Cultural Geography

When in 1987 British Prime Minister

Margaret Thatcher declared that there was

‘no such thing as society’, her comments hit a

raw nerve with social scientists who had for

years suffered a sense of professional anxiety

over exactly what constitutes ‘the social’ and

how it might be differentiated from other

concepts such as ‘the economy’ or ‘culture’.

For Margaret Thatcher,‘society’ was a dubious

abstraction which was too readily invoked in

support of policies that she and her support-

ers would have defined as socialist. While

Mrs Thatcher preferred to speak of individual

men and women and in support of nuclear,

heterosexual families, her ‘no society’ rhetoric

served as a covert means of promoting

economically driven solutions to social prob-

lems, with ‘market forces’ increasingly replac-

ing ‘society’ at the centre of British political

discourse. If nothing else, Thatcher’s remarks

demonstrate that definitions of the social are

politically charged, with more at stake than a

question of semantics.

What constitutes ‘the social’ has always

been in question among geographers and

other social scientists. For some, it can be

defined in terms of hierarchical structures and

relatively permanent institutions. For others, it

is a much more elusive concept, referring to

relatively impermanent interpersonal relations

and fleeting affinities, continuously made and

remade rather than firmly institutionalized

and historically sedimented. Raymond

Williams (1976: 291–3) traces the etymologi-

cal roots of our current understandings of

‘society’ and ‘the social’, demonstrating how a

relational view of society as companionship or

association (from the sixteenth century) gave

way to a more abstract and impersonal under-

standing of society or social structure, closely

related to the state (from the eighteenth

century). By the nineteenth century, Williams

argues, ‘society’ was sufficiently objectified to

give rise to debates about the relationship

between ‘the individual’ and ‘society’. Similar

debates continue to resonate today, despite

attempts to transcend such dualisms with

more sophisticated accounts of the recursive

relationship between (social) structure and

(human) agency (Giddens, 1985).

Some social scientists, such as John Urry

(2000), have begun to doubt the usefulness

of the term ‘society’ and to sketch a ‘post-

societal’ agenda for sociology, acknowledging

that sociological categories of class, gender

and ethnicity cannot be mapped unproblemat-

ically onto the geographical spaces of the

nation, region or city. As the flows of people,

information, goods and capital are increasingly

exceeding the boundaries of individual nations,

Urry suggests that metaphors of networks,

mobilities and flows are more appropriate

than static, bounded notions of ‘society’. He

also argues that the complex interweaving of

Section 1

RETHINKING THE SOCIAL Edited by Peter Jackson

Introduction: The Social in Question

Peter Jackson

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