Karuna Mantena ( Alibis of Empire: Henry Maine and the Ends of Liberal Imperialism , pp. 68-70) describes the rise of modern social theory (in line with Arendt, Strauss, and Wolin) as the displacement of politics by society. He disagrees with Strauss and others because he argues that the politics that god displaced was not the ancient politics of Aristotle but the more recent politics inaugurated by Hobbes.

Durkheim plays a crucial role in this displacement:

“Durkheim in an early dissertation on Montesquieu and the foundation of social science—a thesis that was supervised by and dedicated to Fustel—explicitly argued that the proper recognition of ‘society’ as a real, natural ‘thing’ went hand in hand with a rejection of the claims of political philosophy. For Durkheim, political philosophers before Montesquieu tended to view aspects of social life, for example laws, customs, and religion, as products of human will and thus as amenable to alteration and perfection. The defining features of social life—those features that distinguished one society from another—were ultimately associated with and categorized according to regime type. In this way, both the central agencies of transformation and the most formative institutions were primarily political. Durkheim’s argument, in part, was a methodological one, one that associated the emphasis on the human will with the priority given to normative theorizing over scientific explanation. In his terms, political science was seen as an ‘art’ and not a science; rather than “knowing” society, it sought to correct and transform society according to an ideal.”

For Durkheim, this was not merely a methodological point: “what social science or sociology truly lacked was less a clear method than a distinctive object of study. In positing the social or society as a subject matter worthy of science, one had to recognize that social phenomena were ‘natural’ things that, ‘like all other things in nature, which have their particular characteristics,’ do not ‘depend upon the human will.’ For Durkheim, it was Montesquieu’s great innovation to have realized that forms of government had some necessary connection to particular types of society. And while his classification was formulated according to regime type in the traditional manner (that is, with respect to republics, monarchies, and despotisms), Durkheim contended that it was in fact a classification of societies (not forms of government) and thus a view that first recognized the causal priority of society in understanding the nature of a regime. Forms of government in themselves, while reflective of social arrangements, were, for Durkheim, epiphenomenal at best, and purely contingent at worst—either way, they held little importance in understanding the nature of society or in actually shaping social phenomena. In short, political philosophy (with the partial exception of Montesquieu) in its preoccupation with imagining ideal political arrangements obscured the immanent harmony and cohesiveness of social phenomena. This harmony was independent of the nature of political authority, the willed actions of citizens, or the contingent art of the (mythic) legislator. Social science began at precisely that moment when the traditional project of political philosophy was abandoned, for ‘if social [political] science is really to exist, societies must be assumed to have a certain nature which results from the nature and arrangement of the elements composing them, and which is the source of social phenomena. Once the existence of such elements is granted, our lawgiver vanishes and his legend with him.’”