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4 The Certainty of the Social as the Basic Fact S o far, I have discussed one idea that requires something like a definition of “sociality.” It says that humans living together cannot imagine human existence in a state of nature defined by the negation of society and that any other definition of the state of nature assumes society. Since every person lives among people, no one can imagine herself outside of that encompassing fact, and therefore outside of a universe in which each depends on all and responds to every other as someone that could, in important respects, be anyone. Each of us is, then, social through and through and our conception of what it is to be human is essentially social: we are all, at bottom, “someones” and the way of being someone is not at all impersonal or detached. If we are essentially “someones ,” and if an instance of “someone” exists only in the form of the dependence of each on all, then we are inseparable from others in all that we are and do and this must register itself one way or another in personal experience. It is in this regard that we can refer to society as a basic fact—not only for human beings but for human affairs. An observer might claim that social beings sometimes act in ways that are not social. But such an observation cannot be made from within society, since no exception can be recognized from that position. Even if such an observation were possible, it is not possible to show how the line can be drawn between what is social and what is not, since drawing lines for the sake of a comparison is an irreducibly social activity. At the very least, given the plausibility of the hypothesis that human beings and their affairs are essentially social, observers and theoreticians are best advised to act on the assumption that every act is socially reflexive regardless of what else can be attributed to it (see Blum and McHugh 1984). This still says nothing about what people do as members of historical societies in the sense of a rule-governed institutional The Certainty of the Social as the Basic Fact 77 order or territorialized system. That requires an investigation into the ontological aspect of universal inter-dependence in regard to the relationship between objectivity and agency, which I undertake in later chapters. Note also that the argument so far has been primarily conceptual and logical. It has not yet shown how Rousseau’s narrative uniquely demonstrates the truth of the basic fact as a matter of immediate certainty, and this is necessary to any account of the continuity of historical societies. It follows from the impossibility of conceiving of its negation that society, understood for the moment as the necessary association of equals, cannot be explained by the motivation alluded to in Rousseau’s narrative of the “original compact”—namely, insecurity and a corresponding desire for peace, since these are identified psychologically with pre-social individuality. This means that it cannot be characterized as a negation of its negation—society as the antithesis of and remedy for the state of nature. It seems, then, that society and nature can have nothing to do with one another in a theory of human affairs. Rousseau avoids this dilemma to the extent to which the confirmation of society as the basic fact depends on the revelatory character of his narrative of the social contract when it is read as an allegory. The narrative that runs from insecurity to a willingness to associate with an indefinite plurality of others whom one could not have known cannot explain either the onset of society or its continuity beyond the lives of those who presumably formed it. To explain association by a prior insecurity requires imagining so fateful an insecurity from within a situation imposed by a state of nature. We have seen that this is not imaginable to essentially social beings. A sense of insecurity arises only in contrast with a sense of security, as something lost, which assumes a social standard. Insecurity can explain a collective willingness to associate only if it is distributed; and a distribution capable of confirming individual decisions assumes the existence of society. To imagine leaving a state of nature is to imagine leaving the “realm of necessity” that is all one has ever known. It requires imagining leaving together, which is to say leaving for something already socially established. In either...

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