Making the Social Work: toward a Functionalist View of Social Governance

“The social” is a term borrowed from Hannah Arendt. She once attempted to define the features of public sphere in the modern world as “the rise of the social”: With the tremendous expansion of the economy from the end of the eighteenth century, “housekeeping and all matters pertaining formerly to the private sphere of the family have become a ‘collective’ concern.” The social has thus invaded the public sphere and has thereby blurred the boundary between the public and the private. [1]: [35].

For the pursuit of “alternative modernities” of non-Western countries, what fundamentally matters is to combine particularistic practical endeavors for modernization with universalistic normative requirements of modernity on the basis of the distinction between the two. Analytically, modern values or ideas, such as liberty, equality, and democracy, are the universal requirements of modernity, but the conceptions of modern values or ideas are context-dependent. This means people from different cultures may have different perceptions of modern values or ideas on which “alternative” institutional and practical models of modernization are built. The same is true for society building. Although non-Western countries could consider “realizing an active society” as their political objective of modernization of social governance, they must seek their own institutional and practical models of society building on the basis of their unique political and sociohistorical conditions.

For the sake of argument, I have listed only the discourses on socialist civil society from the perspective of market-society relations.

Liu Qingping analyzed the Confucian consanguinitism’s corrosion of sociality and individuality. [16]

“Normative functionalism” is a term borrowed from Axel Honneth, a leading figure in the third generation of the Frankfurt School. In his Freedom’s Right, Honneth introduced the term “normative functionalism” when he expounded on the relationship between market and morality. [9]:[183]

In Fei Xiaotong’s words, “ethical particularism” means “general standards have no utility”. “The first thing to do is to understand the specific context: Who is the important figure, and what kind of relationship is appropriate with that figure? Only then can one decide the ethical standards to be applied in that context.” [6]:[78–79]