‘Society on its own’: the sociological promise today

The social world is currently in a state that defies many reasonable expectations about modernity. The Arab spring ended long-lasting dictatorships but did not bring democracy. European integration has not eliminated poverty, social conflict, and urban unrest. Democracy and the rule of law do not necessarily accompany economic growth. Modernisation and prosperity, wherever they occur, do not necessarily lead to rationalisation and secularism: on the contrary, religion and transcendental values and beliefs are gaining power globally, including in Western Europe. A highly developed division of labour and an advanced level of education encourage pluralism and tolerance but do not eliminate xenophobia and conflicts over identity.

Many of these developments fly in the face of the predictions of the classical sociological tradition, and so it may seem preposterous to suggest, as my title does, that, despite all these failures, sociology might still retain what C. Wright Mills (1956, pp. 3–24) called its promise – a promise to understand the structure of the society and the shape of history, and thereby ‘grasp the intersections of daily experience with the unruly forces of social reality’ (p. 5). Many prominent sociologists concluded towards the end of the twentieth century that the structures of modern industrial society had become increasingly difficult to define, not to speak of grasping their intersections with subjective experiences of daily life (Rose, 1996). The rise of the new middle class, the consumer society, the globalised economy, and transnational interdependency contributed to this condition. Zygmunt Bauman (2000, p. 37) called it liquid modernity, and proposed replacing the term society with sociality, a much more fluid category. He was quoting from Ulrich Beck's (1995, p. 40) moratorium on class as the structuring principle of the modern industrial state. Beck (2005, pp. 43–50) has argued more recently that the concept of society implies an error he calls methodological nationalism, given that modern societies have been national unities that are no longer relevant in the globalised world.

Behind these disillusioned comments were doubts concerning the sociological tradition itself. Many placed the burden of their critiques of sociology on its Enlightenment roots but rarely referred to the social theory of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century authors. If we are to understand what promise this tradition might have held and might still offer now, we must go back to the way in which it formulated the question of social order in modern society, and how classical sociology later elaborated it.

I address these questions in this article, drawing on two well-known reconstructions of the evolution of the sociological science of society from the Enlightenment, one by Reinhard Koselleck and the other by Jacques Donzelot (1984). Koselleck's book Critique and Crisis (1988/1959) was one among several post-war attempts to understand totalitarianism (Stalinism and Hitlerism) in modern society. Donzelot's work sets out to show how Durkheim's sociology helped to solve the issue of total society that had tormented French republicanism since the revolution and especially in the Third Republic. I am focusing on these two authors, first, because they demonstrate the importance of sociology's link to the Enlightenment that has been so ferociously attacked by post-modern critics. Secondly, they share the critique of the pre-sociological Hobbesian idea that societies need a sovereign state to hold them together, as they are ‘are too dangerous [if left] on their own’ (Gordon, 1994, p. 64). Doing this, they also point out an inherent problem in the Enlightenment solution: if social order emerges from the social rather than from the political, how can social divisions be dealt with, and how is the political to be understood in its relationships with these divisions? These have been major concerns of modern sociology, and my argument here is that they are as relevant in our contemporary world as they have been before, although earlier divisions are different from those of modern industrial societies. We can identify the task of sociology today by reminding ourselves of the origin of the problem, rather than throwing overboard the idea of society, and sociology with it.

Let us start from what is now the prime target among critics of modern sociology and its theory of society. Talcott Parsons drafted the theory in The Structure of Social Action (1937) with a view to explaining the potential of social order in modern conditions. His presupposition was that order could not depend on the political structure. The Hobbesian solution to the problem of order (the problem of war and violence in the state of nature)¹ was itself a problem, since it assumed that only the state could achieve social order. This is what sociologists have never accepted, and most do not accept it now. Modern sociology stipulates that the social order must stem from the social, and the political order must obey its laws, not vice versa. Modern society must govern itself on its own. The sociological theory of society is not neutral on the issue of democracy, which is why dictatorships have never tolerated it. In the words of Parsons (p. 93), ‘This is not the solution in which the present study will be interested.’² Why not?

