Universitas/Societas

Louis Dumont ( Essays on Individualism ) notes that “the word by which the old scholastics designated society, or corporations in general, [was] universitas , ‘whole.’” By this they referred to the institutions, values, concepts, language that was “sociologically prior to its particular members, the latter becoming human beings only through education into and modelling by a given society.” Within the universitas was a variety of complexly connected societies, so that Althusius could speak of a ” consociatio complex et publica ,” which he described as both as universitas or a consociatio politica .”

Moderns by contrast employ the term societas , by which they often mean a “partnership” established by “a contract by which the individuals composing it have ‘associated’ themselves in a society.” Society as a whole is conceived of as a voluntary society, a very large club. The individualistic conception behind this notion of society created problems for early modern thinkers. Starting from isolated individuals, it is very difficult to describe how we get to societies with unequal distributions of wealth and power. If everything is contract, then there must first be a Genossenschaft , a strictly “social” contract establishing association among individuals, and then a Herrschaft , a political contract by which the formerly equal members of the society consent to submit to a ruler. Individualism undermines hierarchy and rule, other than the hierarchy of sheer force (as in Hobbes).

Dumont neatly traces the career of societas to the period after the French Revolution. He sees the Revolution as the extreme result of individualistic notions of society, and in reaction thinkers like Hegel attempted to recover universitas , though without ignoring the Enlightenment development of societas and the individual.