Interrogating social cohesion: the South African case

Abstract

It will be argued in this chapter that the current South African government's policy focus on the question of social cohesion is driven by an understandable concern with the state of South Africa's social fabric as well as an important insight that social networks and social relations remain important even in a complex modern society. However, there is a danger that anxieties around the state of the social fabric can lead to a misrecognition of the nature of the problem of social cohesion as solely a question of values, which posits consensus in the realm of values as the solution to this problem.