“Social Form”: Contours of Concept
The article develops the theme of the political form, the discussion of which started on the pages of the Journal of Politeia in 2012-2016, and contains a conceptual elaboration of a more general concept of the social form. The author builds her model around the interdisciplinary concept of sociality, which treats the latter as a supraspecific phenomenon. In general terms, social form is defined as a sign complex, through which this or that type of interaction is realized. Social form represents a special class of social interactions and specifies them on such grounds as stability and repeatability of the external configuration of interactions; materiality; invariance of structural components; integrity. Social life is organized along two key types of forms. The first type includes elementary (ethological) social forms that are in principle common for a human being and other social animals. The second type includes institutional forms that are specific for human communities. In contrast to an ethological form, which is regarded as a stable way of social interactions independent of individual interpretation that are realised as a system of statuses / roles, a social institution is a system of statuses / roles that has a reflexive form. A promising area of the analysis of institutional phenomena, including political institutions, is their interpretation from the perspective of a converted form. Scientific researchers are interested in the category of social form largely due to its inherent causative force. Being a semiotic phenomenon, social form is built as one or another semantic complex and thereby is imposed upon the subject. Both elementary and institutional forms, “simple” as well as converted, possess a causative force.