Concept
Social conflict
Overview
Social conflict is the struggle for agency or power in society.
Social conflict occurs when two or more people oppose each other in social interaction, and each exerts social power with reciprocity in an effort to achieve incompatible goals but prevent the other from attaining their own. It is a social relationship in which action is intentionally oriented to carry out the actor's own will despite the resistance of others.
Overview adapted from Wikipedia (CC BY-SA 4.0; see the article history for authors).
Possible passages
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In some early states of society, these forces might be, and were, too much ahead of the power which society then possessed of disciplining and controlling them. There has been a time when the element of spontaneity and individuality was in excess, and the social principle had a hard struggle with it. The difficulty then was, to induce men of strong bodies or minds to pay obedience to any rules which required them to…
John Stuart Mill, On Liberty
Close in meaning to Social conflict; the term itself is not named.
On the one hand, there is in each citizen, more or less of resistance against all restraints imposed on his actions by other citizens: a resistance which, tending continually to widen each individual’s sphere of action, and reciprocally to limit the spheres of action of other individuals, constitutes a repulsive force mutually exercised by the members of a social aggregate. On the other hand, the general sympathy of…
Herbert Spencer, First Principles
Close in meaning to Social conflict; the term itself is not named.
Sometimes however frustration dams activity up, and intensifies it. A longing for satisfaction at any cost is engendered. And when social conditions are such that the path of least resistance lies through subjugation of the energies of others, the will to power bursts into flower.
John Dewey, Human Nature and Conduct
Close in meaning to Social conflict; the term itself is not named.
Philosophers who discussed Social conflict
Related ideas
Opposing perspectives
Place in the tradition
Part of Communism.