Abstract
This article describes the history of the concept of ‘the social’ as a substantivated adjective. Despite the growing use of the terms ‘society’ and ‘social’ in the eighteenth and nineteenth century, it is only at the beginning of the twentieth century that ‘the social’ started being used as an independent concept. In its simplest and most general meaning, ‘the social’ is the ensemble of phenomena involving a relation between human beings, and thus distinct from the individual and the natural. Emile Durkheim and Marcel Mauss used the expression in this sense. In the 1950s, Hannah Arendt gave a more limited meaning to the expression: she spoke of ‘the rise of the social’ to describe and criticize the development of modern industrialized societies; in these societies, economic activities (the production and consumption of goods) have become the primary concern of individuals, and the distribution of benefits the central activity of governments, resulting in a loss of political freedom. In the last decades of the twentieth century, the importance of the concept of ‘the social’ has steadily grown, thereby becoming one of the fundamental notions of the social sciences, central to many social theorists. ‘The social’ has thereby acquired a meaning of its own, independent of ‘society’: a more abstract term applicable to the macrolevel, as well as to the microlevel and with less connotations of homogeneity and boundedness, it is even often described, instead of ‘society,’ as the proper object of the social sciences and social philosophy.
Terrier, Jean