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DIAGNOSING SOCIAL PATHOLOGY

Can a human society suffer from illness like a living thing? And if so,
how does such a malaise manifest itself? In this thought-provoking
book, Frederick Neuhouser explains and defends the idea of social
pathology, demonstrating what it means to describe societies as “ill,”
or “sick,” and why we are so often drawn to conceiving of social
problems as ailments or maladies. He shows how Rousseau, Hegel,
Marx, and Durkheim – four key philosophers who are seldom taken
to ­constitute a “tradition” – deploy the idea of social pathology in
comparable ways, and then explores the connections between societal
illnesses and the phenomena those thinkers made famous: ­alienation,
anomie, ideology, and social dysfunction. His book is a rich and
compelling illumination of both the idea of social disease and the
importance it has had, and continues to have, for philosophical views
of society.

Fr eder ick Neu houser is Professor of Philosophy at Barnard


College, Columbia University, and Permanent Fellow at the Center
for Humanities and Social Change in Berlin. His books include
Fichte’s Theory of Subjectivity (Cambridge University Press, 1990),
Foundations of Hegel’s Social Theory (2000), Rousseau’s Theodicy of
Self-Love (2008), and Rousseau’s Critique of Inequality (Cambridge
University Press, 2014).

Published online by Cambridge University Press


Published online by Cambridge University Press
DI AG NO S I NG S O C I A L
PAT HOL O G Y
Rousseau, Hegel, Marx, and Durkheim

FR EDER ICK N EU HOUSER


Barnard College, Columbia University

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It furthers the University’s mission by disseminating knowledge in the pursuit of
education, learning, and research at the highest international levels of excellence.

www.cambridge.org
Information on this title: www.cambridge.org/9781009235037
doi: 10.1017/9781009235020
© Frederick Neuhouser 2023
This publication is in copyright. Subject to statutory exception
and to the provisions of relevant collective licensing agreements,
no reproduction of any part may take place without the written
permission of Cambridge University Press.
First published 2023
Printed in the United Kingdom by TJ Books Limited, Padstow, Cornwall
A catalogue record for this publication is available from the British Library.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
names: Neuhouser, Frederick, author.
title: Diagnosing social pathology : Rousseau, Hegel, Marx,
and Durkheim / Frederick Neuhouser.
description: 1 Edition. | New York, ny : Cambridge University Press, 2022. |
Includes bibliographical references and index.
identifiers: lccn 2022009563 | isbn 9781009235037 (hardback) |
isbn 9781009235020 (ebook)
subjects: lcsh: Social problems. | Sociology – Philosophy.
classification: lcc hn18 .n478 2022 | ddc 361–dc23/eng/20220224
lc record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2022009563
isbn 978-1-009-23503-7 Hardback
Cambridge University Press has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of
URLs for external or third-party internet websites referred to in this publication
and does not guarantee that any content on such websites is, or will remain,
accurate or appropriate.

Published online by Cambridge University Press


Für Gene, das Gute in leiblicher und geistiger Gestalt

Published online by Cambridge University Press


Published online by Cambridge University Press
Contents

Preface page ix
Note on Citations xx

1 Can Societies Be Ill? 1


2 Society as Organism? 29
3 Marx: Pathologies of Capitalist Society 45
4 Marx: Labor in Spiritual Life and Social Pathology 72
5 Plato: Human Society as Organism 92
6 Rousseau: Human Society as Artificial 105
7 Durkheim’s Predecessors: Comte and Spencer 139
8 Durkheim: Functionalism 156
9 Durkheim: Solidarity, Moral Facts, and Social
Pathology 192
10 Durkheim: A Science of Morality 229
11 Hegelian Social Ontology I: Objective Spirit 255
12 Hegelian Social Ontology II: The Living Good 281
13 Hegelian Social Pathology 312
14 Conclusion: On Social Ontology 345

