Introduction
In social study, the conception of the human being with which we start out will influence our approach. But the same is true of our conception of society and this is the matter we turn to now.[1]
Perhaps the most basic question and one that in a sense underlies all the other that we will raise is whether societies exist in their own right at all. For surely, it may be argued, a society is simply a collection of individual human beings so that the existence of a society is no more and no less than the existence of those human beings and more pertinently once we agree that a society is no more and no less than the individuals who belong to it, needn’t we agree that in understanding how the individual behaves, we shall be understanding all there is to understand about society? On this showing sociology, as a study of society, for example, becomes something of a bogus enterprise.
