For communicating ideas, words have their importance. In announcing the award of the 2024 Nobel economics price to Daron Acemoglu, Simon Johnson, and James A. Robinson, the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences declared:
This year’s laureates in the economic sciences … have demonstrated the importance of societal institutions for a country’s prosperity.
The Nobel Foundation may have been contaminated by some of its new laureates’ look and feel. I reviewed the two latest books of Acemoglu: The Narrow Corridor with James Robinson, and Power and Progress with Simon Johnson. Acemoglu’s naïve and pre-public-choice conception of the state has become more obvious: if this was not apparent in his earlier work, it certainly is in these two books and especially in the last one. The words and expressions used sometimes betray Acemoglu’s progressive agenda. In my review of Power and Progress, I wrote:
In another book by Acemoglu with James Robinson, The Narrow Corridor, the state becomes more and more powerful but is kept in check by a more and more powerful “civil society” in a manner that seems magical. … In a few places in both books, the magical “social” mutates into “societal,” which only has the look and feel of something more scientific.
As I explained in a previous post (“The Word “Societal,” EconLog, September 7, 2021), the strange word “societal” as a substitute for “social” was, as far as we know, invented by a Minor Hugo (probably the pen name of Luke James Hansard), a 19th-century utopian British communist and follower of Charles Fourier. It is now used by fashionable intellectuals who perhaps hope to show that they know about social matters more than the plebs—and also more than the long tradition of economic analysis.
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READER COMMENTS
Ahmed Fares
Oct 14 2024 at 5:22pm
A couple of good comments on stack exchange.
Difference between “social” and “societal”
Pierre Lemieux
Oct 14 2024 at 6:53pm
Thanks, Ahmed. With due respect, I think that if you follow my links, you will learn much more.
David Henderson
Oct 14 2024 at 5:24pm
Good piece in Regulation, Pierre. I wish I had read it before I wrote my piece for the Wall Street Journal.
Pierre Lemieux
Oct 14 2024 at 6:50pm
Thanks, David.
Mactoul
Oct 15 2024 at 12:22am
Looking back, perhaps we can see the significance–the practical communists (as oppposed to utopian ones) desired to capture the state and had no truck with societal institutions (which I translate as NGOs, the universities and grant-giving foundations ) .
But following the failure to capture the state in the West, they shifted to the tactics of subversion of the state by what is called the Long March through the institutions.
Craig
Oct 15 2024 at 9:58am
Culture/Cultural, history/historical, nature/natural — throwing an -al at the end of society doesn’t seem to be so far off in English that we should sully the word because it was first coined by a socialist?
Pierre Lemieux
Oct 15 2024 at 11:21am
Craig: You ask,
Not necessarily, of course. But if we (“we,” liberal individualists) already have a useful word for the adjective X, which happens to be standard, consistent with a few centuries of scientific X analysis, and says everything but “X if you love the look-and-feel of collectivism,” we should stick to simple X.
Roger McKinney
Oct 15 2024 at 10:46am
Social and societal are what Hayek called weasel words. They are useless adjectives added to baptize the noun as something sacred. Since only humans create institutions, and society refers to humans, the addition of either adjective is redundant and poor writing.
The only adjectives useful for the word institution are formal and informal, as Douglass North did. But it’s the socialist way to baptize every sacred object with some form of social, much like TV talking head crown everything with iconic.
Monte
Oct 15 2024 at 1:23pm
Pierre,
Always enjoy reading your very lucid and insightful reviews. Curiously, the only background I’ve been able to find on Luke James Hansard is that he was a skilled English printer of some renown for the House of Commons, but nothing characterizing him as a communist sympathizer or directly linking him to Charles Fourier. One his his more interesting affiliations (in what capacity, I don’t know) was with the Alleged Lunatics’ Friends Society.
As to the use of the term “societal”:
Regards
Pierre Lemieux
Oct 15 2024 at 3:46pm
Monte: Thanks. Did you have a look at my previous EconLog post? What is COCA? See also RICHARD K. P. PANKHURST, “FOURIERISM IN BRITAIN,” where Luke James Hansard a.k.a. Hugo Minor is mentioned as a Fourierist. But you are right that he is not a household name. Yet, according to the Oxford English Dictionary, he is the first known person to have used “societal” in print. In my previous post, I have a link to his 1843 book.
Monte
Oct 15 2024 at 5:03pm
In either case, Hansard is a rather obscure fellow. COCA:
This also:
Anders
Oct 15 2024 at 4:56pm
The progressive leanings are of course clear when you look at some of the punditry. But I found how nations fail to show much more awareness of public choice type issues than most.And the work on coalitions and trajectories at least as much.
Any attempt at big picture explanations of something that broad and complex will fail. Either you use institutions in a sense broad enough to be all encompassing and hence meaningless, or a narrower one destined to be partial. What matters is understanding more about how they change.
Working in development, I could frame most failures, from big bang liberalization to an obsession with draconian industrial policies and brute capital accumulation, as failures to understand and take seriously the latter. That is the main value, and in some ways downright Hayekian.
What we need is to temper progressive interventionism with public choice insights and market testing. Without that mix, the first is highly dangerous, the second defeatist in the development context (there is a reason Friedman kept pointing to Hong Kong as a paradigm, a country almost singularily well equipped to embrace and benefit from Copperthwaites experiment).
And if you still disagree, perhaps start with the truly harmful populist right or virtue driven left interventionism, touted by prophets like Mazzucato a century after her country saw someone with plenty of mission orientation take over whose name also started with M, and much worse.
David Seltzer
Oct 15 2024 at 5:41pm
When I started to read and learn economics five years previous, I attempted to differentiate societal from society. I thought of societal in terms of a small scale community perhaps like a village where elements of amiable morality were evident. The concept of society is more general and vague. In as much as it is cast as more “scientific” I will avoid the term as much as possible.
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