Society exceeds its individual parts through collective labor and division of functions
Evidence
The most concrete theoretico-practical explanation, however, is that to be found in the first volume of Capital , where it is demonstrated that in the factory system there exists a quota of production which cannot be attributed to any individual worker but to the ensemble of the labour force, to collective man. A similar process takes place for the whole of society, which is based on the division of labour and of functions and for this reason is worth more than the sum of its parts. — Antonio Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks, 1655
Categorization
Category: Definitional Content
- XREF: Gramsci’s concretization of the ‘society is more than the sum of its parts’ claim connects to Durkheim’s emergent social facts and to later theories of collective identity formation used in Islamophobia analysis.
- DEFINE: Defines what ‘more than the sum of its parts’ means concretely via the factory labor quota — not just a vague holism.
Related
- Social aggregates exceed their components because division of labour creates unownable collective production (similarity 0.84)
- Society, through the division of labour, produces more than the sum of its parts. (similarity 0.81)
- The social exceeds the sum of its individual members (similarity 0.81)
- Social wholes exceed their components, so social law cannot be physical law (similarity 0.81)
- Collective critique and division of labor raise a group’s average to its best members. (similarity 0.79)
- Division of labor makes modern societies possible, not merely more productive. (similarity 0.79)
- Collective worker consciousness extends from the factory to national and international division of labour (similarity 0.78)