The word social comes from Rome's rebellious allies
Social traces back to the Latin socii, allies, and in particular to the Italian states allied with the Roman Republic. The irony is that those allies rose against Rome in what became known as the Social War of 91 to 87 BC. Society itself grew from a word for comradeship.
In English, society goes back to at least 1513, borrowed from the twelfth-century French societe, meaning company, and before that from the Latin societas, fellowship or alliance, built on socius, a comrade or friend. Today it describes a large group sharing a territory, usually under one political authority and with dominant cultural expectations, knitted together by patterns of relationships and institutions.
Humans share their strong sociability with their nearest relatives, chimpanzees and bonobos, which suggests a biological foundation. Yet human groups stand apart in several ways: fathers take on parental roles, people communicate through language, labour is divided into specialised roles, and people build multi-generational settlements from camps to cities. The biologist E. O. Wilson went so far as to class humans as eusocial, alongside ants, though others disagree. Larger societies with bigger food surpluses tend to develop ranks and hierarchies.
Western sociology offers three main lenses. Functionalists such as Auguste Comte and Émile Durkheim saw society as working like a body whose organs cooperate, forming its own level of reality in which individuals are temporary occupants of lasting roles. Conflict theorists, most famously Karl Marx, saw an economic base shaping government, family and religion above it, with history driven by struggle between workers and owners. Symbolic interactionists zoom in, studying how people use shared language and symbols to build meaning.
Max Weber offered a narrower test, calling an action social when the person performing it takes account of others' behaviour. Later in the twentieth century many thinkers came to see society as socially constructed. Peter Berger described the relationship as a dialectic: people create society, and that creation, in turn, moulds the people who made it.
Source: Society
