If society has real existence, it should naturally possess laws peculiar to it. If we accept the first theory about the nature of society (which we have already discussed) and reject the existence of society as a real entity, naturally we have to admit that society lacks laws that may govern it.
And if we accept the second theory and believe in the artificial and mechanical composition of society, then we would have to admit that society is governed by laws but that its laws are confined to a series of mechanical and causal relationships between its various parts, without the distinguishing features and particular characteristics of life and living organisms.
And if we accept the third point of view, we shall have to accept:
Firstly, that society itself has a comparatively more permanent existence independent of the existence of individuals. Although, this collective life has no separate existence, and is distributed and dispersed among its individual members, and incarnates itself in their existence. It has discoverable laws and traditions more permanent and stable than those of the individuals, who are its components.
Secondly, we shall have to accept also that the components of society, which are human individuals, contrary to the mechanistic point of view, lose their independent identity, although in a relative fashion ‘to produce an organically composite structure.
But at the same time, the relative independence of the individual is preserved; because individual life, individual nature, and individual achievements are not dissolved totally in the collective existence. According to this point of view, the man actually lives with two separate existences, two souls, and two “selves.”
On the one hand, there are the life, soul, and self of the human being, which are the products of the processes of his essential nature; on the other, there are the collective life, soul, and self which are the products of social life, and pervade the individual self. On this basis, biological laws, psychological laws, and sociological laws, together, govern human beings.
But according to the fourth theory, only a single type of law governs man, and these are the social laws alone. Among the Muslim scholars `Abd al-Rahman ibn Khaldun of Tunisia was the first and the foremost Islamic thinker to discuss clearly and explicitly the laws governing the society in independence from the laws governing the individual.
Consequently, he asserted that society itself had a special character, individuality, and reality. In his famous introduction to the history, he has discussed this theory in detail. Among the modern scholars and thinkers, Montesquieu (the French philosopher of the eighteenth century A.D.) is the first to discuss the laws which control and govern human groups and societies.
Raymond Aaron says about Montesquieu: His purpose was to make history intelligible. He sought to understand historical truth. But historical truth appeared to him in the form of an almost limitless diversity of morals, customs, ideas, laws, and institutions. His inquiry’s point of departure was precisely this seemingly incoherent diversity.
The goal of the inquiry should have been the replacement of this incoherent diversity with a conceptual order. One might say that Montesquieu, exactly like Max Weber, wanted to proceed from meaningless fact to an intelligible order. This attitude is precisely the one peculiar to the sociologist. (1)
It means that a sociologist has to reach beyond the apparently diverse social forms and phenomena, which seem to be alien to one another, to reveal the unity in diversity in order to prove that all the diverse manifestations refer to the one and the same reality. In the same way, all similar social events and phenomena have their origin in a similar sequence of analogous causes.
Here is a passage from the observations on the causes of the rise and fall of the Romans: It is not fortune that rules the world. We can ask the Romans, who had a constant series of successes when they followed a certain plan, and an uninterrupted sequence of disasters when they followed another.
There are general causes, whether moral or physical, which operate in every monarchy, to bring about its rise, its duration and its fall. All accidents are subject to these causes, and if the outcome of a single battle, i.e. a particular cause, was the ruin of a state, there was a general cause which decreed that that state was destined to perish through a single battle. In short, the main impulse carries all the particular accidents along with it. (2)
The Holy Quran explains that nations and societies qua nations and societies (not just individuals living in societies) have common laws and principles that govern their rise and fall in accordance with certain historical processes.
The concept of a common fate and collective destiny implies the existence of certain definite laws governing society.
About the tribe of Bani Israel, the Holy Quran says:
And We decreed for the Children of Israel in the scriptures: You verily will work corruption in the earth twice, and you will become great tyrants. … It may be that your Lord will have mercy on you [if ye mend your ways], but if you repeat [the crime] We shall repeat [the punishment], and We have appointed hell a dungeon for the disbelievers. (3)
The last sentence, i.e.“But if you repeat [ the crime] We shall repeat [the punishment]” shows that the Quran is addressing all the people of the tribe and not an individual. It also implies that all the societies are governed by a universal law.
Determinism or Freedom
One of the fundamental problems discussed by philosophers, particularly in the last century, is the problem of determinism and freedom of individual as against society, or, in other words, determinism and freedom of the individual spirit vis-Ã-vis the social spirit.
If we accept the first theory regarding the nature of society, and consider social structure to be merely a hypostatized notion, and believe in the absolute independence of the individual, then there will be no place for the idea of social determinism.
Because, there will be no power or force except that of the individuals, and no social force that may rule over the individual. Hence, in this theory, there is no room for the idea of social determinism.
If there is any compulsion or determinism it is of the individual and operates through the individuals. Society has no role in this matter. Hence, there can be no social determinism as emphasized by the advocates of social determinism.
In the same way, if we accept the fourth theory, and consider the individual and individual’s personality as a raw material or an empty pot, then the entire human personality of the individual, his intellect, and his free will would be reduced to nothing but an expression of the collective intelligence and the collective will, which manifest themselves, as an illusion, in the form of an individual to realize their own social ends.
Accordingly, if we accept the idea of the absolute essentials and prissiness of society, there will be no place left for the idea of the freedom and choice of the individual.
Emile Durkheim, the famous French sociologist, emphasizes the importance of society to the extent of saying that social matters (in fact all the human matters, as against the biological and animal urges and needs, like eating and sleeping) are the products of society, not the products of individual thought and will, and have three characteristics: they are external, compulsive, and general.
NOTES:
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1. Raymond Aron, Main Currents in Sociological Thought, vol. I, p. 14.
2. Ibid.
3. The Holy Quran 17:4-8
