Four conceptions of social pathology

Social philosophy and social pathology

Our aim in this article is to distinguish more clearly four different usages of ‘social pathology’, whose differences have not always been appreciated in the literature. Indeed, a leading theorist, Axel Honneth, in his different writings seems to subscribe to three of the conceptions we distinguish here. We hope that distinguishing these different conceptions (or families of conceptions) will clarify the debate, and hopefully everyone will find a conception that suits their purposes: the anti-theoretical view will appeal to some, whereas others welcome the theoretical structure that the other conceptions provide, and so on. The typology we suggest aims to make sense of the usages, especially in social philosophy; other typologies for other purposes can use different classification criteria. ¹ The second aim is to comparatively assess the four different usages, and to argue against some of the views (especially the second-order disorder-view and the organicist view). These aims are relatively independent: even people who disagree with our comparative assessments can hopefully find the classification useful. In this introductory section we will shed light both on the close connection between social philosophy and social pathologies, and on the possible dangers of pathology talk.

The concept of social pathology seems to pose a dilemma for social philosophers. On the one hand, social philosophers are easily repelled by the transfer of a medical or biological vocabulary to issues regarded as social or cultural. Biological, medical and naturalistic analogies seem not only reductionist but also suspiciously amenable to being used as a means of domination (Lüdemann, 2004). The step from a social-critical usage of a pathology diagnostic vocabulary to a racist or sexist discourse of labeling sexual, linguistic, ethnic or religious minorities as unhealthy deviations might be not only shorter than sober social critics would like to think (Honneth, 2014b: 683–4), but also the more radical claim could be raised that it is precisely the task of social criticism to denaturalize social phenomena so as to reveal how something that took the shape of a natural event was in fact a social construction.

Now if this were the only problem that social philosophers have with the naturalistic vocabulary of ‘societal organism’, ‘social life’ and ‘social pathology’, the solution to hand would be simply to drop it. Social criticism could instead be directed by metaphysically more innocent-looking concepts such as ‘moral injustice’ or ‘political illegitimacy’, etc. But the difficulties with the notion of social pathology become more complicated once its concrete role in social-philosophical criticism is taken into account: Social philosophers often use a naturalistic vocabulary, in which the concept of social pathology is to exert an evaluative authority, in order to establish social philosophy as a discipline in its own right and to claim critical power for a social criticism, which does not rely on narrowly moral or political standards of validity; the use of the concept of social philosophy is, then, motivated by the ambition to establish an evaluative approach to social reality not reducible to the perspectives of moral and political philosophy (Dewey, 1973; Honneth, 2007; Fischbach, 2009). According to an influential contemporary commentator, social philosophy is oriented toward a ‘deeper’ layer of reality (Honneth, 2014b: 791), a ‘higher’ order of wrongs (Honneth, 2014a: 86) or ‘society itself’ (Honneth, 2014b: 684). Following such intuitions, social philosophers often subscribe to the idea that social practices or perhaps even society itself might suffer from evils at a higher or deeper level, which marks the jurisdiction of a distinctively social philosophy. This level would, moreover, not be reached by the vocabularies of moral and political philosophy, and its characteristic evils would in some relevant sense resemble or even be ‘illnesses’, ‘diseases’ or ‘pathologies’. From this perspective, then, the very faith of social philosophy as a discipline in its own right looks tied to a naturalistic vocabulary.

As the naturalistic vocabulary for these social philosophers then becomes the very means of defining social philosophy, the demand to simply drop the concept of social pathology comes to seem unacceptable. The metaphysically more innocent-looking and historically less heavily loaded concepts of ‘moral injustice’ or ‘political illegitimacy’ cannot, on this account, compensate for the loss suffered by the abandonment of ‘social pathology’, as these conceptions do not respond to those deeper or higher or more inclusive or systematic patterns of wrongs, with which social philosophy is supposed to deal. The dilemma of social philosophers regarding social pathology is that the naturalistic vocabulary is difficult to keep but also difficult to drop.

Immanent social criticisms are characterized by the attempt not to rely on prior moral or political standards (Honneth, 2000; Celikates, 2009; Stahl, 2013; Jaeggi, 2014; Särkelä, 2017a). Sometimes this rejection of prior or external standards for critique is tied to the view of social philosophy as taking a more extensive view of things than moral or political philosophy. For example, Max Horkheimer distinguishes ‘critical’ social theory by virtue of its claim to grasp ‘the life of society as whole’ (1972: 203) from ‘traditional’ practical philosophies engaged in mere ‘isolated consideration of particular…branches of activity’ (1972: 199). Following Horkheimer, then, social-philosophical inquiry is practiced on a conceptual level, which does not allow reduction to any subtending disciplines of practical philosophy. Furthermore, this level is characterized as the ‘life of society’. So even for a seemingly anti-naturalistic social philosopher like Horkheimer, the faith of social philosophy is tied to its naturalistic vocabulary. ²

This claim seems to be implicit also in the contemporary debate about social pathologies. There are four variations of the concept of social pathology in that debate. In what follows, we will try to sort out the diverging ontological commitments, metaphysical implications and evaluative aspirations of those four conceptions. All these conceptions of social pathology are committed to a picture of social philosophy as somehow more inclusive a project than ‘mere’ moral or political philosophy. Moreover, in all of them, ‘social pathology’ or some equivalent is made the very negative subject-matter defining social philosophy. Therefore, the use of the concept of social pathology says a lot about how social philosophy is understood. In a certain sense, each of the four conceptions also paints a specific picture of social philosophy. It is, however, important to sort out the diverging assumptions of these conceptions, not least because one can often find two or more of these incompatible conceptions used by one and the same author. While each approach tries to remain true to one horn of the dilemma (social kinds should not be reduced to natural kinds), they differ in whether they think it is nonetheless possible or important to retain the naturalistic or medical connotations of the concept of social pathology. ³

A leading question to users of the concept is: is something ‘pathological’ because it is wrong or is it wrong because it is pathological? ⁴ The first two of our four conceptions use the concept of social pathology to denote some social failures that are wrong in some relevant way, and therefore are apt to be called ‘pathological’. These species of pathology conceptions we classify under the genus of ‘normativism’. The last two conceptions, by contrast, use the concept of social pathology to diagnose something as socially wrong. These species of pathology conceptions we sort under the genus of ‘naturalism’.