This denial of interest in the Hobbesian solution prompts us to consider its background in the history of ideas. Reinhard Koselleck (1988/1959) contends in his Kritik und Krise that Enlightenment critics reacted to the crisis of absolutism arguing that the political is not the source of social order but its effect. Koselleck's argument was that Hobbes, the political theorist of absolutism, separated politics from ethics, following the traditional distinction in Christian theology between the inner and external worlds of humans; man can only judge external acts, whereas the inner realm, such as intentions and conscience, is God's, and therefore of higher moral worth. Hobbes turned this Christian duality around and argued that intentions and conscience were a private matter and a source of conflict rather than of peace. Conscience degenerates into the idol of self-righteousness: it is the source of evil itself even when it is based on religion. In war there is no telling what is objectively good and what is evil, and the naturally human wish for peace is not sufficient in itself to temper the thirst for power. Therefore, Hobbes argued, the state performed the necessary role of the ‘mortal God’ who judged mankind's passions with sovereign reason (Koselleck, 1988/1959, p. 32). Man is split into two halves, the private and the public. The private is of no interest to the state: it is a secret of no importance to social order, and correspondingly, the state is morally neutral (pp. 36–39, 53).

The Hobbesian solution, then, excludes from the state everything we now include in the social: morality, higher causes, community, identity, and passions about them, and even justice. And vice versa, it attributes social order entirely to the state, which is not dependent on the social at all. The state is the public executor of order and peace. On the other hand, human virtues, passions, and intentions are indifferent to the social order unless they violate the will of the sovereign. Even the sovereign may err, but never breaks the law – because he or she is the law. ‘It is true that they that have soveraigne power may commit Iniquitie, but not Injustice … ’, Hobbes wrote (quoted in Koselleck, 1988/1959, p. 36).

Enlightenment criticism aimed to remove the disjunction of the state from the social, and the critique came of age in classical sociology. John Locke initiated the emancipation of the social in distinguishing between Divine Law as the measure of sin and duty, Civil Law as the measure of crime and innocence, and Philosophical Law or the Law of opinion or reputation as the measure of virtue and vice. The last of these originates in the interior of human conscience, in the space that Hobbes exempted from the realm of the state. For Locke this interior no longer remained within the individual: through conversation and common judgement it gained the character of laws that received their obligatory power from the unspoken accord of the citizens, ‘by a secret and tacite consent’ (Locke, 1894, para. 10, quoted in Koselleck, 1988/1959, p. 55). For Locke, as Koselleck puts it, ‘The private and the public are not mutually exclusive; as a matter of fact the public realm arises from the private one.’ (Ibid). The social enters the doors of the political. Later in the mid-eighteenth century, Jean-Jacques Rousseau's (1998/1762) idea of the volonté générale, the general will, was the culmination of this critique.³ It placed individuals’ conscience and passions at the heart of the political sphere: although emanating from society it assumed absolute power and subsumed everybody, even the lawmaker.

Koselleck did not discuss the work of David Hume and Adam Smith, but the work of each of them is relevant to this debate. Both argued against social contract theories on the basis of their assumptions about human nature. Their contribution to the modern sociological theory of society is a topic in itself, but here I wish to point out just one aspect of their argument. Both maintain that the justification of political power, however despotic, emanates from society, although not in the form of a contract:

The natural ‘opinions’⁵ concerning the right to property and power, and the public interest (in social order) are consolidated by the ‘love of dominion and habit’ invested in human nature, although people do not discover them beforehand or foresee their operation so as to make a social contract. Governments are formed casually and imperfectly, not by a linear process, but by a ‘perpetual intestine struggle between authority and liberty. Even the most absolute monarchies are never unrestricted in their power’ (Hume, 1987/1777, pp. 39–40). Mikko Tolonen (2013) has recently shown that Hume joined Mandeville and Rousseau in their criticism of the Hobbesian ‘selfish theory’, to turn upside down the idea that the political society (sovereign absolutism) is the guarantee of social order. Now the political order becomes the effect of society, not its cause. This is already quite close to later sociological understandings of modern society.

Smith's theory of justification is similar. In The Theory of Moral Sentiments he sees justice as a fundamental social virtue that plays a crucial part in giving rise to the institution of government. It is maintained by the moral sentiments of anger and hatred aroused in all humans who experience, or even witness, undeserved blame or unjustified acts of violence and greed. Justice requires that individuals are recognised as autonomous agents, persons with dignity. Smith explicitly explains that justice does not imply equality of authority among individuals. Humans have a natural inclination to admire wealth and power, but to gain the loyalty of others, men of rank should attempt to recruit their admiration and sympathy through appropriate comportment, manners, style, and aloofness. Smith ridicules Rousseau for utopianism thus: ‘ … to suppose that kings are the servants of people, to be admired and obeyed or resisted, deposed of and punished as the convenience of the public may require, is a doctrine of reason and philosophy, but it is not the doctrine of (human) nature’ (Smith, 1976/1790, pp. 50–61).

