snitsnat wrote:
>
>
> For Marx, society is characterized by a contradiction between the abstract
> citizen who realizes himself in and through society, by participating in
> public life -- what carrol calls struggle -- and the private citizen, a
> concrete individual (not abstract), who operates in civil society.
Phrases such as "realizes himself in and through society" are what lead me to think of much sociology (no matter how explicitly anti-Platonic) as having at least a _whiff_ of the Platonic. This proposition seems to me to turn Marx on his head. The human person does not realize him/herself in society; the human person has no existence in abstraction from society (or social relations). Civil society is the realm of non-persons, of those who are defined by their abstract function (citizen, voter, worker, capitalist, mother, etc), of the "abstract -- _isolated_ -- human individual." We are _always_ already participating in social relations, and it is a radical abstraction to try to think of a person as an individual who then attempts to realize him/herself in society.
I just got back from a tiring overnight trip and don't have the energy to explore this further.
Carrol