Social pathology as an umbrella term for social wrongs

The first approach regards ‘social pathology’ as a replaceable umbrella term for what is socially criticizable (see e.g. Piotrowski, 2006: x). In this approach, ‘social pathology’ is more or less synonymous with social evils, social wrongs, criticizable social arrangements. (The distinction between first- and second-order wrongs is not relevant to this approach, see discussion below.) The approach can be called ‘anti-theoretical’ in the sense in which Gadamer’s hermeneutics, Wittgenstein’s or McDowell’s philosophy of language, Aristotle’s ethics or Michael Walzer’s and Charles Taylor’s views about social criticism are ‘anti-theoretical’ (Wittgenstein, 1953; Walzer, 1987; Taylor, 1991; Aristotle, 2004; Gadamer, 2004). The best we can do is to have good exemplars of what is socially criticizable, and somehow learn to go on from there, case by case. The cases include ideological worldviews, misrecognition, maldistribution, invisibilization, rationality distortions, reification or institutionalized self-realization, thus, to anticipate a list of social wrongs that the second approach will discuss as well.

The first approach assumes that there need not be any inner logic or shared structure for these social wrongs – the list is open-ended; and can include any significant topics of social criticism. It seems thus very unambitious theoretically speaking, or anti-theoretical. There are, however, good theoretical reasons for the anti-theoretical approach: according to this view, it would be a distortion to force the phenomena into the straitjacket of a unified structure, unless the phenomena already contain that structure. If the phenomena indeed constitute a cluster with no common denominator, we have strong theoretical reasons to remain anti-theoretical: the forced structure would be a distortion. A family resemblance may be the best we can have. It would be a mistake to think that ‘the social’ and ‘social pathologies’ have some universal or essential structure. The only universalistic truth is that the social is historically malleable, and new kinds of wrongs can emerge in new historical settings – they can be social wrongs without sharing any structure. Assuming a shared structure smacks of essentialism to the followers of Gadamer, Aristotle and Walzer. It will just blind us, and lead us to focus on familiar cases; like the drunkard who was looking for their lost keys under the lamppost; not because that was where the keys were lost but because it would be easier to find them there. Arguably, this anti-theoretical option, even if non-informative theoretically, is the fall-back option if other construals fail.

Does this approach enable us to see the task of social philosophy in terms of the diagnosis of social pathologies? It may, if it has a story about how social wrongs differ from moral or political ones. On this approach, something is a social pathology, if it is somehow ‘social’, and wrong. How moral, political and social phenomena differ from one another is a contested issue, but at least a negative characterization is readily available for the first approach: socio-ethical questions are not limited to morality in a narrow sense (that concerns how individuals ought to act), and social problems are not limited to political questions of democracy or legitimacy of governance – there are social wrongs or evils of social practices, institutions, structures and processes in addition to narrowly moral and political ones. There are, for example, Charles Taylor’s three ‘malaises’: loss of meaning, eclipse of ends in face of rampant instrumental reason, and loss of freedom or powerlessness under ‘soft despotism’ (Taylor, 1991).

The proponents of this first approach may even think there is no real reason to use the term ‘social pathology’ instead of its synonyms, but it is acceptable to use it out of courtesy as it were, when one’s interlocutors use it; it is just another word for social wrongs. And it may be that the metaphor of ‘pathology’ has useful connotations, suggesting that we can analyze, diagnose, provide an etiology and suggest a cure or therapy, just as in medical cases (Honneth, 2007); and in successful cases, healing (Dewey, 2015; Särkelä, 2017b). If something is experienced as a social suffering, then it makes sense to articulate it through a vocabulary of pathology or, for example, as ‘malaises of modernity’ (Taylor, 1991). So maybe there is, on this view, a rhetorical gesture, albeit not a theoretical reason, behind sticking to the term ‘pathology’. It may of course be that these reasons do not override the weighty practical reasons not to use the vocabulary of ‘social pathology’, as in its naïve usage it may have essentializing, naturalizing, biologizing, universalizing, medicalizing, organicistic, vitalistic, and uncritical overtones that critical thought should avoid. (This was the denaturalization motive mentioned above.)

To sum up, the first approach regards it as more or less hopeless and dangerous to move to positive characterizations from negative ones. Anti-essentialism is, on this view, important when it concerns the social and the pathological. This will mean that the concept of social pathology cannot really be a guide in the demarcation between social, moral and political philosophy: we must first understand which wrongs are ‘social’ and thereby come to view them as social pathologies. And even more importantly, the first approach is anti-naturalist concerning the social and the pathological. Social phenomena certainly are not natural, biological, vitalistic, etc. in any meaningful sense. To suggest anything of the sort would sound highly uncritical, for the proponents of the first approach.

The first two approaches share an implicit premise: It is impossible to be critical and non-reductive about social kinds, while retaining the naturalistic overtones of the notion of ‘social pathology’. The last two approaches beg to differ, as we will see. Another key claim of the first approach is: it is impossible to give an informative account of what all social wrongs share, there’s at most ‘family resemblance’ – and even trying to find a shared structure will be forcing the phenomena into a straitjacket. All the other approaches, including the second approach, to which we now turn, will try to show that this need not be the case. ⁵

Social pathologies as non-natural but sharing a structure: second-order disorders and more encompassing views

The second family of approaches tries to show that there is more to what social pathologies share, there is an illuminating theoretical account to be given after all. ⁶ Social pathologies are all alike in sharing a structure, but (as opposed to the third and fourth approaches), the structure can be analysed in anti-naturalist terms.

