Relationship Between Society & the Individual

Society has been viewed in different ways according to the view taken of the relationship between society and the individual, and in the eighteenth century Mill represented the view that the individual and society have a tacit agreement as to what belongs to each, based on the social contract idea of Locke and Hume, while Marx sees society as a collective that evolves along a specific path he identifies as dialectical materialism.

Mill characterizes the agreement between society and the individual such that the individual receives the protection of society, and he or she owes a return for this benefit. The mere fact that one lives in society means that one is bound to observe certain conduct toward the others in society. The first element of such conduct is not to injure the interests of one another, and such interests should be considered rights; the second is that each person should bear his share of the labors and sacrifices incurred for defending society or its members. The individual whose conduct becomes such as to affect prejudicially the interests of others may be punished because at that point society has jurisdiction over such conduct. The fact that the individual has sovereignty over his own actions until those actions become prejudicial to the interests of another, however, means that society has no right to interfere in those actions until they become prejudicial to the interests of another. This assumes that all the people involved are adults and have the

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circumvent those laws and cause the situation to deteriorate. Marx's theory postulated an entrenched stratification of society based almost entirely on economic differences between social classes. Marx described a class system under which economic position determined class ranking and influenced mobility, and for Marx there was no true social mobility but a rigid stratification into the bourgeois and proletarian classes. For Marx, social classes were part of a system of economic exploitation, with the bourgeoisie, or capitalist class, controlling the means of production and exploiting the work of the proletariat, or working class. Marx believed that this exploitation of the working class would lead inevitably to class conflict and to the destruction of the system of capitalism with the violent overthrow of that system. It would then be replaced by a period of the dictatorship of the proletariat, leading in time to a classless society, as noted. Marx writes in the "Manifesto of the Communist Party" that the history of all society to his time "is the history of class struggles." This struggle defines the ongoing stream of historical materialism, based on the necessary social conditions defined by economic relations. This

Category: Psychology - R