The Problem of Absent Social Categories

Abstract

As I indicated in the Introduction, the subject-matter of social history usually consists of large aggregates of people (or collectivities) and of the social categories that make up these collectivities. The term collectivity may refer to a whole society, a cluster of societies, an empire, a civilization, a large segment of people within a society, a local community, an institution and so on. The term social category refers to a subset of a collectivity. Thus the peasants in a society could be taken as a social category, as could its urban population, its men over sixty, tribes-people living by lakes, children with red hair, the top quintile of income-earners, home-owners, the people born in a certain series of years (a ‘cohort’), women who have given birth to two children and so forth and so on. I will distinguish a social category from a social group by stipulating that a category consists of people who do not necessarily know each other, interact, engage in reciprocity, have the same beliefs and values or have a common identity, whereas the people belonging to a group necessarily possess these attributes. Thus while many social categories may also have the attributes of social groups, by no means all will; a great many will be purely abstract entities, having no group life at all. Social historians do not always study large collectivities and social categories; they also study individuals as well as families and other very small groups. But when they do their purpose is generally to contribute to our knowledge of a collectivity.