One prominent exemplar of this approach is Christopher Zurn’s (2011) interpretation of the tradition of critical theory. Zurn suggests that social pathologies of all sorts, as discussed in the tradition of critical theory and by Honneth in particular, can be conceived of as ‘second-order disorders’. These include pathologies of ideological recognition, maldistribution, invisibilization, rationality distortions, reification and institutionalized self-realization. What is at stake, in his view, are ‘constitutive disconnects between first-order contents and second-order reflexive comprehension of those contents, where those disconnects are pervasive and socially caused’ (Zurn, 2011: 345–6).

Think of the myth of personal responsibility for poverty. This myth is ideological in that it fails to note the causes of poverty in social arrangements, and misattributes it to personal failures. The myth also makes the systematic arrangements between the rich and the poor seem natural and legitimate – it produces a failure to critically question whether some other, more egalitarian arrangement should prevail. There is thus a disconnect between what is really going on, and what is comprehended – second-order critical questioning is blocked. And this blockage is socially caused and pervasive.

Rahel Jaeggi’s (2014) approach to immanent critique of life-forms is different from Zurn’s but also conceptualizes social-philosophically relevant disorders as ‘second-order problems’ (Probleme zweiter Ordnung); such disorders present systematic structural blockages of social learning processes: A social-philosophical critique of life-forms does not, according to Jaeggi, simply focus on barriers to a life-form’s interaction with its environment (first-order problems), but criticizes distortions within its interpretive framework of practice (Jaeggi, 2014: 337).

Such suggestions have been influential in recent debates. For example, Axel Honneth, in his book, Freedom’s Right (2014a), approvingly refers to Zurn’s analysis of social pathology. ⁷

Unlike the anti-theoretical approach, we really have reasons to support this approach once we have successful analyses or successful theoretical proposals. Is Zurn’s proposal successful? There are reasons to doubt that. The cases that Zurn discusses do not seem to fit into his characterization of pathologies as second-order disorders. ⁸

One broad class of social phenomena, which the ‘second-order disorder’ suggestions seemingly put aside, are the cases where there is simply something wrong with the (first-order) social reality. It has features, which are unjust or undemocratic, cause suffering, prevent well-being, cause lack of freedom and autonomy, or prevent genuine solidarity. There can be oppression, misrecognition, exploitation, domination and brute coercion of various sorts even though the subjects can reflexively grasp these – the fault need not lie in the disconnect between reality and reflection, but in the social reality itself. (Of course, it may help the oppressor if the oppression is ideologically disguised.)

Typically such first-order phenomena have a connection to socially caused suffering: to ‘first-order’ experiences of the participants, before critical reflection. Say, cases of invisibilization typically come with ‘learnt self-invisibilization’: the agent taking on the role of being socially invisible.

But one kind of disconnect could hold between social reality and one’s first-order comprehension and experience of it. Various cases of anomie, of lack of suitable socialization (see e.g. Durkheim, [1895] 2013; Honneth, 2014a) can lead agents to be disconnected cognitively, motivationally or practically from the operative social reality.

Even if the suggestion that all social pathologies are second-order disorders turns out to be too narrow, there is conceptual room to develop a more encompassing account, still within the confines of the second, anti-naturalist approach. Instead of merely ‘second-order disorders’, a more encompassing structural approach could thematize five interrelated elements. ⁹ First, there is (first-order) oppression, domination or misrecognition taking place in the social world. Second, the first-order beliefs (of the victims) contribute to this oppression, domination or misrecognition (e.g. by serving the interests of the elite, by hiding the oppression, domination or misrecognition from sight). This is not so in cases of ‘brute, naked power’ where the oppression goes on independently of the victims’ understandings, but in other cases it holds. Third, at the second-order level (beliefs about the origin of the first-order beliefs), the first-order beliefs are understood as natural, unchangeable, to be taken for granted, rather than created by social mechanisms. Or in other ways, critical second-order reflection of the constitutive first-order contents (both in the social world and in the participants’ views) is blocked. Fourth, the idea may be that the very same social mechanisms both uphold oppression, create the problematic first-order beliefs, and distort the second-order understandings as well, e.g. by blocking reflection on the matter. Fifth, there could be ‘third-order’ disorders: the pre-emptive social silencing of criticism even when critical reflection takes place. Social pathologies can be disconnects between any of these elements.

What is the ‘third order’ in such a suggestion? Even if the obstacles for critical reflection were removed, there could be further obstacles for effective social criticism. On the side of the subjects: (1) there could be motivational or practical obstacles: the agents could be disciplined so that they ignore their second-order reflections perhaps as ‘naïve’ or ‘utopian’, or as suitable objects of ridicule. More importantly, on the side of the social reality: (2) the situation could be such that effective criticism is pre-empted, critical voices are doomed to be silenced in advance, the credibility or authority of the complaints removed by default. This is the case where the views of the victims are deemed irrelevant, or the victims have been robbed of a language, in which to express the criticism (cf. Lyotard, 1988). This can take various forms, from literally labeling some people deranged, or taking some forms of complaints (‘naïve’ ones) as a sign that the person cannot be taken seriously, to merely ignoring them, making it institutionally the case that they are not being heard, or that their speech acts fall on deaf ears. Again, typically the social world is constitutively tied with the participants, so that socially pre-empting the critique (2) can be internalized in a form of self-censorship (1): as one knows in advance that criticisms will be socially labeled ‘naïve’, the subject may learn to sanction one’s critical views by oneself, so social silencing is not needed thanks to socially created self-silencing. (To use Bourdieu’s language, this is just one way in which one’s habitus contains the demands of the fields.) This is then in a sense a ‘third-order’ disorder, as the assumption is that one’s second-order reflection is more or less intact and not cognitively out of touch with reality, it is just that one’s motivation and possibilities to effectively act on it have been preventively blocked.

