Whatever state any society may be in, whatever period of its development it may undergo, it always constitutes the most complex system of the most diverse interactions, the actors of which are people. Moreover, the actions of a single individual do not exhaust the gamut of these interactions, because a person in the course of his social life creates or acts as a member of various human communities - social groups. Entering into a diverse relationship with other people, he is objectively the carrier of those values, elements of culture, behavioral stereotypes that are accepted in these communities. Thus, a person in the system of social relations represents not only himself as an individual, but also that social group, community, of which he is a member. The study of this phenomenon is a subject for many branches of science.
Considering what a person is in a system of social ties, philosophy is guided, as a rule, by global issues of being: who is a person, why is he in this world, what is his future and past, and so on.
Sociological consideration of the issue involves the study of more practical issues. Here we consider problems of this order: what is a person in the system of social relations, what is the structure of society, how is the environment within which interactions take place. Sociology proceeds from the, at first glance, the paradoxical fact that the human community present on the planet, being finite in number, is able to create an almost infinite variety of communities that are very different in properties and characteristics. At the same time, the sociological view suggests that if these communities themselves, as well as the individuals that make up them, are sufficiently fixed (explicative), then this cannot be said in any way about the relations that develop between people. By the way, precisely this fact was noted at the time by Auguste Comte, the founder of sociology as a science, which in the work “Positive Philosophy” argued that these relations are latent in nature, they are ethereal, immaterial. Offering to make human interactions the subject of a separate science, Comte gave impetus to the emergence of a number of approaches, scientific schools, concepts that addressed the problem of what a person is in the system of social connections.
Marxism interpreted this problem exclusively in a materialistic vein, asserting that society is formed not by individuals as such, but by their interactions and relationships, primarily economic ones. The same understanding of society and the place of man in it is found in more modern theories. For example, the great American sociologist Pitirim Sorokin proceeded from about the same position when he formulated his theory of social stratification, which is today classical and one of the main in the interpretations of modern society.
To clarify the problem posed in the title of the article, it is necessary, first of all, to understand the very category of “social relation”, “social connection”. Some scientists consider it as a certain elementary particle of society, putting it on a par with the categories of “social subject”, “social activity”. And others, which form the basis of the categorial apparatus of sociological science.
Another view of the problem suggests considering social relations in two ways. In the narrow - when it comes to the relations of specific social communities, as a rule - large social groups and communities. Broadly, social relations are any relations that can develop between people in the process of their diverse activities. Based on this approach, a person in the system of social relations, being included in each of the interacting groups, acts in this system as a universal creative principle, co-subject, co-actor.
Society, being a complex system of interactions, poses as a critical issue for science, the problem of how to classify this variety of relationships, whether it is possible to build any hierarchical model from them, what are the scenarios of a typological action of a person, and so on.
It should be recognized that today there is no unified methodological approach to clarifying the question of what a person is in a system of social ties, what are the trends in the dynamics of his position in this system.
Materialists analyze this aspect exclusively from the perspective of a materialistic view. Non-materialist approaches, interpreting a person’s position in the system of social relations, put spiritual factors in the forefront. Such a distribution of social relations into spiritual and material ones is too, one might say, extremely wide. Therefore, today, science faces, first of all, the methodological task of finding adequate and socially significant criteria for classifying the entire diversity of social relations. Because only such an approach will make it possible to reliably explore the role and place of man in the life of various spheres of society.