Carrol Cox:
> This way of putting it would in fact be a denial of a unity of society
> and the individual -- in other words, it is really only a way of denying
> while seeming to assert assert socialization. We have on the one hand
> "society" and on the other hand "individuals," and the former somehow
> creates the individuals. Weird. The best answer to your question (or at
> least the beginning of the best answer) is to note that the question
> implies its own answer in so far as it is a question that could only be
> asked within a complex or ensemble of social relations.
>
> Society doesn't create us, and we have no existence prior to and
> independent of our social relations. So both statements, "humans create
> society" and "society creates individuls," are simply incoherent.
I agree, but my agreement is merely intuitive. I'm trying to think of material evidence for the necessity of society to human existence -- the kind you can bean a really hard- headed skeptic with and make at least a dent.
> Rousseau, incidentally, argued that "in the beginning" individuals did
> only come together to mate. If you haven't read it you should get hold
> of _A Discourse on Inequality_. From what I know, however, social
> relations (or species that had no existence independently of their
> social relations) long pre-date homo sapiens: or to put it otherwise,
> human society is several million years older than humanity.
My impression -- intuition again -- is that all primates live in complex societies, as do most mammals (as far as I know) -- cats, dogs, rats, deer, and so on. As for Rousseau, it seems to me he just made stuff up about things he didn't know about, and that's fine, but it should be called "fiction" or "poetry" and taken as such.