The Invention of Society argues that democracy allowed people, for the first time, to invent, innovate, and explore choices that could not have been imagined before.

Humans must take into account the existence of others in their everyday interactions. This awareness is understood primarily as ‘value consensus’, which specifies ‘what can be done’ when people interact. If this value consensus is violated, it would result in a total collapse of order. However, over the past 150 years and more, earlier norms have been routinely upended without any breakdown. Instead, history has recorded tremendous progress of the kind never seen before. 

Democracy frees the individual from the limitations of ‘what can be done’ by constraining them instead in terms of ‘what cannot be done’. This book provides a theory of this move from ‘what can be done’ to ‘what cannot be done’ through the notion of the Triad, where the universal rules of ‘what cannot be done’ are housed.

The author states that the Triad enables our understanding of a ‘society’ in the true sense of the term, as classes and categories can now better their life chances with greater choices, but in full awareness of the ‘other’. That is why the Triad comes to life only in a democracy and expresses itself through the concept of ‘citizenship’. 

Dipankar Gupta is Retired Professor of Sociology, with three decades of teaching experience.

Preface

1. The Invention of Society: How and When?

2. Citizenship and the Triad: Beyond Self and Other

3. Before Society: Utopians Imagining the Triad

4. More on the Triad: Limits of the Dyadic Framework

5. Habermas and Parsons: On Triad’s Threshold

6. The Pressures to Change: Benevolence in Abeyance

7. Errors and Ambitions: What the Triad Allows

8. Ethics after Virtue: Correcting the Sequence

9. The Triad and Morality: Notions of Evil

10. The Triad and Liberalism: The Constant Churn

11. The Many Faces of the Triad: Altruistic and Monadic Liberalism

12. Modernity and its Discontents: Separating the Contemporaneous from the Modern

13. Inventors of Society: The Elite of Calling

14. Society First: The Universality of Sociology

Bibliography
Index