Portal:Society

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The Society Portal

A society is a group of people who form a distinct, evolving system, group. More abstractly, a society is defined as a network of relationships between social entities. A society is also sometimes defined as an interdependent community, but the sociologist Tönnies saw a contradiction between “society” and “community.” An important feature of society is social structure, aspects of which include roles and social ranking.

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Selected article

A Vindication of the Rights of Men, in a Letter to the Right Honourable Edmund Burke; Occasioned by His Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790) is a political pamphlet, written by the eighteenth-century British feminist Mary Wollstonecraft, which attacks aristocracy and advocates republicanism. Wollstonecraft's was the first response in a pamphlet war sparked by the publication of Edmund Burke's Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790), a defence of constitutional monarchy, aristocracy, and the Church of England.

Wollstonecraft attacked not only hereditary privilege, but also the rhetoric that Burke used to defend it. Most of Burke's detractors deplored what they viewed as his theatrical pity for Marie Antoinette, but Wollstonecraft was unique in her denunciation of Burke's gendered language. By redefining the sublime and the beautiful, terms first established by Burke himself in A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful (1756), she undermined his rhetoric as well as his argument. In her first unabashedly feminist critique, which Wollstonecraft scholar Claudia Johnson describes as unsurpassed in its argumentative force, Wollstonecraft indicts Burke's justification of an unequal society founded on the passivity of women.

In her arguments for republican virtue, Wollstonecraft invokes an emerging middle-class ethos in opposition to what she views as the vice-ridden aristocratic code of manners. Driven by an Enlightenment belief in progress, she derides Burke for relying on tradition and custom. She describes an idyllic country life in which each family has a farm sufficient for its needs. Wollstonecraft contrasts her utopian picture of society, drawn with what she claims is genuine feeling, with Burke's false theatrical tableaux.

The Rights of Men was successful: it was reviewed by every major periodical of the day and the first edition sold out in three weeks. However, upon the publication of the second edition (the first to carry Wollstonecraft's name on the title page), the reviews began to evaluate the text not only as a political pamphlet but also as the work of a female writer. They contrasted Wollstonecraft's "passion" with Burke's "reason" and spoke condescendingly of the text and its female author. This analysis of the Rights of Men prevailed until the 1970s, when feminist scholars began to read Wollstonecraft's texts with more care and called attention to their intellectualism. (more...)

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Credit: Original by lyzadanger. Edit by Diliff Goods in Fred Meyer supermarket Portland, Oregon, USA}}

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Featured articles

Selected Featured articles about Society:

Gender role · Greco-Buddhism · David Helvarg · Kashrut · Sociocultural evolution · Tiananmen Square protests of 1989

· Weber, Max

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Did you know...

• ... that the type of degree offered by a veterinary school can vary widely, ranging from the Bachelor of Science to the Doctor of Veterinary Medicine?
• ... that the native copper products of the Northern Canadian aboriginal Copper Inuit were highly regarded in the Bering Strait trade network?
• ... that Froduald Karamira, sentenced to death for his role in the Rwandan Genocide in 1994, was one of the last individuals executed before capital punishment was abolished in the country?
• ... that the 19th-century fad of Pedestrianism started with gambling over the speed of footmen by the British aristocracy?
• ... that in 1937, Oscar Garcia Rivera, Sr. became the first Puerto Rican to hold public office in the United States?

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Quotes

“	A person who cannot live in society, or does not need to because he is self-sufficient, is either a beast or a god.	”
—Aristotle, Politics

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Categories

• General Categories: Culture · Humans· People · Social groups · Society
• Areas of Study: Anthropology · Archaeology · Cultural studies · Demographics · Economics · History (esp. Classical studies) · Geography · Linguistics (esp. Pragmatics) · Media Studies · Political science · Religion · Social psychology · Social sciences · Sociology
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• Ethnicity and Race: Ethnic groups · Indigenous peoples · Race
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• Groups: Clubs and societies · Organizations
• Media: Communication · Mass media · Scandals
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• Private Life: Family · Personal life

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Geography · History · Social sciences and society

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