Social Wrongs and Social Pathologies

This book provides a thorough analysis of the notion of social wrongs. It develops a framework of social wrongs, which should help advance critical social philosophy. It first examines societal and structural injustices as paradigm cases of social wrongs. Then it turns to a comprehensive elaboration of social pathologies as social wrongs. It introduces the contemporary conversation about social pathologies by critically reconstructing Axel Honneth’s view of social philosophy as a diagnosis of social pathologies. It then provides a map of four conceptions of social pathology and contends that only one of them, organicism, is vulnerable to standard rejections of medicalization or biologization, while the other views may, in various ways, contribute to a critical understanding of social reality. The book further elaborates a 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 of social pathology, and the framework of social wrongs, by examining diagnoses of contemporary capitalism in terms of metabolic rift, economic mute 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 requirements of social life.