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Michael Brown's remarkable book is a bold attempt to reunite the social sciences and humanities on the basis of a unitary concept, that of the social, which allows him to integrate the different dimensions of sociality and to question our research practices, in which we too often take for granted our ways of thinking about the collective. The book also helps to combat the increasing fragmentation of our knowledge, which the hypertrophy of the critical posture and the multiplication of specialized studies have fostered over the last half-century. Brown proposes a real refoundation of our knowledge in a time of great confusion about the legitimacy of discourses on the social and the drifts of “situated epistemologies” that tend to reduce our knowledge to a simple point of view. Certainly, the dream of a unified social science emerged long ago and has never been realized. Brown's essay escapes the criticisms that always threaten systemic thinking and conceptual generalization, for he consistently incorporates the critical perspective inherited from the Marxist foundation into his enterprise.

This chapter is an attempt to rethink the social from the point of view of intellectual history. In the first part, the question of the unity of the social sciences is reexamined in the light of the proliferation of specialized studies. We then move to the sociological analysis of concepts as they emerge in diverse social contexts. A special attention is paid to Bourdieu's grand theory endeavor in the third part. It can be compared to Bruno Latour's strategy to flatten the social, which is the object of a critical analysis in part four. Thus, it becomes possible to offer a renovated analytical frame to account to the sociality of intellectual contents, based on the “density of practices” (parts five and six).

This essay summarizes the formation of the concept of “sociality” as it was developed in The Concept of the Social in Uniting the Humanities and Social Sciences. Its thesis is that if the human sciences are to have a representative discipline – in contrast with a field of largely topical studies – that defines human reality in the course of its work, then that discipline must have a concept of its distinctive reality, and the basic fact that the concept describes must be indisputable: that is, it must be irreducible and irrepressible as well as distinctively human. These qualities are satisfied by the formula “each-dependent-on-All,” where each shows itself as “intra-dependence” and, therefore, as “being-in-the-middle” of a “course of activity without immanent beginning and end.” This concept is then applied to theoretical positions presented or hinted at by the other chapters of this volume in order (1) to see how a given theory might differ from what is conventionally taught as sociological theory when the basic fact is systematically taken into account, and (2) to find among the implications of the concept a dialectic of social progress and societal change that is incompatible with received positive ideas of society, e.g., as an entity, system, or totality and compatible with the idea of such an apparent formation as a project in which the manifold (internal) relations of each-dependent-on-All present social progress as the ongoing reality of human reality.