The concept of society emerged as the name for a newly invented moral order

Evidence

To the world divided in two, I argue first of all, there corresponded a new conception of the person, similarly divided into a physical body and a non-physical entity to be called the mind or mentality. I examine how the new political practices of the colonial period were organised around this distinction, with the aim of making the individual body disciplined and industrious, and how the same distinction became the subject of a large literature, concerned in particular with the Egyptian mind or ‘character’, whose problematic trait was its lack of the same habit of industry. The political process was conceived, in other words, according to this novel dichotomy between a material and a mental world, an object and a subject world. Its purpose, in turn, was to create both a material order and a conceptual or moral order. The new name for this moral order was ‘society’. — Timothy Mitchell, Colonising Egypt, 86

Categorization

• SEED: Article angle: ‘society’ and ‘the mind’ as colonial inventions — how the dichotomy between body and mentality was operationalized to discipline a colonized population, and its echo in modern managerial discourse about ‘work ethic’.
• XREF: connects to: The Institut’s scholarly solidarity deliberately modeled an ideal future brotherly society — Martin Jay, The Dialectical Imagination: A History…, 161