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Social and System Integration: The Philosophical

Foundations of a Key Distinction in (British) Social Theory

Daniel CherniloLoughborough University, UK 

Margaret S. Archer (1996)

Social Integration and System Integration: Developing the Distinction Sociology  30, 4: 679-99.

Nicos Mouzelis (1997)Social and System Integration: Lockwood, Habermas, Giddens Sociology  31, 1: 111-9.

Jose Mauricio Domingues (2000)Social Integration, System Integration and Collective Subjectivity Sociology  34, 2: 224-41.

Social theory is a truly international, though arguably not yet an altogether global,

field. Different national and regional traditions can be distinguished and play an

important role, but translations, exchanges and all kinds of cross-fertilizations

have long been normal occurrence. The  philosophes of the Enlightenment read

each other’s works regardless of nationality; Marx blended together the ‘British’,

‘French’ and ‘German’ traditions of his time; and contemporary social theory has

found a new impetus by looking at developments beyond its traditionally

‘Western’ poles of development. The national in ‘national intellectual traditions’,

as much as in all other national phenomena, does not refer to endogenous or self-

contained trends but rather speaks of specific configurations that are relativelystable while remaining contingent and open to various influences.

The distinction between social integration and system integration has been more

salient in UK sociology than anywhere else (Archer 1995, Giddens 1984). Indeed,

it was first raised by David Lockwood (1992) in the 1960s and its exploration is

central to the three articles under consideration here. A key exception to this is of 

course Jürgen Habermas’ (1984, 1987) use of social and system integration in his

two-volume Theory of Communicative Action. But Habermas does not really

discuss Lockwood’s formulation and his rendition of the distinction has more to

do with the attempt at bridging the gap between hermeneutics and action theory,

 © The Author(s), 2012 

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on the one hand, and functionalism and system theory, on the other.

The distinction between social and system integration is partially convergent with

several others in sociological theory throughout its history: community/society,

individualism/collectivism, micro/macro, structure/agency and indeed Habermas’

own system/lifeworld. At the same time, it has its own specificities: it does not

favor one side of the distinction against the other, it is ontological as well as

analytical and methodological and it rejects that questions of scope or scale are

central in sociological analysis. Whether in terms of theoretical consistency (does

it allow us to grasp modernity’s key structural developments?) or empirical

 purchase (does it offer a clear temporal framework for separating structural

change from stability?), the emphasis in all three articles is that of its analytical

 potential. At its best, sociological theory ought to allow for a better understanding

of social life itself: from international migration to educational achievement, fromreligious beliefs to pandemic obesity, from ethnicity to financial and ecological

crises. Thus, the distinction between social and system integration should allow

for the differentiation between actors’ behavior and structural trends. More

 precisely, it does so by treating social phenomena as emergent: while there is no

society without individual human beings, sociology’s object of study is social life

understood as autonomous from what happens to these individuals, their 

motivations and intentions.

My central argument in this very short intervention is that there is one additional

dimension to the distinction between social and system integration that still

deserves further research: its philosophical foundations. This is not altogether 

absent in the articles above – see Domingues’ piece in particular – but here Ishould like to emphasize the specific debt to modern natural law that inheres in

the rise and main features of modern social theory (Chernilo 2013). From Grotius

to Hegel, and with particular clarity in Hobbes and Rousseau, a fundamental

question is that of the interaction between social and non-social forces in the

constitution of social life. The transition from the state of nature to the civil

condition that is central to modern natural law becomes, in sociological terms, the

interplay between our a-social individuality that only becomes fully-fledged

‘human nature’ as we interact with other human beings. The social element of 

social relations can only be explicated by looking at the ways in which ‘the

human’ constitutes but does not fully determine ‘the social’. In other words, the

unacknowledged presupposition upon which social and system integration

depends is whether our fundamental human attributes are innate or they rather emerge as the sublated result of the rise of autonomous social life: does social life

take the form it does because it accommodates to human attributes that are pre-

social or, conversely, are those human attributes the result of social life itself and

thus we only become fully human because, and to the extent that, our social

institutions take particular shapes?

Sociology needs not and must not dissolve into philosophy. Yet its key themes,

concepts and concerns still have to be scrutinised further vis-à-vis the

 philosophical traditions out of which it originally emerged. Technical distinctions

in sociological theory, as it is the case with social and system integration, may

Key Articles in British SociologySocial and System Integration

Chernilo

British Sociological Association

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still need to be complemented by a  philosophical sociology: what conceptions of 

the human are being presupposed for our empirical sociological research to be

actually possible.

Key Articles in British SociologySocial and System Integration

Chernilo

British Sociological Association

References

Archer, M. S. (1995) Realist Social Theory: The Morphogenetic Approach,

Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Chernilo, D. (2013) The Natural Law Foundations of Modern Social Theory,

Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Giddens, A. (1984) The Constitution of Society, Cambridge: Polity Press.

Habermas, J. (1984, 1987 [1981]) Theory of Communicative Action, 2 Vols.,

Cambridge: Polity Press.

Lockwood, D. (1992 [1963]) ‘Social integration and system integration’, in

Lockwood, D. Solidarity and Schism. The problem of disorder in

 Durkheimian and Marxist Sociology, Oxford: Clarendon Press.

 Any views or opinions expressed in this collection are those of the contributors only. They are not

endorsed by and do not reflect the views of the British Sociological Association. 

Daniel Chernilo

Daniel Chernilo (BA U Chile, PhD Warwick) is Senior Lecturer inSociology at Loughborough University. He has written widely onnationalism, cosmopolitanism and the problem of universalism inclassical and contemporary social thought. He is the author of  ASocial Theory of the Nation-State (Routledge, 2007), The Natural Law Foundations of Modern Social Theory  (CambridgeUniversity Press, 2013) and, in Spanish, of  Nacionalismo y Cosmopolitismo (UDP, 2010) and La Pretensión Universalista de

la Teoría Social  (LOM, 2011). He has given over forty invitedseminars and lectures in Argentina, Brazil, Chile, the CzechRepublic, Germany, Singapore and the UK. He is also a member of the international advisory boards of the British Journal of Sociology , European Journal of Social Theory  and Revista deSociología.