Critical Perspectives and Reflections

Jim Ward One of the greatest challenges facing humankind in the world today is to recognize the importance of the collective. By the collective I mean any situation in which people join together with some kind of notion that this is for the good of all the members of that collective. The 19th century pioneer of sociology and anthropology, Emile Durkheim stressed the notion that to be human one has to belong to some group that is more than him/herself. For Durkheim someone with the human form raised by wolves in a cave would not be human. To be human is to be social. In essence this notion feeds into the left side of modern politics, where the right tends to believe it is all up to oneself and the left believes we are all in this together. When Hegel praised the German state for being the greatest achievement up to that point in human history, he had in mind a huge collective of several million people that eventually became, with some notorious ups and downs, the modern German nation-s...