In one way or another, then, Enlightenment critique derives the political from the social. Locke and Rousseau stressed the procedural aspect of moral approval of the government; Hume and Smith stressed the natural moral sentiments of humans that give priority to justice and social order over the allurements of the present and the frivolous temptations of private passions.

Koselleck's interpretation highlights one problem in Locke and Rousseau, and after them in debates about the revolution conducted in the salons of Paris by the famous political thinkers Turgot, Diderot, and Abbé Raynal (Gordon, 1994), as well as Thomas Paine in England (Thompson, 1991/1963). The question that haunted these intellectuals was the very same balance between liberty and authority that Hume had in mind. They could see that revolution was necessary, but acknowledged that its consequence may not be freedom. The authority of a republican government must be founded on the general will, but the general will could only exist if it was total and exercised with despotic power. Thus, the belief that the state and the law represent the will of the people, to which everyone must submit, has the potential to turn into totalitarianism and terror. Koselleck argued that the elevation of the social into and even above the state was a utopia of the Enlightenment. It led in the end to the escalating Cold War between ‘liberal-democratic America and socialist Russia’, both ‘retracted in the Enlightenment … as the common root of their claim to exclusiveness with its moral and philosophical legitimations’ (Koselleck 1988/1959, p. 1).

Koselleck was not the only post-war critic of Enlightenment republicanism. Karl Popper (1956, p. 535) considered Rousseau's romanticism to be ‘one of the most pernicious influences in the history of social philosophy’, and saw the concept of the general will to be a predecessor of Hegel's notion of the Spirit of the Nation (p. 240), which was central in his justification of absolutism. Claude Lefort's (1986, pp. 278–287) analysis of totalitarianism in the Soviet Union also rested on the idea that abolition of the sovereign leaves an empty space that will, in certain historical conditions, be refilled with the imaginary of the People-as-One and the bureaucracy, mandated by the Party-as-One behind it. In this way the state becomes again consubstantial with society, with totalitarian effects. A common element in such theories was that totalitarianism aims at elimination of differences, and as a consequence symbolically denies the existence of real inequalities (Lefort, 1986, p. 280).

To those familiar with Zygmunt Bauman's work, Koselleck's emphasis on the continuity between Enlightenment critique of absolutism and the potential of totalitarian terror in the republic will be less surprising than it first appears. Society on its own has a tendency to become repressive under the assumption that it is governed by the general will. Bauman's critique of modernity, especially in Modernity and Ambivalence (1991), is based on philosophical and psychological premises concerning modernity's yearning to constrict ambivalence in the search for certainty (echoing here the work of Hannah Arendt and Erich Fromm). This led to the twentieth-century nightmare of manufactured homogeneity through the elimination of strangers, and the suppression of the difference and the ambivalence they generate. The Holocaust was not the work of a pre-modern backlash of despotism: it was, for Bauman, a logical result of modernity itself, with the political emanating from the social (Bauman, 1992).

The republican potential for totalitarianism did not need the historical experience of Nazism or Stalinism to be recognised. French revolutionaries were already aware of the problem. Jacques Donzelot explained this paradoxical threat in his book L’invention du social: the general will of the people, replacing the will of the sovereign, may turn against the people itself (Donzelot, 1984, p. 51). Old social ties, especially guilds, corporations, and the local community, were destroyed, but nothing replaced them in the new social order. The sovereignty of all citizens confers on the state an unlimited power and destroys individual liberty. In Rousseau there was nothing between the individual and the general will as executed by the Republic. The revolutionaries of 1848 were still immersed in the ideology of the contract, but for them the Republic had become a problem instead of the solution. The state was at the same time everything and nothing: deriving its authority from the will of the people, it concentrates all the power of society, yet its sovereignty rested unalienably with the citizens, which gives everybody the right to reject this power. This ambivalence concerning the republic explains the mix of extremely contradictory positions in the political discourse of the 1848 revolutionaries. Utopian followers of Charles Fourier tended to see in the republic nothing but the Ancien Régime in a new guise, while centralists like Icarie de Cabaret would see the state as the good guardian of individuals’ comportments as well as their consciences (Donzelot, 1984, p. 56). Accusations continued to pour over Rousseau's contractualism in the Third Republic. It allowed nothing between the individual and the state. The disaggregation of society allied the liberals, the socialists, and conservatives in a fierce critique of the idea of the volonté générale. One theme that animated socialist thought was that the contractual republic elevated all individuals, even the wage labourer, into ‘an assembly of kings, while in economic terms the worker is a kind of slave’ (Jean Jaurès in 1893, cited by Donzelot, 1984, p. 67).

