social philosophy broadly the philosophy of society, including the philosophy of social science (and many of its components, e.g., economics and history), political philosophy, most of what we now think of as ethics, and philosophy of law. But we may distinguish two narrower senses. In one, it is the conceptual theory of society, including the theory of the study of society – the common part of all the philosophical studies mentioned. In the other, it is a normative study, the part of moral philosophy that concerns social action and individual involvement with society in general.
The central job of social philosophy in the first of these narrower senses is to articulate the correct notion or concept of society. This would include formulating a suitable definition of ‘society’; the question is then which concepts are better for which purposes, and how they are related. Thus we may distinguish ‘thin’ and ‘thick’ conceptions of society. The former would identify the least that can be said before we cease talking about society at all – say, a number of people who interact, whose actions affect the behavior of their fellows. Thicker conceptions would then add such things as community rules, goals, customs, and ideals. An important empirical question is whether any interacting groups ever do lack such things and what if anything is common to the rules, etc., that actual societies have.
Descriptive social philosophy will obviously border on, if not merge into, social science itself, e.g. into sociology, social psychology, or economics. And some outlooks in social philosophy will tend to ally with one social science as more distinctively typical than others – e.g., the individualist view looks to economics, the holist to sociology.
A major methodological controversy concerns holism versus individualism. Holism maintains that (at least some) social groups must be studied as units, irreducible to their members: we cannot understand a society merely by understanding the actions and motivations of its members. Individualism denies that societies are ‘organisms,’ and holds that we can understand society only in that way.
Classic German sociologists (e.g., Weber) distinguished between Gesellschaft, whose paradigm is the voluntary association, such as a chess club, whose activities are the coordinated actions of a number of people who intentionally join that group in order to pursue the purposes that identify it; and Gemeinschaft, whose members find their identities in that group. Thus, the French are not a group whose members teamed up with like-minded people to form French society. They were French before they had separate individual purposes. The holist views society as essentially a Gemeinschaft. Individualists agree that there are such groupings but deny that they require a separate kind of irreducibly collective explanation: to understand the French we must understand how typical French individuals behave – compared, say, with the Germans, and so on. The methods of Western economics typify the analytical tendencies of methodological individualism, showing how we can understand large-scale economic phenomena in terms of the rational actions of particular economic agents. (Cf. Adam Smith’s invisible hand thesis: each economic agent seeks only his own good, yet the result is the macrophenomenal good of the whole.) Another pervasive issue concerns the role of intentional characterizations and explanations in these fields. Ordinary people explain behavior by reference to its purposes, and they formulate these in terms that rely on public rules of language and doubtless many other rules. To understand society, we must hook onto the selfunderstanding of the people in that society (this view is termed Verstehen). Recent work in philosophy of science raises the question whether intentional concepts can really be fundamental in explaining anything, and whether we must ultimately conceive people as in some sense material systems, e.g. as computer-like. Major questions for the program of replicating human intelligence in data-processing terms (cf. artificial intelligence) are raised by the symbolic aspects of interaction. Additionally, we should note the emergence of sociobiology as a potent source of explanations of social phenomena. Normative social philosophy, in turn, tends inevitably to merge into either politics or ethics, especially the part of ethics dealing with how people ought to treat others, especially in large groups, in relation to social institutions or social structures. This contrasts with ethics in the sense concerned with how individual people may attain the good life for themselves. All such theories allot major importance to social relations; but if one’s theory leaves the individual wide freedom of choice, then a theory of individually chosen goods will still have a distinctive subject matter. The normative involvements of social philosophy have paralleled the foregoing in important ways. Individualists have held that the good of a society must be analyzed in terms of the goods of its individual members. Of special importance has been the view that society must respect individual rights, blocking certain actions alleged to promote social good as a whole. Organicist philosophers such as Hegel hold that it is the other way around: the state or nation is higher than the individual, who is rightly subordinated to it, and individuals have fundamental duties toward the groups of which they are members. Outrightly fascist versions of such views are unpopular today, but more benign versions continue in modified form, notably by communitarians. Socialism and especially communism, though focused originally on economic aspects of society, have characteristically been identified with the organicist outlook.
Their extreme opposite is to be found in the libertarians, who hold that the right to individual liberty is fundamental in society, and that no institutions may override that right. Libertarians hold that society ought to be treated strictly as an association, a Gesellschaft, even though they might not deny that it is ontogenetically Gemeinschaft. They might agree that religious groups, e.g., cannot be wholly understood as separate individuals. Nevertheless, the libertarian holds that religious and cultural practices may not be interfered with or even supported by society. Libertarians are strong supporters of free-market economic methods, and opponents of any sort of state intervention into the affairs of individuals. Social Darwinism, advocating the ‘survival of the socially fittest,’ has sometimes been associated with the libertarian view.
Insofar as there is any kind of standard view on these matters, it combines elements of both individualism and holism. Typical social philosophers today accept that society has duties, not voluntary for individual members, to support education, health, and some degree of welfare for all. But they also agree that individual rights are to be respected, especially civil rights, such as freedom of speech and religion. How to combine these two apparently disparate sets of ideas into a coherent whole is the problem. (John Rawls’s celebrated Theory of Justice, 1971, is a contemporary classic that attempts to do just that.)
See also ETHICS, METHODOLOGICAL HOL- ISM , PHILOSOPHY OF THE SOCIAL SCIENCES , POLITICAL PHILOSOPH. J.Na.