What Kind of Thing Is Society?
An examination of the metaphors through which societies understand themselves, how political language converts those metaphors into policy, and why the dominant social imagination changes over time.
Political discourse is saturated with metaphor. Governments promise to rebuild the country, heal divisions, balance the books, defend borders, fight crime, unlock growth and provide a safety net. These phrases are familiar enough to pass unnoticed, yet each one carries an implied account of social reality.
A country that must be rebuilt is treated as a structure. A divided nation that requires healing is treated as a wounded body. An economy whose books must be balanced is treated as a household or business. Crime that must be fought is treated as an enemy. Welfare conceived as a safety net is designed to catch people after a fall, rather than to alter the conditions that made the fall likely.
Metaphors therefore do more than make political speeches memorable. They help define what the problem is, who or what has caused it, which forms of evidence matter, who should act, and which responses appear reasonable. They also establish emotional positions. Some metaphors call for care, others for discipline, mobilisation, repair, purification, competition or defence.
Metaphor as a Structure for Social Reasoning
The cognitive account associated with George Lakoff and Mark Johnson challenged the idea that metaphor belongs primarily to poetry or decorative language. On this account, metaphor is one of the ordinary means by which abstract experience is organised. We understand one domain of experience by mapping onto it selected relationships from another domain.
The mapping is always partial. When society is understood as a body, concepts such as health, injury, infection, balance and recovery become available. The metaphor may encourage solidarity by presenting citizens as interdependent parts of a whole. It may also encourage suspicion of whatever is described as diseased, parasitic or foreign.
No metaphor provides a neutral or complete representation. A machine has components, functions, inputs and outputs, but it does not possess memory, grief or moral conflict. A family suggests intimacy and mutual obligation, but it may also imply hierarchy, obedience and parental authority. A market highlights exchange and choice, but can make unequal resources appear to be merely different preferences.
Political metaphors are especially consequential because they operate within institutions that possess the authority to legislate, tax, punish, classify and distribute resources. A metaphor voiced in a speech may eventually become embedded in departmental names, administrative categories, funding priorities, performance measures and legal tests.
A Changing History of Social Metaphor
The history of political metaphor is not a sequence in which one image disappears before another begins. Older metaphors remain available and are repeatedly revived. The important change is often one of emphasis. At different historical moments, particular metaphors become especially persuasive because they correspond with prevailing technologies, religious beliefs, economic arrangements or political anxieties.
Society as a body
The body politic is among the oldest political metaphors in European thought. Society is imagined as an organised body whose different parts perform different functions. Rulers may be represented as the head, labourers as the hands, and institutions as organs or limbs. The metaphor emphasises unity, coordination and mutual dependence.
Its political ambiguity is considerable. The body can justify duties of care because injury to one part may threaten the whole. It can also legitimise hierarchy by suggesting that some groups naturally command while others naturally serve. Once political disagreement is represented as disease or infection, coercion can be presented as treatment.
Society as a family or household
Family imagery historically connected political authority with parental authority. The ruler could be imagined as a father, citizens as children, and the nation as a household united by loyalty and inheritance. This made political obedience appear continuous with domestic obligation.
Modern democratic societies have weakened many overtly paternal models, but family metaphors remain influential. Politicians speak of the national family, future generations, responsible housekeeping and living within our means. These expressions can promote care and stewardship, while also obscuring conflicts between differently positioned members of society.
Society and the state as machines
Mechanical metaphors gained particular force alongside early modern science and later industrialisation. Thomas Hobbes famously described the commonwealth as an artificial person, while his political philosophy repeatedly drew upon mechanical conceptions of movement and causation.
The machine metaphor supports ideas of design, regulation, efficiency, repair and technical expertise. It encourages the search for defective parts, administrative levers and measurable outputs. It can be useful when examining procedures, but it may reduce citizens to components and political judgement to engineering.
Society as an organism or system
Organic and systemic metaphors emphasise development, adaptation and interdependence. Social institutions are viewed less as separate mechanical parts and more as processes operating within a changing whole. The language of social systems, environments and feedback became increasingly important across sociology, biology, cybernetics and organisational theory.
These metaphors encourage attention to relationships and unintended consequences. Yet they may also make social arrangements appear naturally evolved rather than historically produced. A system can sound as though it has needs of its own, separate from the interests of the people living within it.