It remains to be seen how well such a more encompassing structural account will be able to cover all the relevant phenomena. In this article, our aim is to characterize this approach to social pathologies vis-à-vis the rival approaches. The second approach agrees with the first in that the starting points are various social wrongs (from misrecognition and invisibilization to the norms of self-realization in late capitalism), and that the naturalistic, medical or biological connotations are to be avoided, but it argues (as the third and fourth approaches will) that such social wrongs share a structure. In Zurn’s and Jaeggi’s proposals, the structure is that of a second-order disorder, and in more inclusive views, a more complex structure.

For this family of approaches, the naturalist or medical connotations of ‘pathology’ do not seem important. Even if the concept of pathology here is clearly intended as a critical tool for diagnosing social disorders not grasped thoroughly enough by ‘mere’ moral or political criticism, this view of pathologies of recognition is not immediately tied to the wider pathology diagnostic tradition in social philosophy that Honneth traces back to Rousseau in his early essay on ‘Pathologies of the Social’ (cf. Honneth, 2007). One advantage of that tradition is that the concept of pathology seems a handy way of distinguishing the project of ‘critical social philosophy’ from the projects of ‘political philosophy’ or ‘moral philosophy’ that apply standards of political legitimacy and moral rightness to social conditions. An intuition behind this use of the concept of pathology seems to be that it adds a distinct layer of social wrongs or evils to the picture. Under pathological conditions, the questions of moral rightness and political legitimacy appear one-sided and do not grasp the specific disorder addressed.

This second approach risks ending up being too abstract and it will face difficult challenges both from the side of the first approach, and from the remaining two. First, it is not clear whether such diverse phenomena as ideology, reification, invisibilization, organized self-realization, etc. can be understood as having one common conceptual structure. Second, here, too, the terminology of ‘pathologies’ remains an optional – and perhaps in some sense misleading – way to speak about pervasive forms of ideologically concealed socially caused suffering. There seem to be no compelling reasons why these social evils are called ‘pathologies’. By contrast, in social philosophy, the concept of a pathology has often been employed in circumstances that emphasize either its medical (Canguilhem, 1991) or biological (Durkheim) connotations. Such uses might point to disorders that are ‘first-order’, ‘third-order’ or even render the vocabulary of different orders unnecessary. Therefore, consequently we will see if there are approaches that can remain true to that tradition.

Social pathology as disease of the social organism: revitalized social organicism

One of our guiding questions has been: is something ‘pathological’ because it is wrong or is it wrong because it is pathological? Whereas the first two of our four conceptions use the concept of social pathology to denote some social failures that are wrong in some specified way, the last two conceptions do the opposite: they use the concept of pathology in order to diagnose social life, to identify social wrongs. If the proponents of the first two conceptions use the concept in a predominantly metaphorical way – they translate the concept of pathology into a ‘normative’ vocabulary – the following two perspectives, on the contrary, use a contentful notion of pathology in order to find out what is wrong with the social organism or with social life. In the tradition of social philosophy, naturalistic terminology has also been put to use in a more literal, self-conscious way, and so the concept of social pathology has been used to deliberately produce medical and biological connotations or to articulate the kind of life that social practices present.

The third option prevalent in contemporary social ontology is to conceive of social pathology on the model of the ill organism. Here, social pathologies present deviations from the reproductive values and ends of society. In the broad tradition of social philosophy, this use of diagnostic pathology concepts is, of course, familiar from Durkheim’s diagnosis of anomie (Durkheim, [1895] 2013: 277–92). Its roots, however, reach back to Plato’s Republic and have been modernized by Auguste Comte’s Cours de philosophie positive. Although Hegel arguably does not directly endorse an organicistic view of society (see below), he does in the Philosophy of Right treat the state as an organism (Hegel, [1821] 2008: §§ 46, 258, 259, 267, 269, 302), which has been the source of a predominantly right-Hegelian line of organicistic social theory. Similarly, in the French tradition, the likes of Louis de Bonald and Joseph de Maistre utilized an organicistic social ontology to criticize abstract principles of liberalism in political philosophy (cf. Spaemann, 1959; Fischbach, 2009: Chapter 2).

Honneth (2014b) has attempted to revitalize the societal organism for the purposes of contemporary critical social theory. He concludes his recent article by dreading that ‘without rehabilitating this organic conception that has long since been declared dead…the thesis that societies also can be stricken by diseases cannot be justified’ (Honneth, 2014b: 702). More radically, Franck Fischbach, in his Manifeste pour une philosophie social (2009), links the faith of social philosophy with the view that society is continuous with nature in the sense that it ‘naturally constitutes itself as an organism’ (comme un organisme naturellement constitué) (2009: 53).

Such approaches to social philosophy conceive their object ‘society’ as the kind of thing that can fall ill – a living organism. If the social is pathological, then the social organism has fallen ill. The idea is that society’s institutional complexes can be understood by analogy to the organs of the organism. These institutional complexes, then, appear ‘dead’, if they fail to serve the ends of the societal whole or if their inter-institutional communication is disrupted, just like a hand as an organ of the human organism is dead, if it does not fulfill the hand-specific functions in the maintenance of the living human being or fails to cooperate with other organs of the body, in which case the organism itself is ill. Therefore, the pathological state of society is here not diagnosed as a disconnect within practical self-reflection, but as the result of an institutional ‘dysfunction’, ‘misdevelopment’, ‘malformation’ or ‘maladjustment’. The institutional organs are displaced from their functions, i.e. the tasks assigned to them by the demands of societal reproduction such that the social organism can be maintained in its current form on a continuing basis (Honneth, 2014a: 128; 2014b: 700–2).

One evident advantage of this organicistic conception is that it makes sense of the concept of social pathology as a critical tool in its own right by delimiting it from other social-philosophical projects such as the critique of ideology or the critique of reification, on the one hand, but also from the more narrowly normative undertakings of moral and political philosophy. In the above two approaches, the choice of the name ‘social pathology’ to denote the wrongs criticized was arbitrary in the sense that the criticized phenomena could just as well be brought under the labels ‘social evil’, ‘reflexive disorder’, or ‘higher-order wrong’. Here, on the contrary, the transference of the word ‘pathology’ from the sphere of organic life and medicine to that of social life and criticism becomes the critical point of the concept’s use. It is the idea of pathology that will help the social theorists to diagnose the peculiar wrongs in the social world. ¹⁰ The critical force of the concept lies in the supposition that societal reproduction can fail by analogy to the way in which the self-maintenance of a living organism is disrupted when it falls ill. Therefore, there is, on this conception, no longer any distance between the critical claim and the naturalistic vocabulary of the social pathologist.

