When Durkheim et al roll their eyes into the back of their head and speak about "S"ociety, they are not talking about society.
Rational people understand society as follows:
Society, from the latin, socius: ally, companion, known associate. In a free nation, the results, plural, of free associations, plural. A group of people who meet once a month to discuss bird migration is an example of a society. The ASME is an example of a society. PETA is an example of a society. The people who join in commerce to give us the Outback Steakhouses are an example of a society. The 82nd airborne is an example of a society. And, so on.
The sum total aggregate of all of them has no political meaning in a free nation based on free associations, plural. Only in a Totalitarian context based on forced association does the term "S"ociety have any political meaning.
Compare that meaning above with Durkheim spilling the beans in his summary of “The Elementary Forms of the Religious Life:”
Society is not at all the illogical or a-logical, incoherent and fantastic being which has too often been considered. Quite on the contrary, the collective consciousness is the highest form of psychic life, since it is the consciousness of consciousness. Being placed outside of and above individual and local contingencies, it sees things only in their permanent and essential aspects, which it crystallizes into communicable ideas. At the same time that it sees from above, it sees farther; at every moment of time it embraces all known reality; that is why it alone can furnish the minds with the moulds which are applicable to the totality of things and which make it possible to think of them.
This isn’t a cherry picked paragraph out of Formes. It is from Durkheim’s summary at the end of this ‘scientific’ work, his slight of hand. Durkheim ranting on about “the concsciousness of conscioiusness … the highest form of psychic life” and so on had nothing to do with science, and everything to do with religion: The crx of Durkeheims(and others, from Plato to Kant to Hegel) is that “Society is God” … and the state is its proper church. Durkheim divinizes "S"ociety, and claims that God was simply ancient man’s mistaken totem for the tribe/"S"ociety. As an answer to Nietsche, he asserted that God wasn’t dead, merely mistaken for Society all these many years, and the 20th century was all about the new, civil religion, scientific statism, Social Scientology. A new unseen Magic Spirit in the Sky for tribal elites to roll their eyes into the back of their head and speak for–the True God. He was not formulating “the sociology of religion”, he was leg-lifting “the Religion of Sociology.” It was an act of religious -political aggression, an attempt to elevate his religion over all other competing religions. By camo-masking the religion of Sociology as a ‘science’, he and his have successfully over-run the machinery of state in America, piercing our 1st Amendment like no other religion before them.
“Christian Science” failed to make us believe that it was a science. “Scientology” failed to make us believe that it was a science. But “Social Scientology” succeeded – in spite of being rife with totally religious mumbo-jumbo nonsense like the above. To this day, pick up any Sociology text, and it will be filled with nothing but endless religious assertions of the form “Schemgfield believed…” while “Bloomfield countered…”
Well, so did the apostles of every religious movement, but that didn’t make their rantings ‘science.’
So, by "S"ociety, I mean, any political leg-lifting appeal to "S"ociety.
Do you know everyone? Neither do I. So, looking at the definitions above, when Durkheim et al roll their eyes into the back of their heads and appeal to the 'true God, “S"ociety”, who do you think they are speaking for? Might as well be God, it’s the same slight of hand.
And, we’ve let that kind of sloppy religion over-run our machinery of state, for at least a hundred years.
Ditto “The” Economy. It’s the economies…
regards,
Frediano