Medieval people had no concept of society as we understand it. By the 1530s, the term still referred to the friendly association of one person with another, from the Latin socius, or "companion." Only from the mid-seventeenth century did it come to denote an object with its own independent existence and laws, that could be described, analyzed, and governed. This course retraces that invention in early modern Britain: the problems it emerged to solve and the conflicts that arose in defining it. Is society something that must be made deliberately, or something that emerges naturally from how people already are? Where are its boundaries drawn, and how do those cast outside - for instance by race, sex, or perceived civility - define what counts as belonging? Our readings span the intellectual history of the period, ranging across humanism and the recovery of classical political thought in More and Thomas Smith; the social contract and the state of nature in Grotius, Hobbes, and Locke; republicanism, virtue, and corruption in Machiavelli and Harrington; the first attempts to count, map, and improve a population by Graunt and Petty; the idealization of commercial society and polite sociability in Defoe, Mandeville, and Shaftesbury; and the Scottish Enlightenment works of Ferguson, Millar, Hume, and Adam Smith, in which society first became the object of a self-conscious science. Throughout, we will ask how concepts of "society" both open and foreclose the possibilities we perceive for collective life.
5 units · Letter (ABCD/NP)
Medieval people had no concept of society as we understand it. By the 1530s, the term still referred to the friendly association of one person with another, from the Latin socius, or "companion." Only from the mid-seventeenth century did it come to denote an object with its own independent existence and laws, that could be described, analyzed, and governed. This course retraces that invention in early modern Britain: the problems it emerged to solve and the conflicts that arose in defining it. Is society something that must be made deliberately, or something that emerges naturally from how people already are? Where are its boundaries drawn, and how do those cast outside - for instance by race, sex, or perceived civility - define what counts as belonging? Our readings span the intellectual history of the period, ranging across humanism and the recovery of classical political thought in More and Thomas Smith; the social contract and the state of nature in Grotius, Hobbes, and Locke; republicanism, virtue, and corruption in Machiavelli and Harrington; the first attempts to count, map, and improve a population by Graunt and Petty; the idealization of commercial society and polite sociability in Defoe, Mandeville, and Shaftesbury; and the Scottish Enlightenment works of Ferguson, Millar, Hume, and Adam Smith, in which society first became the object of a self-conscious science. Throughout, we will ask how concepts of "society" both open and foreclose the possibilities we perceive for collective life.
Offered in Autumn 2026 at Stanford University.