Introduction: What Is Distinctively Human About Human Affairs?

There is a startling lacuna in the status of key sociological concepts in the literature of sociology. What should be primary remains implicit, contingent, and not examined. We are speaking about the notion of the “social,” and the less used “sociality.” Assumptions are made that these terms are understood and are stable in their use, yet they function as a kind of black box in the literature. As Brown points out, “[s]ociology can be thought of as a discipline aimed at regulating the use of such terms according to a highly flexible language in which they circulate as ‘non-rigid signifiers’… Such rigor envisions a definition capable of representing something (the social) as fixed despite the fact that it must also represent the very unfixable activity involved in coming to a definition… ambiguity, in the broad sense of the word, is a necessary feature of that very life…” (Brown, 2014, pp. 9–11). Glossing over this ambiguity then leads to concepts that seem more grounded in mainstream sociology, but are also problematic, such as institution, and role. This is Michael Brown's primary issue in his book The Concept of the Social in Uniting the Humanities and Social Sciences.