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Society versus the State

Following Margaret Somers, the paper explores the implicit metanarrative that underlies and informs basic concepts in the social sciences - and hence also basic concepts in housing research - of "society/market" and "state". Somers shows how the Hobbesian thesis that society is impossible without the state was countered by the Lockeian project of making a conceptual distinction between them that redefined society/market as "natural" and as existing prior to the creation of the artificial state as a means of controlling and distorting society. She then shows how and why this abstract model became historicised into a storyline ("once upon a time"…) involving a struggle between good (society) and evil (the state). Somers argues that modern anglo-american social science is predicated on this confrontational conceptual distinction and its accompanying narrative of good versus evil, natural versus artifical, voluntarism versus coercion, spontaneity versus regulation and other "great dichotomies". The paper illustrates how this conceptual distinction has been adopted by housing researchers from Donnison through Castells, Harloe and Saunders, but that the narrative that is recounted varies from one housing researcher to another. The paper concludes by arguing for an abandonment of the simplistic Lockeian thesis of "society/market versus the state" and for developing a conceptual framework that does not polarise them.