SUBJECTOLOGY

What we Ignore and what we know about the Social Subject

De: Agustín Galán Machío

Narrado por: Virtual Voice

Translated by AI (Microsoft Word, ChatOn AI, DeepL)

Individual' and 'collective' subjects have no less 'definition' than 'knowledge' (epistemology) or 'ignorance' (agnotology). To speak of sociology (the study of society) is not much different from conceiving of possible neologisms as 'subjectology', 'nationology' (the study of nations) or 'tribology' (the study of tribes); considering that in 'subjectology' the term 'subject' encompasses from 'individuals' to 'society', 'community', 'tribe', 'nation', empire, or civilizations.
The 'subject' is key in sociology, political science and law, economics, psychology or philosophy; and it also plays this crucial role in the natural sciences such as biology or neuroscience. This book is about 'subjectology' (the study of the 'subject' rather than the study of 'society'), understanding the 'object' of social sciences as 'individuals', 'social beings' and 'collective subjects' (society, community, collectivities).
According to Rousseau, the ‘people’ is ‘subject’ and ‘sovereign,’ a ‘constituent’ and ‘constituted’ subject; and according to George H. Mead, human behavior crystallizes in a fusion of the ‘me,’ in which the social content of the personality predominates, and the ‘I,’ in which the individual content does. Thus, political science and sociology speak of the same 'thing': the subject.
Individuals ('social beings') and the societies in which they live are the real 'historical subjects'. Social movements, social strata or layers (the working class or its postmodern substitutes, new social movements - immigrants, women, Hispanics, the LGBTI community, etc.) are agents or agencies of social majorities that can influence the course of historical events, but since no one can inhabit these entities (no one can live in a social class or in a feminist movement), they do not reach the category of subjects.

Any collective subject must have characteristics such as those of an individual ‘identity’, ‘self-consciousness’ in space and time, action according to ends, sensitivity to happiness or misfortune, autonomy, independence, delimited boundaries, goals, rules of belonging, and so on. They must resemble Hobbes' ‘Leviathan’ as a mechanism with a life of its own, acting under the guidance of an authority emanating from the majority social forces; in other words, what we know as ‘society’ and not some ‘fragment’ of it.
In this book, the author discusses the classical contract theory of the formation of political society as an implicit pact between individual subjects (Machiavelli, Hobbes, Locke, Montesquieu, Rousseau) and sociological theories of social subjects (Comte, Durkheim, Gabriel Tarde, Marx, Weber, Talcott Parsons, Foucault, Habermas, Bourdieu, Mead, Goffman).