This creates a new philosophical problem.
If society has structures that constrain individuals, where does the possibility of changing those structures come from?
The answer cannot simply be the isolated individual. The individual is already formed within the structure.
Yet the structure cannot change itself independently of individuals acting within it.
The problem is therefore relational.
How can a system generated by human relations become an object of conscious transformation by the humans who constitute it?
This question extends the problem we encountered with history and freedom.
Human beings are neither outside society nor completely absorbed by it.
They are formed through relations that they can, under some conditions, reflect upon and alter.
Society therefore becomes something philosophy can investigate at a new level.
Not merely:
What should individuals do?
Not merely:
What political institutions are legitimate?
But:
What kinds of relations produce the forms of life in which individuals can become what they are?
Once that question becomes possible, philosophy has moved beyond the simple opposition between individual and society.
The object of inquiry is now the relation that produces both.
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