The Invention of Society argues that democracy allowed people, for the first time, to invent, innovate, and explore choices that could not have been imagined before.

Humans must take into account the existence of others in their everyday interactions. This awareness is understood primarily as ‘value consensus’, which specifies ‘what can be done’ when people interact. If this value consensus is violated, it would result in a total collapse of order. However, over the past 150 years and more, earlier norms have been routinely upended without any breakdown. Instead, history has recorded tremendous progress of the kind never seen before. 

Democracy frees the individual from the limitations of ‘what can be done’ by constraining them instead in terms of ‘what cannot be done’. This book provides a theory of this move from ‘what can be done’ to ‘what cannot be done’ through the notion of the Triad, where the universal rules of ‘what cannot be done’ are housed.

The author states that the Triad enables our understanding of a ‘society’ in the true sense of the term, as classes and categories can now better their life chances with greater choices, but in full awareness of the ‘other’. That is why the Triad comes to life only in a democracy and expresses itself through the concept of ‘citizenship’.