This conception, then, avoids some of the difficulties of the second-order view: First, there are the difficulties with the projection of a relational second-order structure onto all social-philosophically relevant wrongs in the second-order conception. As the organicistic view takes the biological and medical connotations of the word ‘pathology’ to bear critical weight, it not only targets any wrongs with an adequate second-order relational structure but also systematic disturbances in the reproduction of the social whole. Pathology is ascribed to social entities only to the extent that these are of the kind that can fall ill, which is supposed to be the case with ‘society’, as it is taken to present a self-maintaining whole. This conception, then, belongs to a tradition of classical, predominantly sociological, social-theoretical diagnoses of dysfunctions on a peculiarly societal level. ¹¹ Here, social pathologies are neither ‘socially caused’ individual problems nor socially ‘aggregated’ personal disorders but reproductive dysfunctions of the society itself. ¹² The ‘illness’ or ‘disease’ of society is not attributed to the many suffering individuals, not even to the malfunctioning institutional ‘organs’ but only to the social organism.

Accordingly, also the organicistic conception can be used to single out social philosophy as a discipline in its own right by circumventing it from moral and political philosophy. The theorists diagnosing social pathologies have, so the argument goes, their subject-matter on a super-individual, societal level irreducible to single acts, social practices or even collective attitudes. Unlike in the first two views, here the diagnosis of social pathologies is not treated as a critical enterprise next to moral and political philosophy. On the contrary, social philosophy has to view morality and politics as societal institutional complexes and thus make the objects of moral and political philosophy its own. Therefore, the theorists working with the organicistic conception cannot leave the first-order normative content of the criticized practices untouched. Morality and politics can conflict with other institutional spheres of the societal whole; they might fail at their reproductive tasks, in which case they will be diagnosed as requiring revision. ¹³

Yet, this advantage comes at a high price. Many intersubjective social wrongs that proponents of the first two conceptions often call ‘pathologies of recognition’ risk falling outside the picture. The organicistic conception, although somehow recognition-theoretically constructed in Honneth’s works, explicitly targets dysfunctions on such a high macro-level that it becomes difficult to see how they might be conceived as pathologies in the sense of a recognition-theoretical understanding of sociality. As such macro-level dysfunctions need to trickle down through rich layers of social mediation before they affect interpersonal relationships, this might make the organicistic conception unattractive or even useless, at least for an encompassing understanding of social pathologies. The intuition of these theorists who stick to the first two conceptions is that social pathologies are somehow linked to the way in which social reality denies adequate recognition to persons (see Canivez, 2011, and the articles in Laitinen and Särkelä, 2015). For such a research question, it is not helpful to limit focus to a societal macro-level. In contrast to the all-too-wide umbrella conception of social pathology, the organicistic view tends to become too restricted for concrete diagnoses and so to debilitate the critical force of the naturalistic vocabulary it emphatically sought to revitalize.

In this picture, then, the naturalistic vocabulary of pathology diagnosis obtains a critical function. This has important ontological implications. Namely, it is no longer the question of structurally characterized wrongs simply labeled ‘pathology’; on the contrary, social conditions will be exposed as criticizable, because they are dead, ill – pathological. It is the contentful idea of pathology itself that lends critical force to the diagnosis by the transfer of the concept of illness to social phenomena. From this it follows that it is not normatively neutral how the social theorist understands the relation between organic and social life, between nature and society, between the self-maintenance of the organism and the reproduction of society. After all, on this account, the critical force of the diagnosis is conceptually dependent on the ontological commitment that societies belong to the class of entities that can fall ill. In what sense society, in fact, might fall ill or be an organism, depends on how the social theorist conceives the relation between nature and society. This commits the social pathologist to some sort of metaphysics or cosmology, if she wants to clarify the ontological commitments of her diagnostic social criticism, which she probably should. Hence, in a stronger sense than the more ‘metaphorical’ uses of the notion of social pathology above, this view is ‘metaphysically loaded’.

Of course, this metaphysical loading need not be a problem, as long as the pathologist clarifies her metaphysical commitments such that her interlocutors can assess their plausibility and fruitfulness for the project of social criticism. Alas, contemporary social pathologists say very little about the metaphysical implications underlying their critical practices, which threatens to leave the social organism hanging in the air. This might be due to the strong hold of ‘post-metaphysical thinking’ in critical theory. Nevertheless, there arguably is a shared implicit understanding of the relation between nature and society among contemporary organicistic social pathologists: The third conception of social pathology is namely based on the idea of an analogy between organism and society. That is to say, these social theorists take it that there is enough of a structural similarity between the biological organism and society. The idea is, then, that although biological organisms and social organisms constitute different kinds of substances, they can still be ontologically characterized so that what appears as a structural deficit on the one side of the analogy, also can be conceived as such on the other.

In this picture, furthermore, ‘social pathology’ is a concept that is first taken from a biological, medical, natural vocabulary and context to be then applied to a social, societal, culturally mediated material. However, if one understands biological organism and society to be structurally similar (that is, not identical) and social pathology to be an analogy, then naturally one must also hold that they are not only similar, but also, importantly, different. The organicist social pathologist, like Honneth, albeit thinking that society indeed is a social organism, clearly does not think that society is a biological organism, it is only in some relevant way like (and hence also, unlike) a biological organism (therefore, the social organicist does not have to ontologically reduce social kinds to natural kinds, she just constructs an analogy between them). This difference, now, it seems to be assumed, lies in the higher complexity, reflexivity and freedom involved in societal life. The picture is then that there is something added to society that is not present in pre-social nature.

