AccScience Publishing / BIJP / Volume 10 / Issue 1 / DOI: 10.18491/beytulhikme.1534
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RESEARCH ARTICLE

Society, Person and Their Connections: A Bhaskarian Formulation

Erol Subaşı1
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1 Recep Tayyip Erdoğan Üniversitesi, İİBF, Siyaset Bilimi ve Kamu Yönetimi Bölümü 53020, Rize, Turkey
BIJP 2020, 10(1), 105–116; https://doi.org/10.18491/beytulhikme.1534
Received: 28 September 2019 | Published online: 22 March 2020
© 2020 by the Authors. This article is an open access article distributed under the terms and conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution -Noncommercial 4.0 International License (CC-by the license) ( https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/ )
Abstract

How the agency relates to society is a classic problem in the social sciences. The literature, for the most part, has long been dominated by two main methodological positions, namely methodological individualism, and methodological holism. These consider individuals and collectivities respectively as constituent parts of society. While the former suffers from an atomistic, a-historical and a-social conception of social reality, the latter tends to dissolve the person into the social object and considers it as reified. The present study explores Roy Bhaskar’s conception of the connection between society and person connection through his key texts. The study argues that contrary to methodological individualism and methodological holism, society is composed of relations. Furthermore, although society pre-exists the person, its survival depends upon human praxis, creating an ontological gap between them. Such an analysis has important implications for political science and political sociology. Methodological individualism underpins liberalism, utilitarianism and the neo-classical economy, methodological holism underpins nationalism, fascism, and Stalinism. In contrast, methodological relationism acknowledges both the distinctive ontologies of the person and society, which could enable the transformation of existing socio-political structures and the democratization of politics.

Keywords
Society
person
individualism
holism
dialectism
relationism
transformational model of society
References
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Beytulhikme An International Journal of Philosophy, Print ISSN: 1303-8303, Published by AccScience Publishing