Society as a battlefield
Modern governments have repeatedly declared war on non-military problems. There have been wars on poverty, drugs, crime, disease and terror. War language creates urgency, simplifies competing priorities and identifies a common enemy. It also invites sacrifice, centralised command and exceptional measures.
The difficulty is that social conditions do not surrender, sign treaties or remain within clearly defined territories. When the declared enemy is an abstraction such as crime or drugs, the practical target may become a population associated with that abstraction.
Society as a market or enterprise
During the later twentieth century, market language expanded beyond the direct exchange of goods. Citizens were increasingly addressed as consumers, public bodies as service providers, schools as competitors, and personal identity as a project requiring investment and promotion.
Market metaphors foreground choice, incentives, competition and efficiency. They can expose complacency and unresponsive institutions. They can also narrow the meaning of citizenship by treating public participation as a purchasing decision and public value as something adequately represented by price.
Society as a network or ecosystem
Digital technology, ecological awareness and global interdependence have strengthened the appeal of network and ecosystem metaphors. Society is described through connections, platforms, flows, resilience, nodes and complex adaptive relationships.
These metaphors can direct attention towards interdependence and indirect effects. They are particularly useful where linear explanations are inadequate. However, the apparent neutrality of a network may conceal differences in ownership, power and control. Not every node possesses equal access, and not every participant is equally able to alter the system.
What Political Metaphors Do
Political metaphors usually operate through a cluster of implications rather than a single word. Andreas Musolff describes these clusters as metaphorical scenarios. A scenario contains characteristic actors, relationships, causes, dangers and possible outcomes. Once activated, it gives an audience a familiar story through which a complex issue can be interpreted.
They define the problem
A social difficulty may be framed as a wound, blockage, imbalance, invasion, burden, breakdown or failure of personal responsibility.
They distribute agency
Metaphors identify heroes, victims, enemies, experts, parents, dependants, competitors and passive components.
They suggest remedies
Wounds are healed, enemies defeated, machines repaired, markets liberated, borders defended and unhealthy systems regulated.
They conceal alternatives
Every metaphor suppresses features that do not fit its internal logic. What cannot be pictured within the metaphor may become politically difficult to discuss.
| Dominant metaphor | What it highlights | Policies it may favour | What it may obscure |
|---|---|---|---|
| Society as a body | Unity, health, coordination and vulnerability | Public health measures, social protection, regulation and removal of perceived threats | Internal disagreement, cultural plurality and unequal power between social groups |
| Nation as a family | Care, loyalty, belonging and inheritance | Protective welfare, paternal regulation and appeals to national duty | Exclusion of outsiders and unequal authority within the supposed family |
| State as a machine | Efficiency, function, design and measurable performance | Administrative reform, targets, central planning and technical intervention | Culture, emotion, local knowledge and political disagreement |
| Social problem as war | Urgency, threat, solidarity and victory | Emergency powers, concentrated resources, enforcement and punitive action | Complex causes, care, compromise and long-term coexistence |
| Economy as a household | Debt, thrift, budgeting and personal responsibility | Spending restraint, deficit reduction and fiscal rules | The differences between household finance, public investment and sovereign economic policy |
| Society as a market | Choice, competition, incentives and exchange | Privatisation, contracting, performance pricing and consumer choice | Public goods, unequal bargaining power and obligations that cannot be reduced to transactions |
| Society as an ecosystem | Interdependence, adaptation, resilience and indirect effects | Preventive policy, coordinated intervention and long-term systems planning | Identifiable responsibility, deliberate exploitation and concentrated ownership |
From Figure of Speech to Public Policy
The relationship between metaphor and policy is not mechanical. Hearing a metaphor does not automatically determine a person’s political opinion. Existing beliefs, group identities, knowledge, emotional state and the credibility of the speaker all matter. Research nevertheless suggests that metaphorical framing can influence which aspects of a problem become cognitively available and which solutions appear appropriate.
Crime as a beast or a virus
In a widely discussed series of experiments, Paul Thibodeau and Lera Boroditsky presented participants with reports in which crime was described either as a beast preying upon a city or as a virus infecting it. The statistical information remained substantially the same. Participants exposed to the beast framing were more likely to favour enforcement and punishment, while those exposed to the virus framing were more likely to consider prevention and social reform.