One disadvantage of this analogical ontology is that it still makes for a reductionist fallacy once put to critical use: If the social pathologists understand their critical notion to be an analogy from the workings of a less complex pre-social nature and to be used on a more complex societal material, as if in an extra step, they would already at the outset limit their claim reductively, as their evaluative work would always consist in applying the concept of something poorer to something that is by definition richer, that is, conceptually more complex, flexible, freer. Therefore, this conception makes itself vulnerable to normativistic and culturalistic worries at the outset, such as might be voiced by the proponents of the two previous conceptions of social pathology.

A third problem concerns the ontological assumptions that the organicistic social pathologists have to make for their diagnosis to have critical power. These assumptions are counterproductive in the sense that the organicistic social pathologists seem to end up reproducing the very illness they sought to cure. The worry is that the organism analogy squeezes society into such a static shape that radical social critique becomes impossible. What is made impossible is the critical scrutiny of reproductive ends, the ‘denaturalizing’ of the roots (radix) of societal self-maintenance as socially mutable, as social, not natural, kinds. The claim to provide for a more radical, more encompassing and inclusive social critique than moral or political philosophy was what motivated the diagnosis of social pathologies in the first place. It is, however, far from clear whether the imperatives of societal persistence and the successful communication between institutional complexes provide potential for emancipatory social critique. Are not, in this picture of the organism, the reproductive ends simply ‘given’ and so protected from criticism? Criticism of those ends will seem pathological, and not emancipatory.

A fourth and final difficulty regards the implicit ontology of the organism, which provides the structure for the organicistic pathologists’ social ontology. The basic ontological commitment of this view is, as has been noted, that society is a kind of substance that can fall ill, and that such a substance is the self-maintaining organism, because of which an analogy must be constructed between the functional structure of the living organism and the mode of existence of societies. As in the biological organism every organ and every process is fully coordinated and has a specific and exclusive task to accomplish (one can neither breathe with one’s fingers nor digest with one’s ears), so in society the different institutional complexes need to be harmonized such that they fulfill their specific tasks in societal reproduction. Now, a skeptic could not only challenge the validity of the inference from the successful functioning of an organism to the fulfilling society, but question the basis of the analogy itself. The ontology of the organism implied here is based on the Aristotelian picture of the purposively organized living being that does not allow for a functional change in one of its parts without the collapse of the entire structure; the organism is conceived of as an ideally planned organization where no part can fail without disturbing the whole. The problem is, however, that organisms are not like that. First, organisms are products of natural history and individual genesis, both being cases of functional transformation; second, organs with analogical functions appear in manifold structures – one and the same task can be resolved in multiple ways; third, organisms are to a very large extent able to maintain themselves despite loss of organs – cats and dogs adapt after losing a leg, humans survive without the spleen, rats go on living their rat-lives even without the cerebrum (Hampe, 2006a: 210–11). Concisely, with regards both to evolutionary and individual history as well as to conceptual structure, the organic is more plastic than assumed by the organism analogy in organicistic social ontologies. Therefore, the third conception of social pathology not only becomes useless in critical practice and compresses society into an unconvincingly static structure; it also misinterprets the object of the analogy, the organism. Even biological organisms are more plastic, transformative and free than the organicistic pathologists’ society, if the underlying ontology is taken seriously. ¹⁴ Hence, thinking of society as something that can fall ill does not commit the social pathologist to endorsing the organicistic conception of the organism.

Finally, one can, even more radically, question whether stabilizing self-maintenance is a convincing ontological principle of organic life at all. In modern philosophical cosmologies, there has been the contrary tendency to emphasize instability, growth and intensity increase. To quote Whitehead ([1929] 1971: 4): ‘The art of persistence is to be dead.’ According to Whitehead, self-maintenance, far from being the characteristic of organisms, is what they ‘trade off’ in exchange for growth. In contrast to inorganic processes which might endure multiple times longer than any biological organism, living beings are characterized by growth: they are processes that grow until they stagnate, fall ill, and, eventually, die.

Social pathology as degeneration of social life: naturalism of growth and stagnation

This brings us to the fourth and last conception, which, as it happens, is defended, among others, by just these metaphysicians of growth and intensity: Nietzsche, Dewey and Whitehead. Dewey, whose social-theoretical works exhibit a rich naturalistic vocabulary of social pathology (Särkelä, 2017b), objects to the organicist conception in his ‘The public and its problems’:

Human associations may be ever so organic in origin and firm in operation, but they develop into societies in a human sense only as their consequences, being known, are esteemed and sought for. Even if ‘society’ were as much an organism as some writers have held, it would not on that account be society. (Dewey, [1927] 1988: 330)

Self-consciously naturalistic yet anti-organicistic, this fourth conception of social pathology seems also to be implied in the current debate. It has, however, not been systematically developed to date. ¹⁸ Yet in certain writings where Honneth and Neuhouser leave the organism analogy in the background, they seem to operate with a vocabulary that could perfectly well get off the ground without presupposing organicism (Honneth, 2007; Neuhouser, 2016). Therefore, these same authors adumbrate an alternative naturalistic conception of social pathology combining the advantages of and avoiding the disadvantages of the second and third views. When they namely switch the perspective from the comparison of society with the biological organism to the description and evaluation of societal processes as ‘social life’, an alternative naturalism for social ontology is vernacularized.

Whereas organicism rests on the conception of the organism as an ideally organized self-maintaining substance and regards this organism as the ontological principle of life, the idea of a distinctively social life, by contrast, is committed to the idea of a life-process operating above and beneath the living body and conceives life as irreducible to the organism. This picture conceptualizes the object of the social pathologists not on the model of the diseases of organisms but, more inclusively, as stagnation or even degeneration of a distinctively social life-process. Social life is pathological when it stagnates, and degenerates to a genus of life below a distinctively social level of life-process. In conceiving the social in terms of social life, it preserves the vitality of the naturalistic vocabulary, but in focusing on the social life-process more generally than on merely ‘society itself’, it rejects modeling the social on the single living being, thus avoiding the problems of the organicistic social ontology.

