Can human beings ever become fully human alone?

 Human identity, cognition, language, emotion, morality, and autonomy develop through interaction with others[1]. Social relationships are therefore not merely an external environment in which already formed individuals live; they are necessary conditions for the emergence of distinctly human capacities.

A distinction can be made between living together and society[2]. Living together is the dynamic process of interaction, dependence, cooperation, conflict, and meaning-making through which people relate to one another. Society consists of the relatively stabilized institutions, economic arrangements, and political systems through which that process is organized. Societies are therefore temporary configurations within an ongoing relational process rather than static entities.

Human vulnerability makes social life necessary from the beginning. Human children remain dependent on care and protection for an unusually long period. This extended childhood enables language acquisition, cultural learning, emotional development, and the transfer of complex knowledge, but it also makes relationships indispensable for survival[3].

Language develops through shared attention, imitation, repetition, and correction. Cognitive abilities grow through observation, education, and feedback. Emotional regulation develops in relationships characterized by trust and recognition, while moral judgment is learned through participation in social practices containing expectations, norms, and evaluations. Dependence therefore extends far beyond physical care.

Adults also remain reliant on complex systems of healthcare, education, law, economic cooperation, knowledge, and social security. Even people who withdraw from social life rely on language, knowledge, and skills previously acquired through socialization. Dependence is consequently a structural condition of humanity rather than a temporary stage that ends with adulthood.

Social life is characterized by interdependence and mutual constitution. People continually influence one another by creating expectations, roles, meanings, and patterns of cooperation or conflict. Individuals form institutions through their actions, while institutions shape the opportunities, limitations, and interpretations available to individuals[4].

Identity is similarly relational. People come to understand themselves through the reactions, recognition, and expectations of others. Languages, symbols, and cultural traditions provide interpretative frameworks that individuals inherit and can modify. Neither individuals nor social structures can be adequately understood in isolation.

Interdependence does not automatically produce equality. Social relationships can create care, trust, cooperation, and solidarity, but also exclusion, hierarchy, and domination. Dependence becomes dominating when one party can set essential terms without meaningful constraint and the other cannot refuse, leave, appeal, or secure an alternative without disproportionate loss. The issue is therefore not dependence itself, but the way dependence is organized. A patient depends on medical expertise, a child on care, an employee on income, and a citizen on public administration. These relationships can support development when authority is bound by rights, professional duties, voice, review, and realistic alternatives; without those safeguards, the same dependence can become arbitrary power. Class, gender, ethnicity, and other social categories affect access to education, resources, recognition, and political influence. Living together is therefore both the basis of human development and an arena in which inequality is produced and contested.

Societies are historically embedded. Political systems, markets, bureaucracies, legal orders, and democratic institutions are outcomes of long processes shaped by conflict, cultural traditions, previous decisions, and relations of power. Arrangements that appear natural or permanent are often historically recent and have developed differently across regions.

Social life is also ecologically embedded. Climate, water, soil, biodiversity, and other environmental conditions influence economic possibilities and institutional organization. Irrigation systems in ancient Mesopotamia, Dutch water-management institutions, and Asian rice terraces demonstrate how ecological needs can generate long-term coordination and distinctive forms of governance. Nature is not merely an external limit but an active condition shaping social organization[5].

Living together is functionally necessary because cooperation enables achievements that isolated individuals cannot realize. Collective institutions provide security, coordinate production, construct infrastructure, transmit knowledge, organize care, and regulate conflict. Law, education, science, transport, energy systems, healthcare, and political decision-making all depend on sustained cooperation.

These functions can also create tensions. Extensive specialization may increase productivity while producing alienation and reducing people’s understanding of larger social processes. Institutions that provide stability and coordination can also concentrate power or restrict participation. Social organization must therefore be assessed according to both what it enables and how its benefits, risks, and authority are distributed[6].

Work is one of the central practices connecting material production, cooperation, identity, and personal development. It should not be understood only as paid employment or income generation. Work includes productive activity, care, knowledge creation, community maintenance, and the reproduction of institutions. Through purposeful activity, people transform their environment while developing their skills, capacities, relationships, and sense of self.

Work can provide opportunities for learning, creativity, problem-solving, autonomy, confidence, and craftsmanship. It can also connect individuals to networks of cooperation and give them a sense of contributing to a larger whole[7]. When people receive respect, influence, and recognition for their contributions, work can support dignity and social participation.

At the same time, work differentiates society. Occupational positions influence income, status, security, and social mobility. Work can be emancipatory when people have meaningful control and opportunities for development, but it can become merely instrumental or actively alienating when organized exclusively around efficiency, insecurity, and unequal power[8]. Its effects depend on the institutional context in which it occurs.

Labour markets, employment rights, social-security systems, education, collective bargaining, and workplace participation determine whether work supports autonomy or produces vulnerability. Cooperative ownership, economic democracy, and participatory decision-making offer alternative ways of distributing influence. Broader social protection can also reduce the extent to which survival depends on accepting insecure or degrading work.

