Abstract
Today the proposition that identities are socially constructed is common place. A hundred years ago, characteristics like sex, race, nationality, generation and social class would have been seen as natural characteristics. Now, just as unassailably, these self-same characteristics are no longer seen as natural, but rather attributed to a social process of the construction of identity. In some cases these characteristics are renamed to signify their social origins: race becomes ethnicity, sex becomes gender. It is not just that these social categories are supposed to overlay natural properties, the proposition is that there is no discrete natural foundation to identities, rather socially constructed identities are the real content of the characteristics once attributed to nature.
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Notes
Though Helen Wilkinson uses the less naturalistic term ‘cohort’ in her Demos pamphlet Genderquake.
‘As consuming citizens we seek to purchase our fetishised individual unique sexual identities and lifestyles within the increasingly self-imposed confinement of sexual communities.’ David Evans in Angelia Wilson (Ed), A Simple Matter of Justice?, Cassell, 1995, p116. He also writes of ‘“cultural scenarios” in the form of intra- and inter-personal scripts’ p115.
At a demonstration against cuts in education in London in March 1995 I heard a platform speaker repeat a familiar sociologist’s inventory of social roles. She introduced herself as a school governor, a mother and a teacher’.
See Suke Wolton, ‘Racial identities: the degradation of human constructions’, given as a paper in this seminar series and reproduced in this volume.
Georg Lukacs recalls: ‘Once during the First World War Scheler visited me in Heidelberg, and we had an informing conversation on this subject. Scheler maintained that phenomenology was a universal method which could have anything for its intentional object. For example, he explained, phenomenological researches could be made about the devil; only the question of the devil’s reality would first have to be “bracketed”. “Certainly”, I answered, “and when you are finished with the phenomenological picture of the devil, you open the brackets and the devil is standing before you”. Scheler, laughed, shrugged his shoulders and made no reply.’ Georg Lukacs, ‘Existentialism’, in Marxism and Human Liberation, Delta, 1973, p246. Today the proposed research might be published under the title of The Invented Devil: A Study in the Social Construction of Evil.
Edmund Husserl, The Crisis of European Science and Transcendental Phenomenology, (Trans D Carr) Northwestern University Press, 1970, pp353–78.
A contemporary version of Husserl’s bracketing of the natural world can be found in Jeffrey Weeks, Sex, Politics and Society, Longman, 1989 (2nd ed). In Chapter 6, ‘The construction of homosexuality’, Weeks brackets the question of a natural foundation to sexual difference when he writes that, ‘even if primary differences were biologically formed, this would not fundamentally alter the argument’, p97.
Husserl’s researches were not without precedent. Followers of Immanuel Kant in southern Germany had granted a greater role to history in the development of ideas. For example, Heinrich Rickert wrote: ‘From philosophical standpoints “nature” itself—in other words, the conception of reality with respect to the general, or the nomological nexus—becomes a product of the historical work of culture.’ Heinrich Rickert, The Limits of Concept Formation in Natural Science, Cambridge University Press, 1986 (orig 1902), p226
Edmund Husserl, The Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology, Northwestern University Press, 1970, pp121–23
Edmund Husserl, The Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology, Northwestern University Press, 1970, p168
Karl Marx, Capital, Vol 1, Penguin, 1976, pp997–98. All other citations are to the Lawrence & Wishart edition
Karl Marx, Capital, Vol 1, Lawrence & Wishart, Moscow, 1983, p63
Fillippo Brunelleschi is widely credited with the invention of perspective, circa 1420. See N Kelly Smith, Here I Stand: Perspective from Another Point of View, Columbia University Press, 1994
Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, The Bell Curve, The Free Press, 1994
Max Weber, The Theory of Social and Economic Organisation, (Talcott Parsons Ed), William Hodge, 1947 (orig 1922), p102
Reprinted in Kurt H Wolff (Ed), The Sociology of George Simmel, The Free Press, 1950
Kurt H Wolff (Ed), The Sociology of George Simmel, The Free Press, 1950, and cited in Kenneth Thompson and Jeremy Tunstall (Eds), Sociological Perspectives: Selected Readings, Penguin, 1971, p80
See Lucien Goldmann, Lukacs and Heidegger: Towards a New Philosophy, (Trans WQ Boelhower), Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1977
Reproduced in Thomas Luckmann (Ed), Phenomenology and Sociology, Penguin Modern Social Readings, 1978, p48
Jean Francois Lyotard, Phenomenology, State University of New York, 1991, p75
Martin Buber, Ich und Du (I and Thou), Collier Books, 1987 (orig 1921), p11
Martin Buber, Ich und Du (I and Thou), Collier Books, 1987 (orig 1921), p6
There is a sketch of a theory of society as such in the Introduction to the Critique of Political Economy, though its main purpose is to highlight the formal character of transhistorical social categories. See Marx and Engels, Introduction to the Critique of Political Economy in The German Ideology, Students edition, Lawrence & Wishart, 1970
Karl Marx, Capital, Vol 1, Lawrence & Wishart, 1983, p77
Karl Marx, Capital, Vol 1, Lawrence & Wishart, 1983, p78
Adam Smith, Wealth of Nations, Penguin Classics, 1987 (orig 1776), p119. Smith in turn developed his point from Bernard Mandeville whose polemical poem The Fable of the Bees: or, Private Vices, Publick Benefits, written in 1714, imagines the economy as a hive of bees where ‘every part was full of Vice/ Yet the whole Mass a Paradise’. ‘And Vertue, who from Politicks/Had Learn’d a Thousand cunning Tricks/Was, by their happy Influence/Made Friends with Vice: And ever since/The Worst of all the Multitude/Did Something for the common Good’, Bernard Mandeville, The Fable of the Bees, Penguin, 1970 (orig 1714), pp67–68.
