かならず 読んでください

社会など存在しない

Society does not exist, as we imagine not in Margaret Thatcher's sense but in historical entities

カメレオン

池田光穂

■社会の定義（→「社会」）

オックスフォード英語辞典（OED）の「社会 （Society）」の最初の定義はこのように書いてある。

Association with one's fellow men, esp. in a friendly or intimate manner; companionship or fellowship. Also rarely of animals (quot. 1774).

【翻訳】ある人の仲間と共にある、とりわけ友好的な いしは親密な流儀での、連合（アソシーエション）のこと。仲間付き合い、親睦的結社。時には（人間以外の）動物にもみられる。［以上の用例は 1774年の下記］。

1774 Goldsm. Nat. Hist. (1776) V. 153 As Nature has formed the rapacious class for war, so she seems equally to have fitted these for peace, rest, and society.

【翻訳】1776年に出版されたオリバー・ゴールド スミス（Oliver Goldsmith, 1730-1774）『地球と生きている自然に関する歴史（An History of the Earth and Animated Nature）』５巻153ページからの用例：「自然は闘争のための強欲な階級を造ったがゆえに、自然は同様に、平和と休息と社会のための階級をも併せて もつようになった」。

OEDはそれよりも140年ほど古い用例を示してい るが、この現代的用法の起源は18世紀後半の博物学者ゴールドスミスのものに依拠させている。

さて、ではこのことは、何を意味するのだろうか？　 私の考えでは、社会というものの用例は、啓蒙主義にもとづく市民社会の登場と深い関係があるのではないかということである。これは古い用法では、社会の語 源となったラテン語の形容詞 socius（主格・男性形）——意味は分有している・加盟している・家族親族である・連盟している——の用法の対象の範囲が狭かったの対して、国家を構 成するメンバーである市民の啓蒙時代における「急速な拡張」のせいで、社会というものの定義が想定する範囲がきわめて大きなものになったということに他な らない。すなわち、現代の我々の社会が想像する一番大きな集団は、まさに市民社会（civil society）そのものなのである。

市民社会の確立は、あるいはそのような権利主張が公 共のものになる根拠は、市民からの代表者が政治権力を司る民主主義（democracy）——人民による権力掌握（demos+cracia）——という 考え方が確立しつつあったということである。この最たる力の行使の結果がブルジョア革命である。

今日における社会の概念は、市民による共同性を前提 にしているが、それが古代から引き継いだ親密性の範疇＝親密圏（intimate sphere）と公共性の範疇＝公共圏（public sphere）との重なりや、時代的取り扱いについては、さまざまな議論がある。

■マーガレット・サッチャーさん（Margaret Hilda Thatcher, 1925-2013）の「社会はない」発言（1987年）の出典は？

ウィキペディア（英語）によりますと1987年の Woman's Own 誌において、下記のようなインタビューへの返答をしています。

"I think we have gone through a period when too many children and people have been given to understand "I have a problem, it is the Government's job to cope with it!" or "I have a problem, I will go and get a grant to cope with it!" "I am homeless, the Government must house me!" and so they are casting their problems on society and who is society? There is no such thing!"

つまり、

「…彼ら（＝政府に文句を言う人たち）は、自分たち の問題を社会のせいにするのです、 誰が社会なのでしょうか？　そんなものは存在しないのです！」 と言い、「個々の男たちと女たちがおり、家族がいます、そして人々を通してしか政府はなにも為しえないのです、人々はまず自分たち自身を省みなければなり ません（people look to themselves first）」を含む次のような言葉が続きます。

There are individual men and women and there are families and no government can do anything except through people and people look to themselves first. It is our duty to look after ourselves and then also to help look after our neighbour and life is a reciprocal business and people have got the entitlements too much in mind without the obligations." （この出典は、"Interview for Woman's Own ("no such thing as society") with journalist Douglas Keay". Margaret Thatcher Foundation. 23 September 1987.）

"During her tenure as Prime Minister, Margaret Thatcher oversaw a number of neoliberal reforms, including tax reduction, exchange rate reform, deregulation, and privatisation.These reforms were continued and supported by her successor John Major. Although opposed by the Labour Party, the reforms were largely left unaltered when Labour returned to power in 1997. Indeed, the Labour government under Tony Blair even implemented a variety of privatisation and deregulation measures that had not been completed under prior governments." - neoliberalism

■さて、サッチャーの「社会などない」発言よりも 29年前に、マルクス主義文芸批評家・社会学者のレイモンド・ウィリアムズは、『文化と社会』（1958年——ただし私が参照したのは1960年版）のな かで、こう喝破しています。

「大衆は存在しない。人びとを大衆とみなす方法があ るだけだ」と。There are in fact no masses; there are only ways of seeing people as masses (Williams 1960:319).

■大衆と社会に関するレイモンド・ウィリアムズの主 張

F. R, Leavis, in the pamphlet Mass Civilization and Minority Culture published in 1930, を論じるなかで、

What, in fact, do we mean by 'mass'? Do we mean a democracy dependent on universal suffrage, or a culture dependent on universal education, or a reading public dependent on universal literacy? If we find the products of mass-civilization so repugnant, are we to identify the suffrage or the education or the literacy as the agents of decay? Or, alternatively, do we mean by mass-civilization an industrial civilization, dependent on machine production and the factory system? Do we find institutions like the popular press and advertising to be the necessary consequences of such a system of production? Or, again, do we find both the machine-civilization and the institutions to be products of some great change and decline in human minds? Such questions, which are the common places of our generation, inevitably underlie the detailed judgements. And Leavis, though he has never claimed to offer a theory of such matters, has in fact, in a number of ways, committed himself to certain general attitudes which amount to a recognizable attitude towards modern history and society.
(Williams 1960:275-276)

if the working people are really in this helpless condition, that they alone cannot go beyond 'trade-union consciousness' (that is, a negative reaction to capitalism rather than a positive reaction towards socialism) , they can be regarded as 'masses' to be captured, the objects rather than the subjects of power. Almost anything can then be justified.（p.303）

In Nineteen Eighty-Four, the same point is clear, and the terms are now direct, The hated politicians are in charge, while the dumb mass of 'peoples' goes on in very much its own ways, protected by its very stupidity. The only dissent comes from a rebel intellectual: the exile against the whole system. Orwell puts the case in these terms because this is how he really saw present society, and Nineteen Eighty Four is desperate because Orwell recognized that on such a construction the exile could not win, and then there was no hope at all. (Pp.312-313)

Masses was a new word for mob, and it is a very significant word. It seems probable that three social tendencies joined to confirm its meaning. First, there was the concentration of population in the industrial towns, a physical massing of persons which the great increase in total population accentuated, and which has continued with continuing urbanization. Second, there was the concentration of workers into factories: again, a physical massing, made necessary by machine-production; also, a social massing, in the work-relations made necessary by the development of large scale collective production. Third, there was the conse quent development of an organized and self-organizing working class: a social and political massing.(Pp.316-317)

The masses are always the others, whom we don't know, and can't know.(p.319)

■

リンク

文献


Copyleft, CC, Mitzub'ixi Quq Chi'j, 2013-2019