> 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.
What Marx calls "universally developed individuals" do realize themselves in society. Their social relations are their self-conscious creation, the product of their "conscious knowing and willing". It's true that such individuals require a particular kind of social relations for their existence, but it is for their existence as individuals with the developed capabilities required to subject these relations "to their own communal control".
"It has been said and may be said that this is precisely the beauty and the greatness of it ['the connection of the individual with all, but at the same time also the independence of this connection from the individual' characteristic of the capitalist 'world market']: this spontaneous interconnection, this material and mental metabolism which is independent of the knowing and willing of individuals, and which presupposes their reciprocal independence and indifference. And, certainly, this objective connection is preferable to the lack of any connection, or to a merely local connection resting on blood ties, or on primeval, natural or master-servant relations. Equally certain is it that individuals cannot gain mastery over their own social interconnections before they have created them. But it is an insipid notion to conceive of this merely objective bond as a spontaneous, natural attribute inherent in individuals and inseparable from their nature (in antithesis to their conscious knowing and willing). This bond is their product. It is a historic product. It belongs to a specific phase of their development. The alien and independent character in which It presently exists vis-à-vis individuals proves only that the latter are still engaged in the creation of the conditions of their social life, and that have not yet begun, on the basis of these conditions, to live it. It is the bond natural to individuals within specific and limited relations of production. Universally developed individuals, whose social relations, as their own communal [gemeinschaftlich] relations, are hence also subordinated to their own communal control, are no product of nature, but of history. The degree and the universality of the development of wealth where this individuality becomes possible supposes production on the basis of exchange values as a prior condition, whose universality produces not only the alienation of the individual from himself and from others, but also the universality and the comprehensiveness of his relations and capacities." <http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1857/grundrisse/ ch03.htm#p156>
Ted