Society emerged as a concept from crowds, schooling, and shared space practices

Evidence

The neologism was explained but the Pasha’s confusion concerning the new order remained – ‘that people should be ruled over by a peasant, the community represented by a ploughboy!’ His confusion reflects the difficulty of imagining this new object called society. It was new in several respects. Its order was not a hierarchy of personal status, for peasants now appeared as equal members with gentlemen. Its membership was not a pattern of kinship extending outward, however distantly, from one’s own connections. ‘Society’ was something encountered above all in the form of crowds. Somehow the strangers crowded together in the courtroom were to be conceived as parts of a social whole to which one belonged, even though nothing seemed to connect the Pasha to the crowd except their occupying the same space at the same moment. To conceive of these connections, and to construct them into a social whole was not necessarily a matter of extending one’s horizons or enlarging one’s imagination. It was more a matter of adopting new political and social practices, which brought a new set of assumptions. Certain practices involving self and space, order and time, body and mentality were to be adopted, of the kind I have been describing in this book, so that the dimensions of space and time and mentality appeared to stand apart as a conceptual structure, a whole; and it was to be forgotten that they were mere appearances. — Timothy Mitchell, Colonising Egypt, 387 (#expands, via linked claim)

Categorization

• XREF: connects to: Society names both actual human networks and the abstract forms of sociality — Georg Simmel, on individuality and social forms_…, 896; Sociology emerged as a scholarly response to social acceleration — Hartmut Rosa, Social Acceleration: A New Theory of…, 189; The concept of society required new embodied practices to be imaginable — Timothy Mitchell, Colonising Egypt, 387 (+3 more)

Broader Connections

• The concept of society required new embodied practices to be imaginable #expands (0.95) — Timothy Mitchell, Colonising Egypt, 387