Later research raised questions about the reliability and conditions of this effect. Some follow-up experiments did not reproduce the same pattern once additional controls were introduced. The debate is instructive. Metaphors can influence reasoning, but their effects are not universal, automatic or independent of context.
The war on poverty
In January 1964, United States President Lyndon B. Johnson declared an unconditional war on poverty. The metaphor transformed deprivation into a national enemy and positioned government programmes as a coordinated campaign. It supported urgency, mobilisation and the concentration of political attention.
Yet war metaphors contain an unstable question: who is the enemy? Poverty may initially be identified as the opponent, but political language can gradually transfer suspicion onto people who receive assistance. A campaign against a condition can become a campaign to monitor, discipline or classify those associated with it.
The national economy as a household budget
Arguments for fiscal restraint frequently compare government borrowing with a household spending beyond its income. The analogy is immediately comprehensible because it translates macroeconomic policy into familiar domestic experience. Debt becomes evidence of irresponsibility, while spending reductions become an act of maturity.
The analogy omits important differences between a household and a state, including taxation, public investment, monetary institutions and the economic effects of government expenditure. Even so, empirical research in the United Kingdom found no clear evidence that exposure to the household analogy directly caused greater support for austerity. Its significance may therefore lie less in momentary persuasion and more in its long-term ability to define the terms in which fiscal responsibility is discussed.
Brexit as divorce, journey and escape
British discussion of withdrawal from the European Union drew heavily upon relationship and movement metaphors. Brexit was represented as a divorce, a departure, a journey, an escape, a new beginning or a leap into the unknown.
Each scenario organised responsibility differently. Divorce imagery invited questions about blame, settlement, custody and continuing obligations. Journey imagery suggested a destination and a point from which turning back might become difficult. Escape imagery presented existing membership as confinement. The political dispute was therefore also a contest over which metaphorical story the public would inhabit.
Metaphor is influential, but not all-powerful
It would be misleading to treat citizens as passive recipients whose beliefs are controlled by a single phrase. Metaphors interact with established values, personal experience, media repetition, institutional trust and material conditions. They are most politically effective when they provide a coherent story that resonates with assumptions an audience already holds.
How Policy Reinforces the Metaphor
Influence also travels in the opposite direction. Political metaphors shape policy, but implemented policies can make their originating metaphors appear increasingly factual.
When public services are organised as competitive markets, they begin to generate market-like behaviours. Institutions compete for funding, users are classified as consumers, and performance is represented through comparable units. The metaphor is no longer confined to speech. It has been installed in the procedures through which the institution operates.
Similarly, when a social problem is governed as a war, resources may be directed towards surveillance, enforcement and command structures. The resulting encounters produce evidence of conflict, which can then be cited as confirmation that the war metaphor was accurate.
This produces a recursive process:
1. The metaphor frames reality
A complex issue is organised through a familiar model.
2. Policy follows the frame
Institutions adopt the categories and remedies implied by that model.
3. Institutions produce evidence
Measurements focus on outcomes that the metaphor makes visible.
4. The evidence confirms the frame
The metaphor appears to describe an objective reality rather than a selected interpretation.
Why Social Metaphors Change
Metaphors change because social experience changes. New technologies provide new source domains. Mechanical clocks, steam engines, factories, telecommunications, computers and digital networks have each supplied models for imagining collective order.
Political interests also promote particular metaphors. A government seeking central coordination may favour the language of machinery, mobilisation or national unity. A programme of deregulation may describe the economy as an organism that must be allowed to breathe or as a market that must be freed. Environmental politics may frame society as part of an ecosystem whose survival depends upon balance and limits.
Crises accelerate metaphorical change. War, financial collapse, pandemics and environmental emergencies disrupt established explanations. Competing groups attempt to establish the metaphor through which the crisis will be remembered and governed. Is an economic collapse a natural storm, a mechanical failure, an act of sabotage, an infection, a consequence of addiction or evidence of structural injustice? Each description produces a different distribution of responsibility.
Counter-metaphors arise when existing language no longer accounts for people’s experience. A person described by an institution as a customer may insist upon being recognised as a citizen. A community treated as a collection of economic units may describe itself as a commons. A group represented as a burden may present itself as a source of labour, care, knowledge or cultural renewal.
