Great IdeasLiving together
How societies work
Customs, classes and institutions, studied from the outside.
The question
How do societies hold together? Where do classes, customs and institutions come from?
How the books answer
Oldest first. Each stop is our own short summary of what the author argued; follow the link to the rung for the whole lesson.
c. 340–322 BC
Aristotle, Politics and The Athenian Constitution
Aristotle says people are by nature political animals, made to live together and to talk about what is just. A person who could live wholly alone would be either a beast or a god. Society, for him, is not an invention but part of human nature.
“But he who is unable to live in society, or who has no need because he is sufficient for himself, must be either a beast or a god: he is no part of a state.”
c. 1387–1400
Geoffrey Chaucer, The Canterbury Tales
Chaucer gathers pilgrims from almost every rank of English life: a knight, a miller, a nun, a cook, a lawyer, a plowman. Each tells a tale in their own style. The result is a lively, funny portrait of a whole society, its virtues and its faults.
“He was a verray parfit gentil knight.”
1755
Jean-Jacques Rousseau, A Discourse on the Origin of Inequality and A Discourse on Political Economy
Rousseau tells a story of how people left a simple state of nature and built societies with property, rank and envy. He argues that much inequality is made by society, not nature. His critics replied that his picture of early people was guesswork.
1835–1840
Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America
Tocqueville is amazed by how Americans form associations for everything: churches, schools, charities, clubs and town projects. Where in France people would wait for the government, Americans join together. He thinks these groups keep a free society healthy.
“Americans of all ages, all conditions, and all dispositions, constantly form associations.”
1848
Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, Manifesto of the Communist Party
Marx and Engels argue that the way a society produces goods shapes everything else: its classes, laws and ideas. They see history as a series of class struggles. This way of looking at society has been very influential and also strongly disputed.
1855–1857
Charles Dickens, Little Dorrit
Dickens mocks the Circumlocution Office, a government department whose skill is never getting anything done. He shows a debtors' prison where families live for years, and the rich and poor bound together in one society. His satire helped readers see institutions that needed fixing.
“Whatever was required to be done, the Circumlocution Office was beforehand with all the public departments in the art of perceiving—HOW NOT TO DO IT.”
1871–1872
George Eliot, Middlemarch
George Eliot studies a whole English town, where the lives of a doctor, a banker, a clergyman's family and a young idealist are woven together. No one acts alone; each choice touches others. She ends by honoring the many quiet people whose good deeds are never recorded.
1890–1915
James George Frazer, The Golden Bough (selections)
Frazer gathers customs and myths from around the world to trace how human thought developed. He proposed that thinking moved from magic to religion to science, a scheme that later anthropologists criticized as too simple. His huge collection still shapes how people read old customs.
“The movement of the higher thought, so far as we can trace it, has on the whole been from magic through religion to science.”
essays 1904–1920; collected in English 1946
Max Weber, Essays in Sociology (selections)
Max Weber studies how authority works: through tradition, through a leader's personal gifts, or through rules and offices. He thought modern life was being organized more and more by bureaucracy. He saw its efficiency and also feared that people could become trapped in a cage of rules.
For young readers
A society is a big group of people living together, like a town or a country. People in a society have different jobs: farmers, teachers, doctors, builders. They depend on each other.
Societies also have customs, like how people greet each other or celebrate holidays. The great books ask how all these people and customs fit together, and how a society can be fair to everyone in it.
Talk about it
- Name ten jobs people do in your town. How do they depend on each other?
- Tocqueville saw Americans forming groups to fix problems. What groups do you or your family belong to?
- Chaucer's pilgrims came from every walk of life. What could they learn from each other on the road?
- Dickens made fun of an office that never got anything done. Why can it be hard for big organizations to act?
Where else on the site
- The Federal Bureaucracy
- Economic Systems
- Big Business and Industry
- Branches of Indo-European
- Narrative Writing
Every rung tagged with this idea:
- Chaucer: The Canterbury Tales
- Bacon: New Atlantis
- Rousseau: The Discourses
- Adam Smith: The Wealth of Nations
- Mill: On Liberty
- Tocqueville: Democracy in America
- Marx and Engels: The Communist Manifesto
- Marx: Capital
- Balzac: Cousin Bette
- Dickens: Little Dorrit
- George Eliot: Middlemarch
- Freud: The Later Works
- Veblen: The Theory of the Leisure Class
- Tawney: The Acquisitive Society
- Keynes: The General Theory
- Frazer: The Golden Bough
- Weber: Essays in Sociology
- Huizinga: The Waning of the Middle Ages
- Lévi-Strauss: Structural Anthropology
- Fitzgerald: The Great Gatsby
- Faulkner: A Rose for Emily
These pages are our own short synthesis, written for families. They were inspired by Mortimer J. Adler's Syntopicon, the index of great ideas in volumes 1 and 2 of Great Books of the Western World, but the questions, summaries and groupings are ours, not the Syntopicon's. Short excerpts come from public-domain translations, credited where they appear.