Social Wrongs and Social Pathologies

This book provides a thorough analysis of the notion of social wrong and the idea of social pathology. It addresses questions such as: What does it mean for something to be socially wrong? Why do social philosophers keep “diagnosing” wrongs as “social pathologies”? And is something a pathology because it is wrong, or is it rather a wrong because it is pathological? By constructing an analytical framework of social wrongs and developing the idea of wrongness-with, the book seeks to support critical social thought. While taking societal and structural injustices seriously as paradigm cases of social wrongs, it also offers a comprehensive elaboration of social pathologies as social wrongs. It provides a map of four conceptions of social pathology and contends that only one of them, organicism, must be completely rejected, while the other views may contribute to a critical understanding of social reality. It further elaborates a “natural-historical” view according to which social pathologies as well as their diagnosis and cure are part and parcel of social life. It tests the usefulness of this conception by examining diagnoses of contemporary capitalism in terms of metabolic rift, economic compulsion, and capitalist cannibalization. These diagnoses exemplify three types of pathologies of social life: pathologies of reproduction, pathologies of transformation, and pathologies of mediating the reproductive and transformative pressures of social life.