Do people generally cooperate with each other in harmonious relationships or are they most often in conflicts and disagreements with each other? Throughout this book, I have tried to show that social life encompasses many things, with areas of cooperation and harmony, as well as areas of conflict, disagreement, and struggle. I have also considered the variations that exist in individuals' social thinking and in their actions. Those variations are of a systematic kind, involving the application of different domains of judgment to different types of social situations. The evidence and theoretical approach I have presented are not in accord with the presumption, discussed in previous chapters, that we can speak of attitudes or orientations toward society in general. Social judgments and actions are sufficiently varied and flexible, so individuals cannot be portrayed as possessing general character traits or as reflecting a general type of national character.

In previous chapters, I also touched upon these issues with regard to culture. It is in cultural analyses that we see the most comprehensive efforts at explaining social life as entailing cohesiveness, consistency, and social harmony. Indeed, the societal and cultural perspectives of early twentieth-century scholars like Durkheim and Benedict are good examples of the view that social life involves accommodation to collective or cultural patterns that hang together in cohesive ways, and that, as a consequence, social life is usually not a struggle for individuals.