Like “public,” “community,” “civilization,” and other keywords that point to collective human experience, “society” is often described as being in decline. What is different about this declension narrative is that “society” has real enemies, people and political tendencies that work explicitly against the more radical and progressive tendencies inscribed within the concept. The notion of society is also diminished in the social sciences themselves to the degree that they premise their investigations on rational choice theory, the assumption that society is best understood as an aggregate of individuals intent upon maximizing their interests. A strong argument can be made that the ascendancy of neoconservative politics and neoliberal economic policy in the United States and elsewhere is a response to a decrease in the persuasiveness and affective force of major categories of collectivity such as nation and class, and a concomitant reduction of the sense of solidarity that such “social imaginaries” could at least potentially produce (C. Taylor 2004). 

This is an excerpt from Glenn Hendler’s entry in Keywords for American Cultural Studies (p. 228).