Saying "there is no society, only men and women," is like saying that there are no people, only organs.

Recognizing the mutuality between, and the reality of, both a whole and its parts is sensible and productive.

As with the brain, an understanding of our relation to society benefits from examination on multiple levels.

People can make their social institutions work for them by rolling up their sleeves and making the effort.

U.S. President Ronald Reagan’s almost equally famous British counterpart Margaret Thatcher once remarked to an interviewer that "there’s no such thing as society…there are [only] individual men and women" (Keay, 1987). One reason the remark has been quoted so often is that it seems able to do double duty as a counter to political liberalism. On the one hand, it appears to challenge claims that individuals cannot be held accountable for their failures because they are mainly "products of society" rather than of their own choices. On the other hand, it seems to undercut the liberal view that individuals have obligations to society, and that society as a whole can decide how to apportion those obligations, perhaps demanding more, materially, from its higher-income members, given their greater ability to pay. A further potential ramification is that government can’t be assumed to be acting on behalf of "society" since there is no such thing, only individual men and women. Those who hold the reins of power are also only individual men and women, it seems, so it can be assumed that they will focus on their own interests, like everyone else does.

The idea that society doesn’t exist, in the sense that it is not an actor that has a mind and that makes decisions, and that it therefore should not be spoken of as an actor or decision-maker in the way that individuals are, might seem to pass the common sense test. In terms of psychology, neuroscience, evolutionary biology, and even economics, however, the case is not so open and shut. Start with the idea that each individual possesses a coherent self that makes decisions based on its own judgments. That there are individuals in that sense is hotly debated. The view that there are changing coalitions of neurons that become most influential in shaping the pronouncements of the “speaking self” under different circumstances, and that the large majority of our pronouncements are more like ex post attempts to make sense of why unconscious substrates reached one decision versus another than like pronouncements by “a thinking self” as such, probably comes closer to the current understanding of cognitive neuroscientists than the old-fashioned notion of a unitary executive self (LeDoux, 2019). Of course, well-functioning individuals cultivate “biographical selves” displaying narrative continuity and permitting identification of present with past selves, but these can be understood as simply extensions over time of the “narrator”/”spokesperson” phenomenon. They, too, are “selves” that call for ongoing assembly and re-editing. Even in economics, the social science that insists most strongly on treating the individual (not society) as the unit of analysis, researchers have been studying models of individuals who have multiple selves as a way to understand problems of self-control, such as difficulty adhering to pledges to exercise, to stop smoking and overeating, and to save for retirement.

How is the fact that individual selves are a partly fictitious construct relevant to the realness of society? Similar to the way in which an individual human being is an aggregation of cells grouped into an organism, parts of whose nervous architecture form shifting coalitions claiming executive control and assuming a “spokesman” role, societies are aggregations of individuals that sometimes operate as collective wholes, and that over time evolve ways of reaching and executing decisions as more-or-less unified wholes. The respective societies of, say, California vs. Oklahoma, or of Denmark vs. Italy, are real enough that the decisions that have been taken by the shifting decisive coalitions in each over the courses of many decades have influenced very real things, like the kinds of industrial activity occurring in them, what resources are available in them for childcare, education, and health services, what levels of air and water pollution their people are exposed to. To exercise functions like providing sanitation services, operating street lights, and maintaining police forces to enforce laws against theft and violence, governments make demands on individuals that are backed when necessary by the threat of monetary and other punishments. Societies are real enough that significant numbers of people are living in jails and prisons, and are employed as police officers, prison guards, soldiers, sailors, and government employees. Such functionality and internal specialization exist in each of the world’s roughly 200 nation-states and its tens of thousands of provincial, state, municipal, and county governments. The most important actors within governments are indeed individual people, but well-functioning societies have fashioned institutions through which majorities of people have been able to make those actors and governments responsive to their needs and demands. Denying that society is real seems less likely to improve the functioning of governments than is strengthening the institutions that can render officials accountable (Acemoglu and Robinson, 2020).

“What is real?” is both a scientific and a philosophical question. The phenomenon of constituent parts comprising aggregates from which properties emerge only when they operate as a system or whole is ubiquitous: leptons and hadrons make up atoms that have qualities different from both their constituents, and from atoms of other elements that have different numbers of those constituents (consider hydrogen versus iron); atoms form bonds to become molecules that have their own distinct properties (think of water, from oxygen and hydrogen); complex organic molecules can become self-replicating living tissue; and so on. The components and assemblages in these nested hierarchies exert influences in both directions (part on whole, whole on part). It is usually unhelpful for understanding human behavior or psychology to say that people are “no more than” the carbon, oxygen, hydrogen, nitrogen, and other atoms of which their bodies are composed, and not much more helpful to look a few levels up and say that people are “no more than” assemblies of hearts, livers, kidneys, etc. Yet neuroscientists are making progress in understanding cognition and consciousness by working simultaneously to probe the interplay of the atomic, subatomic, molecular, and cellular levels; and so it is for individuals and societies, as studied by the social sciences and psychology.

Today’s world contains over 8 billion beating human hearts, each one part of a living individual also supported by lungs, a digestive system, and a brain, and each belonging to one or another society. It was as societies that humans adopted agriculture, expanded their population from a few to several millions, went on to establish cities and civilizations, became an industrializing world of a little over a billion people, and grew to the 8 billion of today. Societies are less unitarily minded, less composed of preconfigured specialized parts, than are individual people, but they very much condition the opportunities of the individuals comprising them, and their effective functioning requires individuals willing to play their constructive parts. Cultivating a healthy sense of mutual obligations running two ways, both between society and individual, and between individual and society, is as sensible and as helpful to our well-being as is pushing forward towards a more holistic view of the brain and the thinking, feeling person that it makes possible.

Daron Acemoglu and James Robinson, 2020, The Narrow Corridor: States, Societies, and the Fate of Liberty. Penguin.

Douglas Keay, 1987, “AIDS, Education and the Year 2000: Interview with Margaret Thatcher,” Woman’s Own (U.K. Weekly), Oct. 31.

Joseph LeDoux, 2019, The Deep History of Ourselves: The Four-Billion-Year Story of How We Got Conscious Brains. Penguin.

© Psychology Today