Immanuel Kant, Perpetual Peace and Other Essays, Hackett, 1988 (orig 1784), pp31–32.
Max Weber writes: ‘Thus “money” as a means of exchange which the actor accepts in payment because he orients his action to the expectation that a large but unknown number of individuals he is personally unacquainted with will be ready to accept it in exchange on some future occasion.’ Cited in Kenneth Thompson and Jeremy Tunstall (Eds), Sociological Perspectives: Selected Readings, Penguin, 1971, p138
Georg Simmel, The Metropolis and Mental Life, cited in Kenneth Thompson and Jeremy Tunstall (Eds), Sociological Perspectives: Selected Readings, Penguin, 1971, p87
Margaret Thatcher; ‘I don’t believe in society. There is no such thing, only individual people, and there are families.’ Quoted in an interview with Women’s Own, 31 October 1987
Karl Marx, Capital, Vol 3, Lawrence & Wishart, 1984, p817
Take this example from the Frankfurt school ‘The specification of the human being as a person implies that he always finds himself in specific interpersonal roles within the social relations in which he lives, before he is even aware of this. Because of this, he is what he is in relation to others: a child of a mother, student of a teacher, member of a tribe or of a profession; this relation then is not external to him, but one within which and in terms of which he defines himself as specifically this or that.’ The Frankfurt Institute, Aspects of Sociology, Heinemann Educational Books, 1973, p28
Karl Marx, Capital, Vol 1, Lawrence & Wishart, 1974, p94. Marx cites V de Forbonnais, ‘Elements du commerce’, t II, p143 and p155 (1766) and Montesquieu, ‘Esprit des lois’, t II, p2 (1767). If he were writing today he could add his own less than attentive student Alain Lipietz, ‘Reflections on a tale’, Studies in Political Economy, No 26, 1988, who imagined a society with a conventionally agreed currency, in apparent ignorance of this passage.
Jean Francois Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition, Manchester University Press, 1984. Lyotard summed up the modern as ‘any science that legitimates itself with reference to a metadiscourse...making an explicit appeal to some grand narrative, such as the dialectics of Spirit, hermeneutics of meaning, the emancipation of the rational or working subject or the creation of wealth.’ (pxxiii) And, furthermore, postmodernists must show ‘incredulity to metanarratives’ (pxxiv).
See Jean Baudrillard, The Mirror of Production, Telos Press, 1975 and Scott Meikle, Essentialism in the Thought of Karl Marx, Open Court (and Duckworth), 1985
Max Weber, The Theory of Social and Economic Organisation, (Talcott Parsons Ed), William Hodge, 1947 (orig 1922), p91
Ulrich Beck, Risk Society: Towards a New Modernity, Sage, 1992
Anthony Giddens, Beyond Left and Right: The Future of Radical Politics, Polity Press, 1994, p79
Anthony Giddens, Beyond Left and Right: The Future of Radical Politics, Polity Press, 1994, p79
Anthony Giddens, The Transformation of Intimacy: Sexuality, Love and Eroticism in Modern Societies, Polity, 1992
Heraclitus and Diogenes, translated from the Greek by Guy Davenport, Grey Fox Press, 1976, p23
Anthony Giddens, Beyond Left and Right: The Future of Radical Politics, Polity Press, 1994, p192
Anthony Giddens, Beyond Left and Right: The Future of Radical Politics, Polity Press, 1994, p181
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Heartfield, J. (1996). Marxism and social construction. In: Wolton, S. (eds) Marxism, Mysticism and Modern Theory. St Antony’s Series. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-24669-4_2
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