Donzelot showed that Durkheim's thesis of solidarity and the primacy of the social finally opened the way to the politics of representation. The social in Durkheim has primacy not only over the state but also over the individual. It is the social that creates the individual in his or her solidarities with other individuals, and as such individuals act as political agents, citizens of the republic. In modern industrial societies with a high degree of differentiation and a strong division of labour these solidarities should be ‘organic’, based on differences between groups, rather than ‘mechanical’, based on similarity and tradition (Durkheim, 1984/1893). The state was neither just a guarantee of the legal order as the conservatives claimed, nor an instrument of class oppression to be taken over by the revolutionary working class, as claimed by the radical left. Its task was to assure and strengthen the solidarities in society, ‘no longer the subject of society but its priest, its Church, not pretending to be its god’ (Donzelot, 1984, p. 86).

The theme of solidarity appeared everywhere in the last decades of nineteenth-century France, in ceremonies of inauguration or commemoration, in agricultural exhibitions as well as graduations in colleges and schools. Durkheim's contribution, especially in the Division of Labour (Durkheim, 1984/1893), and Suicide (1997/1951) gave it a scientific and more exact formulation. Léon Duguit, professor of law and student of Durkheim, argued that solidarity is the law of organisation of society, and the task of the state is to serve this law. The state is a social fact (cf. Durkheim) but is no more sovereign than the individual, which is the product of solidarity. Now the political rhetoric also changed, liberals and conservatives jointly promoting the idea of solidarity within the nation. The right deplored the destructive effects of the social state on the family and traditional ties of solidarity, the left arguing that the social state is the key to solidarity, but possible only if supported by the working class and its associations. The social question was born. (Donzelot, 1984, pp. 94–103).

Donzelot's account demonstrates what sociology has had to offer as the science of modern society. The idea of solidarities within the social as the primary source of social cohesion fed into subsequent sociological debates over conflict and integration theories, power, mass society, and pluralism. These debates and approaches have largely addressed the issues raised by this very starting point: if societies govern themselves on their own, how can they deal with the inevitable differences within the social, and how is the political related to them? This is not the place to elaborate on how different approaches have been related to each other and the various roots of modern sociological science of the social order. This first part of my argument is just a modest reminder that this science should be seen as the continuation of social philosophers’ turn away from Hobbesianism in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Instead of criticising the Enlightenment as the Other of post-modernism: the glorification of instrumental reason, planning, order, naively idealised infinite progress, and so forth (Gordon, 2001), the kernel of modern sociology as a science of society should be identified in it. As sociology emerged from the Enlightenment it was haunted by the question of how to incorporate the sovereignty of the post-absolutist state with its source, the sovereignty of citizens with their differences and inequalities. My second argument is that the same question is relevant today, not only in countries toppling down old dictatorships and trying to build up societies that can maintain themselves without external force, but also in advanced democracies.

To justify the second argument, three historical facts must be considered at the outset. First, there is a tendency to underestimate how recent was the birth of the politics of representation even in Western Europe. When Durkheim was working out his theory, parliamentary democracy was still only emerging. Before the Second World War, universal citizenship under the rule of law was still a project and political participation an ideal. This was the case even in the Nordic countries, where the foundational myths of nation building were associated with the images of free-holding farmers, urban old middle classes (petite bourgeoisie and the educated groups), and gradually also wage labourers (Stråth, 2012). The threat of totalitarian rule in the name of national unity was lurking around the corner, and was almost realised in Finland in the 1930s (Alapuro, 2012). Continental deviations from these ideals are only too well known.

