On the Category of the "Social"

The idea of “social design” presents what philosophers have called an “essentially contested concept”: the meaning of “social design” cannot itself be given by a set of empirical or analytic propositions, nor derived straightforwardly from existing definitions. Rather, the meaning of social design is itself up for grabs in normative, practical, and imaginative contest about what it means for design to be “social.” Even more contested is the category of the “social” itself. Any discussion of “social design” must ultimately implicate—consciously or unconsciously—our different ideas of the “social.” How did the social emerge—and how does it function now—such that we can imagine design of the social, through the social, or for the social?

The first key to our understanding is that classical antiquity had no developed idea of the “social” apart from the political. Instead, the ancient distinction was between the oikos or household, which functioned as a subpolitical productive unit made up of a family and its slaves, and the polis or city-state, which encompassed all the relevant public activities of ancient life, including what we now think of as “social” life. Economic, religious, recreational and other activities that took place outside the oikos were all considered “civic” activities—or, to use the Greek original for the Latin civitas—they were all political activities. The closest that we come in antiquity to the idea of a free-floating domain of the social is perhaps the Stoic idea of the universal, cosmopolitan “community” of all rational creatures. It was called oikeiosis, a word that now resists straightforward translation but which indicates (via its relation to the oikos) some sense of “at-homeness” in the world.

It is only in early modernity that the category of the social really emerges, and it does so in a way that helps us to understand the challenges now faced by the agenda of social design. Aristotle tells us that the two relations of the oikos or “household” are the master-slave relation and family relations (man-wife-children). For reasons that remain unclear, chattel slavery disappeared from northwestern Europe in the high Middle Ages, and what slaves there were did not play crucial roles in production. Likewise, serfdom disappeared within a few centuries, leaving a problem in the self-understanding of early modern European societies: recognizably modern states were carved out of the “parcellized sovereignties” of the feudal system, particularly in England, France, and the Netherlands, and in all these societies, the ancient category of the oikos did not apply. Laborers were now formally free (however poor), and the central category of master-slave did not describe the new world of “contract,” in which surplus had to be extracted through the mechanisms of the market rather than as tribute.

In this world, the idea of the oikos was transformed into that of the oeconomy, a self-regulating, relatively autonomous universe of horizontal interactions in what was called the “state of natural liberty”—meaning, the non-political or pre-political state, the way of life outside or before the organized politics of the renovated polis of the modern state. A new opposition thus began to replace the classical divide between oikos and polis: between the “state” and “civil society” where the state instantiated the category of the political while civil society found its highest (but not exclusive) expression in the “economy.” The category of the “social” thus emerges in the wake of—in partial reaction to and partial mimicry of—modern politics. While the political involved hierarchy in the vertical relation of citizen and state, the idea of the “social” took its cue from the “oeconomic” relations of formally free, equal individuals in horizontal exchanges of the market.

Why does this history matter for the ambitions of “social design” today? The idea of the “social” is the bearer of a complex genealogy in which it was often opposed to the political. The social covers neither the realm of intimate personal relations (as in the ancient oikos) nor the realm of civic belonging (as in the ancient polis or, via the new theory of representation, the modern state.) As such, the social has never been able to claim politics, but neither can it fully disambiguate itself from the political.

It is against this complex backdrop that any project of “social design” must be pursued and evaluated. It might be asked: why has social design failed—that is, why must it be constantly reinvented? My own sense of this problem is that the category of the social exists in a complex tension with the category of the political from which it takes its cue, but the power of which it also wishes simultaneously to usurp and to deny. On this account, the project of "social" design must become fully political if it is to succeed. There are, of course, many important past and present steps in this direction. However, social design in itself cannot bring about the redemption of the political: design in itself is not enough. Thus, the ambition of “social design” must be maintained - as all forms of aesthetic and intellectual modernism - as a beacon of future hope, but also a signpost of past (and perhaps present) inadequacy.

I wish to end with three questions that the genealogy I have presented here might pose for the project of “social design.”

First, how can design of, for, or through the social (that is, through “civil society”) avoid becoming merely an adjunct to the “economic,” which is the main way that the “social” has usually been theorized and modeled? Or, to put the same question differently, what is the stance of “social design” to the alleged imperatives of the market?

Second, what is the relation of social design to the category of the political? Can social design succeed in its ambitions—however conceived—without engaging politics? And, what should be the response of social designers to our de-politicized age—and, especially, to the de-politicized (and perhaps de-politicizing) discourse of “civil society” in which “social design” might be thought implicated?

Finally, how can social design rehabilitate and renovate the ancient category of the oikos? Of all current forms of praxis, design is most immediately connected to our lived spaces and to the routines and challenges of grounded, daily life. As such, the project of “social design” must necessarily confront the absence of any contemporary theoretical category of the oikos beyond anodyne and often reactionary reflections on the “family,” which fail to address the challenges posed to the family by the shifting productive landscapes of late capitalism. How can the project of “social design” comprehend theoretically the concrete particulars of daily life with which it must engage—that is, life in our modern forms of the oikos—if the discourse of social design is tied to a vocabulary developed first for the modern polis, and its derivative abstraction, the “social”?