Group unity dissolves as members’ lived demands grow heterogeneous.

Evidence

In societies where the disparate subject positions of social actors have a limited range of horizontal variations, they could be conceived as expressing the identity of the same social actors. Workers, for instance, living in a certain neighbourhood, working in comparable jobs, having the same access to consumer goods, culture, recreation and so on, can have the illusion that in spite of their heterogeneity, all of their demands issue from the same group, and that there is a natural or essential link between them. When these demands become more heterogeneous in the living experience of people, it is their unity around a ‘taken-for-granted’ group that is questioned. At this point the logics constructing the ‘people’ as a contingent entity become more autonomous from social immanence but, for that very reason, more constitutive in their effects. This is the point at which the name, as a highly cathected rallying point, does not express the unity of the group, but becomes its ground. — Ernesto Laclau, On Populist Reason, 453

Categorization

• XREF: connects to: Proportionally matched growth still alters a group’s internal relations — Georg Simmel, The Sociology of Georg Simmel, 3223

Broader Connections

• Proportionally matched growth still alters a group’s internal relations #expands (0.72) — Georg Simmel, The Sociology of Georg Simmel, 3223