Hossein Jorjani
First publication: 2026 – 09 – 13
The decline of theological and metaphysical explanations does not necessarily eliminate the explanatory position once occupied by the Absolute. The occupant of that position may change while something of its structural function remains.
God once provided an ultimate ground from which the order of the world could be understood. In philosophical idealism, concepts such as Spirit or the Absolute could occupy an analogous, though by no means identical, position. With the development of secular social thought, another candidate appeared: Society itself.
This does not mean that society is unreal, or that social phenomena can necessarily be reduced to isolated individuals. Languages, institutions, norms, organizations, traditions, economic relations, and structures of power cannot adequately be understood by examining individuals as though they existed independently of their relations with one another. A social whole may possess properties that none of its constituents possesses separately.
But from this it does not immediately follow that Society constitutes an irreducible entity with explanatory powers of its own. The existence of relations among individuals is one claim; the emergence of properties from their organization is another; the existence of a social totality that cannot in principle be explained through its constituents and their relations is a stronger claim still. These propositions require different kinds of justification.
Gurvitch provides an especially interesting case because his sociology gives considerable importance to social totalities while rejecting the closed metaphysical systems associated with philosophical idealism. Social reality is not, for him, simply an aggregate of individuals. The social whole and its multiple levels possess an irreducibility that is fundamental to his sociology and to his conception of dialectic.
The methodological question is whether this irreducibility is demonstrated or assumed. If the properties of a social whole can be explained only through relations operating at the level of the whole, then irreducibility may be warranted. But if “Society” is invoked to explain the behaviour of its constituents while its own existence and causal powers are inferred from those same behaviours, the explanatory circle requires examination.
This is where secular thought can reproduce a structure it believes it has abandoned. God need not return under another name, and Society need not possess any of the attributes traditionally assigned to God. The similarity lies elsewhere. An ultimate explanatory position may survive the disappearance of its former occupant. What was once explained through a transcendent totality may now be explained through an immanent social totality whose own explanatory status is insufficiently examined.
The same danger arises whenever abstractions such as Society, History, Culture, the Nation, or the Market begin to act grammatically and theoretically like agents. We say that Society demands, History determines, Culture prevents, or the Market decides. Such expressions may be harmless shorthand for complex relations and processes. But shorthand becomes reification when the abstraction begins to perform explanatory work that has not been traced back to identifiable mechanisms, relations, or emergent properties.
The alternative is not necessarily methodological individualism. Rejecting an unexplained social Absolute does not require reducing every social phenomenon to isolated persons. Individuals themselves are formed within social relations, while social structures are reproduced and transformed through the activities of individuals and groups. The relevant question is not whether the individual or the whole must always have explanatory priority, but what processes connect the levels in the particular phenomenon being investigated.
The secularization of thought therefore requires more than replacing theological names with social ones. It also requires examining whether the explanatory privileges once granted to the Absolute have survived the change of vocabulary.
The disappearance of God from an explanatory system does not guarantee the disappearance of the throne.
