To What Extent Are Individuals the Product of Society

¶ … individual in society: To what extent are individuals the product of society?

The idea of 'the individual' has become such an accepted construct in modern life it is easy to forget that the idea of an isolated, all-important private and individual 'self' is a relatively new development in human sociological thought. Even today, human beings define themselves, not simply as individual selves, but as persons who must function within particular social contexts of family, work, and school. Quite often, when one asks 'who am I,' one's societal roles of child or parent, worker or employee, or student formulate one's answer. But although societal ideals and ideas have produced the modern notion of the individual as an isolated, psychologically contained essence, this idea has grown so powerful that even as societal institutions of church and education continue to shape the collective, individual persons now seek a sense of empowerment and actualization in their working, personal, spiritual, and societal lives outside of conventional societal norms.

Thus, individuals are affected by the roles society places upon them, but because one of these contemporary roles is 'an autonomous individual,' the individual is both a product of society and seeks to individually shape society and stand outside of its confines. But it is a worthy caveat that even the individualistic practice of psychology and psychoanalysis, although it may be seen as one of the first creative responses to such a development of a concept of 'an individual' located in society, suggested that society created mechanisms to ensure social control of individual human instincts. Freud stated that the individual's will did not operate outside of the society of the family. At the root of familial, controlling mechanisms Freud believed was the prohibition against incest and hence the evolution of the Oedipal complex within the human mind. The collective, shaping needs of society for order and limits upon human desires spawned the incest taboo and stifled the individual's desire to continually supplant his father's role.

But rather than focusing on the so-called Freudian family marriage, it is also possible to see the individual as a product of cultural societal influences as well as personal influences. As counseled by Ian Marsh, one must be aware of the contribution sociology can make to an understanding of social change, as unlike the relatively static family marriage scenario outlined by Freud. Marsh implies that the individual's sense of class, place in society, ability to mobilize him or herself, can all affect his or her individual sense of self-worth.

Because society is in flux, growing more diverse and fast-paced in modern contexts, the individual must speed his or her own tempo up in professional life, or put off marriage in his or her personal life, to make one example, to meet continued cultural challenges. Even if one thinks it will make one happy to be richer than one's neighbors, the status of wealth is a culturally and socially set norm.

Thus, there is always a fusion of the need to function in society and to achieve a sense of empowerment as individual, in the modern construction of psychological and social health. In other words, rather than merely seeing the individual as set of societal obligations and nothing else -- where once one was merely one's relational role or profession in society, as either a son or a farmer -- an individual today is perceived as having rights beyond family and function. But to achieve personal happiness often means meeting the norms and needs of one's family, peer group, and even one's nation and group identification.

After Freud, later sociologists attempted to achieve a more creative balance between the needs of the individual in past, family oriented primitive cultures and today's atomized yet still collectively generated modern life. Durkheim, although influenced by Freud saw human societal constructs as what made the human individual unlike other animals. Humans were not satisfied with mere biological satiation but strove for social approbation as well as survival. In fact, the more one human had, the more that person seemed to want, the father of sociology wrote.

It follows from this natural insatiability of the human animal that his desires can only be held in check by external controls, that is, by societal control. Society imposed limits on human desires but these regulative forces were not always deployed in a fair way.

For Freud, the human was not something that could be changed, and all of society's social controls and jostling came from the sexual impulse.

The rapacious sexual drives of the individual human animal determined the shape of society. But rather than speculating about the individual first, and then analyzing how society shaped those drives, in contrast, the collective experiences were stressed by Durkheim, how society shaped the individual will and the individual's drives. Even if all individuals had the same basic drives, society provided the ways to articulate those drives. An individual seeking carnality might supplant this desire into making money, and to make money might forgo easy enrichment to advance his or her life through education. Thus society shaped basic animal drives.

Rather than focusing upon the individual's Oedipal conflicts within the nuclear family, Durkheim saw the social role of institutions such as religion, and their potential to create belief systems that kept the individual connected in a positive fashion to the community. He believed that industrialization had ruptured such old institutions with its fragmented and irreligious induced state of anomie, or despair. Without societal influences, individuals were adrift, and eventually moved to create negative, rather than positive social associations out of despair.

In contrast to Durkheim, Max Weber believed that industrial, individualized society had in effect sprung forth from a religion, that of Protestantism and the Protestant work ethic. He too stressed the creative use of societal institutions to positively shape the individual. But ultimately, Weber believed that as this religion emphasized one's interior relationship with God in an unmediated form, outside of communal religious worship, individuals felt free to embark upon secular life, making money and creating a capitalist society of more fluid status in terms of class structure and communal affiliations.

Of course, Weber wrote of a relatively homogeneous society, as distinct from modern Britain, which has exhibited diversity not simply in religious affiliations, but national, linguistic, and racial ruptures that cannot always be healed, even with increased class mobility.

Modern sociologists such as Abercrombie and Warde have also noted that this industrialization and creation of the individual in Britain may have ultimately intensified the structure of the class system as well as ruptured and created new divisions within its fold, even while it sowed the seeds for the generation of a new Middle class. But this new middle class was perhaps even more dependent on societal and commercial symbols to reaffirm its status. Capitalism allowed for a new middle class and new social mobility, and new empowerment for the individual outside of the collective and past, assigned familial roles, but as these roles were more unstable the individual sought new forms of identification according to national, regional, and ethnic affiliations.