Secondly, the Enlightenment critique of the primacy of the political does not always apply directly. States, even if monarchical, were often important in building the social in the first place. Nordic ‘absolutism’ at least was never sovereignty above religion as Hobbes thought. Gustav Wasa I, the Lutheran founder of the Swedish monarchy and the state church of Sweden, presented himself as the King of the Swedish people. Aage Sørensen (1998) describes how the Kings of Denmark-Norway also joined forces with Lutheran Pietism from 1660 until the mid-nineteenth century. Nation building in the late nineteenth century again required the support of the people (Slagstad, 1998; Stråth, 2012).

My third and most important point is again more general. The media and many critics contrast the welfare state with individualism, but in fact the state has been the most influential mechanism through which modern society produces the individual. The French socialist leader Léon Bourgeois formulated the Durkheimian premise well: ‘Whereas liberalism takes individuals as the instruments of progress, solidarism understands the individual to be the final goal … Society, with its state, commits itself to resolving the iniquities that it produces through faults in its organisation’ (cited by Donzelot, 1984, p. 111, my translation). State-driven individualisation through education was commonly at the heart of the nation-building process in the Nordic countries too (Stenius, 2012).

The great paradox of modernity, the consequences of which we are now living with, is that progress towards a society on its own, with autonomous individuals as the source of its authority, took the paternalist state as its vehicle. Parliamentary rule gradually extended its range of application to include the social question in all its dimensions: reforming the family, dealing with poverty, organising social insurance, caring for health and hygiene, and education (Dean, 2010). The social question involved extensive legal regulation of the labour market, which interfered with the purely contractual and individualistic cell-form of the wage labour system and politicised it (Castel, 1995, pp. 213–232). The authority of the state allowed control of individuals’ lives in all areas of family and sexuality, housing, consumption, work, and leisure. Consider, for example, the amazing restrictions on alcohol use in the late nineteenth century and early twentieth century. These were supported by mass movements that were not only moralising about drinking but connected their purpose with other reforms like the living wage, universal suffrage, education, and social insurance (Sulkunen, 2009, pp. 57–69).

The economic liberals of the Enlightenment, Turgot and Smith and their ideological followers in England (Polanyi, 1957/1944, pp. 93–129; Thompson, 1991/1963, pp. 101–103), already understood that even if the capitalist state might be minimal in economic terms, it needs to be a centralised one to serve competitive accumulation. The response to the social question and the legal protection of the labour market required a territorial state with a delimited population (Dean, 2010). The problem of sovereignty that sociology inherited from the Enlightenment was that even relatively democratic nation states tend to be inherently homogenising and centralised (Hobsbawm, 1992, Chapter 5). Extreme examples were eugenics, requirements of linguistic homogeneity and the obligation to go to war in the interest of the nation state. Majority rule, the principle of democracy that followed from the procedural tradition of Locke and Rousseau, took precedence over the principle of liberalism that would have followed from Hume and Smith.

Yet the justification for the state's penetration into the social, even the private, was the education of autonomous citizens. Emile Vandervelde, a Belgian leader of the socialist Second International and a temperance politician, formulated it in this way:

Alva and Gunnar Myrdal, the ideologists of the Swedish welfare state, were clear about the task of the state in support of autonomous individuals. They recommended state-driven measures to ‘improve the quality of human material’ such as parents’ training programmes, child care counsellors, home economics classes in schools, nationally planned curricula, nutritional requirements, rational consumer instruction, and home standardisation. Yet they justified the plan in their book The Crisis in the Population Question (A. Myrdal & G. Myrdal 1935, p. 309, author's translation) in this way: The institutions of representative democracy were barely established when the idea of society on its own faced a new type of crisis. The capitalist state was not neutral. Universality requires sameness, and modern sameness has been built on male-dominated family individualism among the petite bourgeoisie, independent peasantry, and the old middle classes. As Foucault (1991, pp. 98–102) wrote, the patriarchal family was turned from the model of governance to its instrument and object. In the Nordic countries the normative ideal was endorsed by the close ties between the state and the Lutheran Church. The state's lack of neutrality was the source of the new crisis, a subject of sociological critiques in the 1960s and 1970s. Sociologists revealed the selectiveness of social control in welfare, health, education, criminal justice, and police practices. They criticised the state for not being neutral regarding gender, ethnicity, good taste, or even political opinion. An extensive wave of liberal legal reforms correcting these injustices followed throughout Western Europe when the new generation of sociologists gained intellectual power (Sulkunen, 2009, pp. 119–140).