Care work, parenting, household labor, and community support are essential to social stability and intergenerational continuity, even though they often occur outside formal markets and receive less recognition than paid employment. A complete understanding of work must include both paid production and the frequently unpaid activities through which people and communities are sustained[9].

Digitalization, automation, artificial intelligence, platform economies, and algorithmic management are transforming employment. These technologies can create flexibility and new forms of cooperation, but they can also increase insecurity, fragment labor relations, and concentrate control. Automation may reduce some forms of work while increasing the importance of creative, interpersonal, and care-oriented activities. Education and lifelong learning become increasingly important under these changing conditions[10].

The central normative question is whether work contributes to human development, dignity, recognition, and participation. Positive outcomes do not arise automatically. They depend on institutions that ensure decent working conditions, social protection, meaningful influence, learning opportunities, and fair recognition of different forms of contribution[11].

Autonomy should therefore not be understood as independence from others. It is a capacity developed through language, education, care, work, social recognition, and public dialogue. Social structures are not only constraints on freedom; they also provide stability, knowledge, resources, and shared meanings that make freedom possible.

Living together is thus constitutive of human becoming. Vulnerability creates dependence, interdependence produces identities and institutions, historical and ecological conditions shape social organization, and practical activities such as care, learning, and work connect personal development to collective life. These relationships enable solidarity and flourishing while also generating power, inequality, alienation, and conflict. The quality of human development therefore depends substantially on how societies organize their shared institutions, dependencies, and forms of participation.

 

Would you like to explore how a relational understanding of humanity can transform democracy, law, the economy, and public institutions? Click the link below to read the full book, Becoming Human Together, and discover a new framework for building a more humane, democratic, and correctable society within ecological limits.

(PDF) Becoming Human Together: Rethinking Democracy, Power and Institutions for a Complex and Changing World

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[1] Bronfenbrenner and Morris, “The Bioecological Model of Human Development”; Tomasello, The Cultural Origins of Human Cognition; Honneth, The Struggle for Recognition.

[2] Anthony Giddens, The Constitution of Society (Cambridge: Polity, 1984); Norbert Elias, The Society of Individuals, trans. Edmund Jephcott (Oxford: Blackwell, 1991). The exact distinction and terminology remain the author’s analytical proposal.

[3] Sarah Blaffer Hrdy, Mothers and Others: The Evolutionary Origins of Mutual Understanding (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2009); Tomasello, The Cultural Origins of Human Cognition; Bowlby, Attachment and Loss.

[4] Giddens, The Constitution of Society; Peter L. Berger and Thomas Luckmann, The Social Construction of Reality (New York: Anchor Books, 1966); Douglass C. North, Institutions, Institutional Change and Economic Performance (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511808678.

[5] Elinor Ostrom, Governing the Commons (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511807763; Elinor Ostrom, “Beyond Markets and States,” American Economic Review 100, no. 3 (2010): 641–672, https://doi.org/10.1257/aer.100.3.641.

[6] Émile Durkheim, The Division of Labor in Society, trans. W. D. Halls (New York: Free Press, 1984 [1893]); Michael Tomasello, Why We Cooperate (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2009). Durkheim is a theoretical antecedent, not direct empirical evidence for every claimed contemporary effect.

[7] Richard Sennett, The Craftsman (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2008); Edward L. Deci, Anja H. Olafsen, and Richard M. Ryan, “Self-Determination Theory in Work Organizations,” Annual Review of Organizational Psychology and Organizational Behavior 4 (2017): 19–43, https://doi.org/10.1146/annurev-orgpsych-032516-113108.

[8] Karl Marx, Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844, in Early Writings, trans. Rodney Livingstone and Gregor Benton (London: Penguin, 1992); Harry Braverman, Labor and Monopoly Capital (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1974); Guy Standing, The Precariat (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2011).

[9] International Labour Organization, Care Work and Care Jobs for the Future of Decent Work (Geneva: ILO, 2018), https://www.ilo.org/publications/major-publications/care-work-and-care-jobs-future-decent-work; Nancy Folbre, The Invisible Heart: Economics and Family Values (New York: New Press, 2001).

[10] International Labour Organization, World Employment and Social Outlook 2021: The Role of Digital Labour Platforms in Transforming the World of Work (Geneva: ILO, 2021), https://www.ilo.org/publications/flagship-reports/role-digital-labour-platforms-transforming-world-work; Antonio Aloisi and Valerio De Stefano, Your Boss Is an Algorithm (Oxford: Hart, 2022).

[11] International Labour Organization, ILO Declaration on Fundamental Principles and Rights at Work, amended 2022, https://www.ilo.org/declaration; Virginie Pérotin, What Do We Really Know about Worker Co-operatives? (Manchester: Co-operatives UK, 2016).