I'm sure I'll have more to say about this book as I get more into it.
Social selves: a challenge to individualism
I have already begun to address the question of why I have called this book Social Selves, because seeing ourselves as isolated cuts off the primary connection we have to other people in the creation of self. It is not that I want to deny the fact that each one of us is a unique individual, or that individualism can be a positive value. The ideals of freedom, liberty and individual autonomy are values that can prevent us from submitting to authorities that crave too much power, seeking to subjugate free people. But like all good ideas and ideals, individualism can also have its dangers. The political thinker C. B. Macpherson characterized the type of individualism that arises in Western capitalist societies as ‘possessive individualism’, which means each individual is thought to be the possessor of their own skills and capacities, owing nothing to society for the development of these.1 A free society is then seen as a market society, one in which individuals can sell their capacities on the labour market for a wage, with which they buy the goods they need to consume in order to live. But Macpherson believed that this type of individualism could be corrosive of human society, because each person is understood as bound to others only through the competitive market and nothing more. It is also a political theory that distorts human nature, because each one of us develops our capacities in society.
For the social and human sciences, the problem of possessive individualism is the creation of a division between the individual and society. An example of this is the approach to social study known as ‘methodological individualism’, typified by thinkers like F. A. Hayek, Karl Popper and J. W. N. Watkins, for whom all explanations of society must be based on statements about the dispositions and actions of individuals. That is because society is not a supra-individual entity, but composed of the individuals who make it what it is. Ironically, these thinkers actually agreed with many sociologists, whom they took as the target of their critiques, believing that society was nothing more than the relations between individuals. The real source of disagreement between these two camps is the status given to social relations – whether they are seen as primary in people’s lives or merely contingent upon already existing individuals. The latter position was the one adopted by methodological individualists, while sociologists and social psychologists tend to believe that social relations are primary in our experience. In the approach I develop here, I am against the methodological individualist position of seeing the individual as a primary fact, one that possesses given capacities or a determinate essence. That is because we are all born into social relations that we didn’t make, and much of who and what we are is formed in that context. But I do not want to reduce individuals to the mere products of their society, for the methodological individualists are right to say that there is no society without individuals and the relations between them. I prefer Norbert Elias’s solution to this problem by thinking in terms of a society of individuals.2
Hence, my attempt to understand humans as social selves is a way of trying to overcome this dichotomy. I want to suggest that when we ask the questions ‘who am I?’ or ‘who are we?’ we try to understand ourselves as social individuals rather than self-contained atoms. I also draw attention to the fact that I speak of social selves, in the plural rather than the singular, for we are all individual selves who necessarily relate to each other: there are many different selves in a society of individuals. But also, as individuals, we are multiple: I am not exactly the same person in all the different situations I act in, nor am I exactly the same person today as I was 20 years ago. This much may be uncontroversial, but why do I insist on the necessity of the concept of social selves? I do so for three basic reasons.
Firstly, we are born into a place and time that is not of our own making, and into a network of social relations we haven’t chosen. Each one of us is born into a society composed of social relations that bear the imprint of a power structure, including a hierarchy of social classes or other groupings according to rank and status, along with a culture with its beliefs and values, such as religion, or other bodies of knowledge, like science. The position into which we are born as an individual – our family, neighbourhood, social contacts, social class, gender, ethnicity, and the beliefs and values in which we are educated – will put a sizable imprint on the self we become. Those who surround us will judge, influence and mirror an image of our self back to us in many different ways. Even those who have sought solitude in order to find themselves, wandering into the wilderness, have nevertheless come from a tradition, religious or mystical, that will guide their meditation. All cultural traditions have theories about what it is to be a person, created in a network of everyday experiences and professional or theological debates. They have their own social history and will vary between cultures, yet all will provide the basis on which the selves who populate that culture emerge, forming their self-identities by moulding them with their own particularities.
Secondly, when we try to find who we are, we often turn to some social activity to reveal that ‘hidden’ self. We try out different roles, jobs, education, hobbies, arts, or sporting activities, hoping to find ourselves in them. The search for self therefore involves what we do, the activity informing who we are through the talents and capacities it may develop. However, this raises another issue, in that the self may not be pre-given: it is not something hidden that we have to find, but something that has to be made. Self, then, is something to be created with other people in joint activities and through shared ideas, which provide the techniques of self-formation. ‘Who am I?’ is perhaps a mistaken question: it should be, ‘who do I want to be?’ or ‘what shall I become?’ It is not being but becoming that is the question. Note also that in both ways of making ourselves, in relations with others and in activities undertaken with others, we are not actually looking ‘inward’ to find ourselves, but ‘outward’ towards other people and joint activities. Primarily, the place where we look for ourselves is in the world we share with others, not the world we have for ourselves through reflection on thoughts and feelings.
Thirdly, the above point is underscored in the fact that who we are, or can become, is often a political issue involving rights and duties fought over within society. Becoming who we want to be, if that is possible, often involves a political struggle. This has been witnessed in recent years with the women’s movement, the black power movement, and the gay, lesbian and transgender movement. The right to become a certain type of person, or to live freely as a particular person with a full complement of rights without persecution – as Asian, black, female, or gay – for many is something that has to be won, rather than something that is given. And the identities forged in such struggle are not formed prior to it, but in it. It is a very different thing today to live openly as a ‘gay’ man, than it was 70 years ago to live secretly as a ‘homosexual’. Even when we do not think that being ourselves involves politics, this is often a misguided assumption. Those who assume that their self-identity is a given right or a natural fact – say, a straight white man in Britain – are those in a privileged position whose identities have automatic ‘right of way’ in most social contexts. Such people assume their privileged position, not realizing that other identities might be silenced in their presence.
These are the three main reasons why I will explore the notion of social selves and social individuality in this book, trying to understand how it is that we can only attain the state of individual self-identity in relations and activities with others. What initially looks like a contradiction in terms – social individuality – will hopefully by the end of the book look like the only sensible way to proceed in confronting the dualisms and dichotomies that theories and methodologies of individualism have left us with. However, what I will do in the rest of this chapter is say a little more about the social and philosophical heritage that has created the problem of individualism, and of the relation between society and self, along with some of the solutions it has proposed to its own problem. How has this heritage created the question ‘who am I?’ and what are the various answers it has devised, leaving us with a conflicting and contradictory understanding of what it is to be human? (p. 2-5)
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