The neo-liberal turn in Western politics during the Reagan–Thatcher era brought a new element to the critique, defining state penetration into the social as a cost the society can no longer afford. When we look more closely, behind the discourse about cost was discontent with ‘squeezing out the choices of private consumers’ (Pierson, 1991, p. 180). This concerned not only the micro-level choices of individuals but the governance of society as a whole. Gerda Krippner has shown in her study of political justifications of the suddenly deregulated American financial market in the 1970s that politicians and leading experts had very little to say about the economic benefits of the free market of credit. Their problem was rather that they no longer felt they had the moral authority to set priorities in the way resources should be allocated between different industries, housing, public services, and consumption. They believed the financial market had to be deregulated because their mandate from parliamentary politics was insufficient for the technical and moral management of society that credit regulation involved (Krippner, 2011, pp. 58–85). A similar moral crisis of public authority was a key factor in the financial liberalisation also in the Nordic countries (Sulkunen, submitted). Society should govern itself, on its own, and the deregulation of markets was the only solution to resource allocation and finance. Critics commonly understand neo-liberalism as a political doctrine that recommends the free market to state involvement for economic reasons. It is associated with ‘conservative’ governments like those led by Ronald Reagan in the USA and Margaret Thatcher in the UK, but also in other European countries. Quotation marks around ‘conservative’ are necessary, however, because in many ways these governments represented change, even radical change to the state-driven modernisation that dominated capitalism since the Second World War, whereas it is difficult to say what these governments were about to conserve. In their views individual freedom, self-responsibility, and the right to choose one's way of life without state paternalism, were the dominant values, not traditionalism or moral prudence.

It should be noted that the two most visible advocates of neo-liberal economic policy, Friedrich von Hayek (1959) and Milton Friedman (2002/1962), although Nobel laureates of economics, argued for their position in moral rather than economic terms. For neo-liberals the market has been a solution to a moral problem; not necessarily an institution with intrinsic value, nor an instrument to advance the interests of those who are strong on the market. The moral problem was mistrust in the concept of the general will represented by majority rule. Von Hayek's (1959, pp. 103–117) distinction between liberalism and democracy (as majority rule) was fundamental to his critique of the modern state as the enemy of freedom.

Deregulation and the roll-back of the public sector is not the end of that crisis. When people take their autonomy for granted they start to claim the right to intimacy, too. Intimacy means separation from others, a sensitivity to authentic selfhood, distinction, and identity, in other words difference. This is the source of what Luc Boltanski and Eve Chiapello call the ‘artistic’ in contrast to the ‘social’ critique of capitalism. Whereas social critics grumble about injustices, insecurity, and wretchedness, artistic critics bemoan ‘the lost sense for beauty and grandeur effected by standardization and commercialization, not only of everyday things, but also objects of art (bourgeois cultural mercantilism), even humans’ (Boltanski & Chiapello, 2005/1999, p. 84). The term ‘artistic’ refers to the aesthetic version of the romantic modernism that emphasises intimacy, i.e. authenticity of experience (beauty) and distinctness of the person (artist or connoisseur). The same tradition was identified by Colin Campbell as a constituent part of the student radicalism of the 1960s in his landmark book The Romantic Ethic and the Spirit of Modern Consumerism (1987).

This genre of criticism, too, has been hostile to the state, even if often pronounced from the political left. Therefore it does not translate well into positive social science or socialist politics, but flourishes among intellectuals instead. Feminist writers and Marxist theorists have disparaged the welfare state that helps the ‘transcapitalisation’ of society.⁶ With state support, commodity relations penetrate the private to the benefit of capitalist reproduction and class reconciliation.

Today the state-driven programme of citizens’ autonomy is no longer a dream but reality taken for granted. Paternalistic efforts to educate members of society to assume self-responsibility while enjoying freedom from traditional ties no longer provide the legitimacy they had in Vandervelde's or the Myrdals’ time; on the contrary they tend to be interpreted as violations of autonomy already gained. Preventive alcohol and drug policies, safety regulations, health counselling, and child rearing programmes easily evoke criticisms of the ‘nanny state’. On the other hand, such efforts are felt to be necessary to defend the very same autonomy they seem to offend. Consequences of risk behaviour inevitably fall not only on the individuals directly concerned but also on society, as health and social expenses and other types of harm to others. This is one reason why responsibility for such efforts is often devolved to ‘participatory’ organisations representing directly the ‘voice and choice’ of citizens in matters of their own welfare. Instead of a state standing for the general will of the people, the subject of governance is hybrid and assembles different societal actors – the state, markets, Civil Society Organizations (CSOs), communities, and citizens – in new, contractual alignments (Sulkunen, 2007).