Political change therefore includes a struggle over naming. Before institutions are redesigned, the public may need a different way to imagine what those institutions are for.
Questions for Examining a Political Metaphor
A critical examination of political language can begin with the following questions:
- What is the source domain? Is society being understood as a body, machine, family, market, journey, building, battlefield or ecosystem?
- What roles does the metaphor create? Who becomes the expert, patient, parent, child, soldier, enemy, consumer or defective component?
- What causal story is implied? Does the problem result from infection, obstruction, invasion, imbalance, bad design, irresponsible behaviour or insufficient competition?
- Which emotions are invited? Does the metaphor evoke fear, loyalty, shame, urgency, compassion, resentment, hope or disgust?
- Which remedies become thinkable? Does the metaphor favour punishment, treatment, repair, removal, investment, protection, education or structural reform?
- What disappears from view? Which experiences, histories, interests or power relationships cannot be easily represented within the metaphor?
- Who benefits from this framing? Which institutions or groups gain authority when the issue is described in this way?
- What alternative metaphor might reveal? How would the proposed policy change if the issue were understood through a different model?
The Ethical Question
The central ethical issue is not whether politics can be stripped of metaphor. Abstract political life cannot be understood without selection, framing and comparison. Attempts to eliminate metaphor usually result in metaphors that have simply become invisible through familiarity.
The more realistic task is to develop metaphorical literacy. This means noticing the images that organise political discussion, tracing their implications, and comparing them with alternatives. It also means resisting the assumption that a successful metaphor must provide a complete explanation.
A useful political culture would maintain several metaphors at once. Society may need to be understood as a network when examining interdependence, as a body when considering collective health, as a commons when discussing shared resources, and as an unfinished conversation when considering democratic participation. The tension between these models can protect against the limitations of any single one.
The Society We Imagine
Societies are partly organised through the metaphors by which they are described. These metaphors influence what citizens notice, what governments measure, which policies appear practical and which people are treated as central, dependent, dangerous or disposable.
Political metaphors change as technologies, institutions and collective anxieties change. Yet they do not merely reflect historical transformation. They participate in producing it. The movement from body to machine, from household to market, or from hierarchy to network is never solely linguistic. Each transition carries a different account of order, responsibility and legitimate authority.
To examine a society’s metaphors is therefore to examine its political imagination. The question is not only, “How do we describe society?” It is also, “What kind of society becomes possible when we describe it this way?”
References and Further Reading
- Lakoff, George and Mark Johnson. Metaphors We Live By. University of Chicago Press, 1980, updated edition 2003. Publisher information.
- Semino, Elena, Zsófia Demjén and Jane Demmen. “An Integrated Approach to Metaphor and Framing in Cognition, Discourse, and Practice.” Applied Linguistics, volume 39, issue 5, 2018. View article.
- Musolff, Andreas. Political Metaphor Analysis: Discourse and Scenarios. Bloomsbury Academic, 2016.
- Charteris-Black, Jonathan. Politicians and Rhetoric: The Persuasive Power of Metaphor. Second edition, Palgrave Macmillan, 2011.
- Thibodeau, Paul H. and Lera Boroditsky. “Metaphors We Think With: The Role of Metaphor in Reasoning.” PLOS ONE, volume 6, issue 2, 2011. View open-access article.
- Steen, Gerard J., W. Gudrun Reijnierse and Christian Burgers. “When Do Natural Language Metaphors Influence Reasoning?” PLOS ONE, volume 9, issue 12, 2014. View open-access article.
- Barnes, Lucy and Timothy Hicks. “Are Policy Analogies Persuasive? The Household Budget Analogy and Public Support for Austerity.” British Journal of Political Science, volume 52, issue 3, 2022. View article.
- Johnson, Lyndon B. “Annual Message to the Congress on the State of the Union.” 8 January 1964. Read the historical document.
- Landmann, Julia. “Recent Metaphors of Brexit in the British Press.” English Today, 2024. View article.
- Brugman, Britta C., Christian Burgers and Barbara Vis. “Metaphorical Framing in Political Discourse Through Words Versus Concepts: A Meta-analysis.” Language and Cognition, volume 11, issue 1, 2019. View article.
Published by The Metaphor Society | Exploring metaphor in language, experience, culture and society