We claim that this is the most promising of the four conceptions, although it is the least discussed and can be found to be merely implicit in the works of some of the protagonists in the contemporary discourse on social pathology. However, even if the authors in the current debate have to a great extent ignored this path, we acknowledge that its basic ontological commitments are far from being new. Although Hegel is often read as a social organicist, one might argue that, for his social ontology, more important than the theory of the state organism, is his conception of the social as ‘self-conscious’ or ‘sublated’ life (aufgehobenes Leben) (Hegel, [1807] 1977: §§ 178–84). The ‘recognition’ (Anerkennen) that characterizes human sociality presents a kind of ‘life’ that, however, is ‘sublated’ as life. ¹⁹ Also Nietzsche’s ‘life’ of ‘plastic power’, for which history can be of use or disadvantage, is understood as that of a ‘culture’ or a ‘people’ (Nietzsche, 2007: 62), yet not modeled as an organism; nonetheless, Nietzsche holds on to his pathology diagnostic claim that it can suffer from ‘the malady of history’ (p. 120) and ‘degenerate’ (p. 67). In Adorno, again, the ‘damaged life' that Minima Moralia diagnoses, is far from being reducible to the terms of the reproductive dysfunctions of a societal organism (Adorno, [1951] 2005). Finally, the social-philosophical import of Whitehead’s thought is often ignored in both contemporary social ontology and process philosophy, but in more essayistic works surrounding the publication of Process and Reality, such as The Function of Reason ([1929] 1971) and Adventure of Ideas, Whitehead develops an account of the ‘criticism’ and the ‘decay’ of social life ([1933] 1967: Part I).

Also in this conception, there is a cosmology in play that delivers content to the critical concept of social pathology. In the works of some pathologists of social life, it remains implicit, but there are also authors, such as Dewey and Whitehead, who have made considerable efforts to make explicit the cosmology implied in their naturalistic vocabulary of social critique. A crucial point here is that social processes are conceived as living and dying not by force of an analogy to an allegedly unproblematic conception of life and death in organic life. Instead, these pathologists understand social life and organic life as homologous: social life has grown out of organic life, increased in complexity and intensity, evolved into its distinctive form irreducible to organic life, yet remaining a kind of life-process. For this reason, social life can stagnate and degenerate just as literally as organic life. In fact, a pathologist of social life might argue, as Dewey does, that social practices live and die in an even more literal sense than organic processes, as they present a higher degree of intensity, depth and freedom (Dewey, [1934] 2008: Chapter 8). The underlying cosmology then implies a processualized scala naturae, consisting of fields or stages of nature, which is simultaneously and importantly conceived as the natural history of social life (Dewey, [1928] 2008). On this account, one can regard death in organic life as a degeneration into the poorer stage of chemical processuality; when an organism dies, it dissolves into a manifold of chemical processes. As social life in this picture presents the sublation of organic life, it can become pathological in two ways: it can lose its transformative growth and stagnate to a merely organic process or it can fail at reproducing its form and degenerate into mere inorganic processuality.

Whitehead’s and Dewey’s important work of explicating such processual cosmologies, which we only briefly hint at on this occasion, can also help to spell out the ontological commitments of the diagnosis of social life-processes more generally. Against this background, one can appreciate the critical impetus of Adorno’s concepts of the ‘administered world’ (verwaltete Welt) or the ‘socialized society’ (vergesellschaftete Gesellschaft). What is pathological about such social formations is not primarily their dysfunctional character, but, on the contrary, their self-maintaining functioning itself (Adorno, [1953] 2003; [1960] 2003). Social life literally dies, when it merely maintains its form, because it then degenerates into a merely organic form of life. What might still present the form of health for a biological organism can constitute the form of a pathology of social life. On the other hand, this conception can retain some of the critical intention of organicistic diagnoses. Also social life is life in the sense that it needs to maintain its form in order to persist. Social practices and societies, therefore, also on this view, can die if they fail in their reproductive functions. But importantly, to diagnose such malfunctions is not the sole task of the pathologist of social life and it is not based on a rigid substance ontology of the organism.

What is common to these social ontologies of growth and transformation is that they situate social critique within the object of social critique, that is, within social life. There is, on this view, a dialectical relationship between social critique and social stagnation, or between ‘pathology’ in the sense of a ‘science of suffering’ and ‘pathology’ in the sense of an ‘experience of suffering’. Social critique is part and parcel of the social life-process. It can vivify a stagnating social life or disintegrate its organization. Social life is, then, conceived as the form of life that once in a while kills its reproductive ends, it regards its current form as an ‘already dead shell’ (Dewey, 1973: 87). These social pathologists of growth and transformation represent social life as a kind of synthesis of organic and inorganic nature. In contrast to organic reproduction, social processes need to disintegrate in order to integrate. Critique has, in the social, become a medium of life. This naturalism, then, incorporates the Hegelian insight that spiritual life is a life that lives through and maintains itself in death (Hegel, [1807] 1977: § 32), because it survives the death of its ends, and ever vivifies itself once in a while by setting new ends that then reintegrate, re-organize ‘associated life’ as a ‘society’. Therefore, social life is reconstructed by the pathologists of social life as a kind of pulsating processual unity of the organic and the inorganic. Just like any life-process, it needs to be maintained, but, in order to be genuinely social life, it needs to be transformed as well. Thus, in this ontology, social life oscillates between organic reproduction and inorganic disintegration. Social life-processes can fail at both tasks. They can die organically, if they cannot maintain themselves as growing within their form; and they can stagnate socially, if they merely maintain their form.

On this view, the science of social pathology is, then, part and parcel of the phenomenon of social pathology, because social critique can kill reproductive ends and be the societal pathology in disintegrating social life or it can serve to preserve societal values and be the social pathology in blocking transformative practice. The work of the pathologist of social life is, hence, critical in the sense, in which the role of the physician, whose work can both kill and save the patient, is critical.