This hybrid mode of governance is one attempt to solve the Enlightenment dilemma: how can the sovereignty of the state be established without detractions from the autonomy of its source, society with its own solidarities. It is an attempt, not a total solution, since it generates conflicts that can only be discussed in abstract terms of justice, or in even more abstract terms of goals that everyone can accept: health, welfare, and security. These conflicts are aggravated by claims for intimacy and right to difference. One person's intimacy may cut into another person's autonomy, and vice versa: defence of everybody's autonomy in public-health-oriented consumer policy significantly undermines some consumers’ intimacy. Authenticity and identity in sexual behaviour, ethnic traditions or religion may also violate other people's sense of autonomy. Debates concerning homosexual marriage, religion, the state and the church, language, and many other issues are examples of conflicts arising from differences that are difficult to adapt to sameness.

The first part of my argument is that modern sociology is a continuation of the Enlightenment critique of the primacy of the political as the harness of social order (but not necessarily the stereotypical assumptions of Enlightenment rationality, etc.). The second part of the argument is that the outcome of that critique, the idea of society governing itself, is still relevant even in advanced democratic societies today. Supposing that the dividing solidarities of class and nation in modern industrial societies are today as insignificant as post-modern critics of sociology maintain, what has the idea of society on its own still to offer? What happens if the autonomy of citizens, the source of the legitimacy of political power, is felt to be violated by state authority while the state is also expected to protect individuals’ welfare, health, and security against violations by other members of society? What can sociological research contribute to understanding the contradictions between intimacy and autonomy discussed above?

These questions highlight the need to analyse, again, the relationship between the social and the political. The first theoretical possibility available among sociological traditions is a return to the totalitarian state. This is the apocalypse dreaded by mass-society theorists (Baudrillard, 1983/1978; Mills, 1959). Following theories of totalitarianism exemplified by Claude Lefort above, and the potential of totalitarianism in the Enlightenment tradition that Koselleck pointed at, they have feared that solidarities within the social may dissolve. This would leave an empty space to be filled by a power elite strong enough to oppress away differences in the name of the People's unity and common interest. In my view this is unlikely, as totalitarian rule is incompatible with the principles of autonomy and intimacy (Sulkunen, 2012).

The second option is deliberative democracy, where stakeholders are invited to participate in the formation of specific policies (Gutmann & Thompson, 1996). This is an appealing option because it stresses agency and participation. No submission to the general will is necessary, because issues are raised and discussed only among those who are immediately concerned, by virtue of interest or belief (the environment, animal rights, healthy living, peace, human rights). The weakness of this solution is that it is excessively responsive to power: only those with high stakes and strong resources can effectively participate in it. ‘Resilience’ (Hall & Lamont, 2013), ‘agonistic conflict’ from below (Mouffe, 2005, pp. 98–107), and counter-democracy of the street (Rosanvallon, 2008) are also frequently proposed as alternatives to the moral crisis of the state. I include these propositions in the type of communicative democracy that deliberations and consultations also represent, with similar doubts as to their capacity to replace representative democracy as the form by which society governs itself on its own.

We are left with some new kind of representative democracy. An obvious lesson is to learn from Hobbes. Intimacy has little to do with maintaining social order. Unlike the normative state in its rather recent past, the state should be neutral as regards authenticity, identity, and difference in articulating the common good. At the same time it should be strict as regards fairness and justice. The state can maintain its legitimacy only if it respects the autonomy of its source, the citizen. Transparency, electoral fairness, and impartiality concerning the rights of citizens are therefore not only moral goods, but indispensable for social order in societies governing themselves on their own. The market alone cannot guarantee these conditions.

The difficulty is the high degree of symbolisation of differences as regards autonomy and intimacy. If there is a sociological promise today, it is to disclose and politicise the negotiable interests and boundaries underneath the non-negotiable imageries of identity, belief, and authenticity that organise the solidarities, even in advanced contemporary democracies.

This work has been supported by the Helsinki Collegium for Advanced Studies, University of Helsinki, Finland.