But as reflecting and controlling this process of social integration and disintegration by diagnosing and curing the arrhythmia, social life becomes what Dewey later describes as a movement of social ‘respiration’: a process of intertwining phases of ‘construction’ and ‘criticism’ (Dewey, [1930] 2008: 125–44), an ‘ongoing process of social reconstruction’ (Dewey, 1973: 80). Social philosophy then aims at reshaping the reproductive and transformative claims of social life by means of self-transformative practice (see Särkelä, 2017a). The diagnosis of social pathologies becomes the practice of criticizing the ways of social life to critically relate back onto itself.

Conclusion

As we have seen, ‘social pathology’ is a central concept for social philosophy, linking social ontology and social criticism. Salient candidates for social pathology are such social evils as reification, alienation, invisibilization, ideological social practices (including ideological recognition), distributive injustice, social inequality, economic exploitation and rationality deficits. Do we gain something by thinking of these social evils as pathologies – do we perhaps see them as wrong because they are pathological? Does the notion of ‘social pathology’ help in demarcating social from moral and political philosophy? And do we presuppose an ‘organicistic’ view of society – and if not, is there some better naturalistic concept involved? The answers depend on what we mean by ‘social pathology’. The four conceptions differ in the answers they give to these three questions.

This article has mapped four conceptions: first, ‘pathology’ is just a convenient label for what is socially criticizable. We do not recommend this usage for anyone willing to take ‘social pathology’ seriously, considering the heavy historical baggage with which the notion comes. If one wants to speak of what is socially criticizable in general terms, one can use terms such as ‘social wrongs’, ‘social evils’ or, obviously, ‘what is socially criticizable’. While this use is compatible with distinguishing social from moral and political philosophy, the notion of ‘social pathology’ is not here taken to be helpful for that demarcation. Rather, it must first find out what is criticizable, and demarcate social from moral and political phenomena – and only then arrive at what ‘social pathologies’ might be. We do not argue here that this is impossible, but merely note that some other uses of ‘social pathology’ will be helpful in those two tasks: by first getting a grip on social pathology, one may then arrive at what is socially wrong, and what the task of social philosophy is, as demarcated from moral and political philosophy. This first approach sees the notion of social pathology as unhelpful in both respects. The first approach also avoids such naturalistic concepts as ‘organism’ or ‘life’ – as it thinks that what we have learnt from, say, critical race theory or gender studies are weighty reasons to drop any such ‘biologicist’ hints.

The second view held that, when the social evils share a structure, they are properly all cases of pathology. A much-discussed view holds that the structure is that of second-order disorder. This view thus presupposes that one first identifies cases of social evils or wrongs, and, only second, studies which of such wrongs or evils fall under the notion of ‘social pathology’ so understood. We briefly outlined and criticized this view: Zurn’s view is in principle compatible with the aim of defining the task of social philosophy with reference to social pathologies – but it seems to have trouble accounting for many of the cases that have been seen to be central to social philosophy in that sense (whereas the less ‘principled’ or ‘structured’ first approach cannot have that problem as it need not rule any cases out). Zurn’s account concerns arguably ‘reflexive’ rather than ‘social’ pathologies, analogously to the difference between reflexive and social freedom. A richer account than Zurn’s would be needed, and providing such a richer account of the aspects of social pathology seems, at least at first, to be a philosophical exercise guided by the already comprehended cases rather than by a unified understanding of what social pathologies are (that is, it proceeds from cases to general understanding); but nothing rules out such a unified understanding emerging from this exercise, and, after that, guiding new critical social philosophy (from general understanding to new cases). Again, the approach is anti-naturalistic, which can be cheered by some, but for others will mean missing a potential benefit.

A third option is to conceive of a social pathology as an ‘illness’ or ‘disease’ that infects a society as a social organism. Here the medical and biological metaphor comes to the fore: this perspective focuses on deviations from the reproductive values or ends of a society. In the wider tradition of social philosophy, we know this use from classical views such as Durkheim’s diagnosis of anomie. This approach invests evaluative authority in the naturalistic vocabulary of pathology diagnosis: society is conceived of as the kind of thing that can fall ill, an ‘organism’. We argued that this is to be avoided for several reasons. Even if it were helpful in defining social wrongs, or the extension of social philosophy, and take on board the idea that social philosophy is naturalistic, it seems to give wrong, implausible answers.

The fourth view considers social pathology not via the model of the illnesses of the organism but in terms of stagnation or even degeneration in the process of social life. It thus preserves the vitality of the naturalistic metaphor by conceiving of society in terms of social life while avoiding the static model of the social organism. This conception is the most promising of the four in using social pathology as a concept in a critical social ontology as it is not ontologically lightweight or lacking critical potential.

So, to sum up: what do we recommend concerning the four conceptions? We have criticized the organicistic view as implausible, and argued that the view starting from the notion of social life is better in comparison. Both of these views promise to put the notion of ‘social pathology’ to use, to understand social wrongs and to understand social philosophy, and both argue that critical social philosophy can be naturalistic. It is just that the social life view does it better than the more implausible organism view.

We also suggest that it is a mistake to think that a naturalistic social philosophy is necessarily uncritical, or blind to, e.g. how race or gender are not biologically determined kinds – they are indeed socially determined, but that does not show that social life as such cannot be understood as a ‘field of nature’, e.g. as ‘second nature’. So unless there are further reasons to reject naturalism, the social life view wins our comparison.

But if someone for other reasons is uncomfortable with naturalism, one may want to take the first or second approach. The second approach sees ‘social pathology’ as a more informative category than the first one, and therefore runs the risk of providing a characterization that does not capture all the central cases of social pathology. Indeed, we criticized Zurn’s version for doing exactly that, and suggested that a richer version would be needed to capture what all central cases of social pathology may share. Or then one can stick to the first approach which does not see the notion of ‘social pathology’ as a very helpful notion at all. But we hope to have shown that would be a premature conclusion.