Bibliography 351
Index 360

vii

Published online by Cambridge University Press


Published online by Cambridge University Press
Preface

When I began this project ten years ago, my plan was straightforward –
and, as I now see, naive: I wanted to demonstrate the indispensability of the
concept of social pathology for normative social philosophy and, by draw-
ing mostly on resources from European thinkers from Rousseau onward,
to articulate more precisely than had been done before how illness in the
domain of the social ought to be conceived. My initial strategy for defend-
ing this concept was to consult contemporary philosophy of biology and
medicine with the aim of finding a generally accepted account of sickness
and health in biological organisms that would serve as the basis for arguing
that analogous features of social life justified applying the concepts of health
and illness to social phenomena. Two discoveries led me to revise my plan.
The first was that contemporary philosophy of biology and medicine, no
less discordant than other fields of philosophy, offered no uncontroversial
account of health or illness that I could simply avail myself of in defending
the idea of pathology in the social domain. Moreover, the controversies only
increased when turning from purely physiological conceptions of health,
applicable to nonhuman organisms, to conceptions of health appropriate
to human beings. It is not only that in the human realm a new category
appears – that of mental health – but also, and more interestingly, that, in
contrast to the case of veterinary medicine, no full account of bodily health
for humans can be given that abstracts from what I call (and explain below)
the “spiritual” aspects of human beings. Although the account of social
pathology I provide in this book is informed by ideas deriving from the
philosophy of biology and medicine, I have had to decide for myself which
aspects of the views on offer there belong to the best account of illness in
human beings (and other animals) and shed the most light on what illness
in the social domain might consist in.
The second discovery that led me to change my plan for this book was that,
as I soon found when presenting my ideas in academic contexts – among
contemporary philosophers, political theorists, and sociologists – resistance
ix

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x Preface
to the concept of social pathology is so entrenched that framing my task
as an outright defense of that concept generated premature dismissals of
my claims and unfruitful disputes that tended to reenact long-familiar aca-
demic debates rather than shed light on the phenomena that interested
me. At the same time, when I described my project to nonacademics, I
was greeted with a degree of enthusiasm I had never before experienced
when trying to explain to “laypeople” what I wrote about as a philoso-
pher. In earlier years my attempts to say something, when asked, about
the self-positing subject, moral autonomy, or the conditions under which
the will of a citizenry could be considered “general” and therefore binding
for all had elicited mostly polite responses and not so lightly veiled (but
understandable) attempts to change the topic of conversation. Suddenly,
I discovered, nonacademics had some sense of what I was talking about
and were eager to volunteer their own examples of ways in which society
appeared to be ill. (Not surprisingly, this tendency increased dramatically
in the United States after 2016, even if the political events that evoked this
response merely made it no longer possible to ignore pathological condi-
tions that had been developing for decades. Now the question is no longer
whether that society is sick but whether it – especially its version of liberal
democracy – is dying.) What, I asked myself, did the responses of my fel-
low citizens, if not my fellow academics, say about the relevance of the
concept of social illness?
These experiences changed my conception of my project. I decided to
start from a fact about the discourse of social pathology that seems incon-
trovertible: beginning at least with Plato there appears to be an irresistible
propensity among philosophers, social theorists, cultural critics, and jour-
nalists of very different outlooks – and not only in the West – to conceive
of social problems and their solutions in terms of the vocabulary of ill-
ness, health, and cure. From Plato’s fevered polis (Plato 1992: 369–74e)
to Shakespeare’s “something … rotten in the state of Denmark”1 to
Machiavelli’s “hectic fevers” (or wasting disease) of the state2 to Hobbes’s
infirmities of “the body politic” (boils, scabs, bulimia, rabies, epilepsy,
parasitic worms3) to Frank Lloyd Wright’s description of “landlordism”
as a social disease (Wright and Pfeiffer 2008: 418), thinkers of various
epochs seem irrepressibly drawn to “illness as metaphor” in the domain
of social philosophy (Sontag 1978: 74, 77, 78). Moreover, despite the fact

1 Shakespeare, Hamlet, Act I, scene iv.


2 Machiavelli [1532] 1950: 11.
3 Hobbes [1651] 1994: ch. xxix.

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Preface xi
that conceptions of physiological illness have varied greatly over the cen-
turies, the tendency to think of social problems on the model of illness
has remained strikingly resilient.4 My project, then, is an attempt to take
seriously the indisputably widespread impulse to think of societies as sus-
ceptible to falling ill by trying to understand the powerful pull it exerts on
our imagination and to assess what value the concept of social pathology
might have, even when we reject the idea that human societies are simply
biological organisms writ large.
With this starting point in view, a slightly different question came into
focus: What does the irresistible urge to think in terms of illness when
thinking about social problems say about the nature of human society?
Or, posed in “ontological” terms: What kind of thing must human society
be if it is vulnerable to falling ill? This book, then, is about the connec-
tion between social ontology5 and the discourse of social pathology, and
its central claim is that we can learn something important about human
social life by taking seriously past and present attempts to understand and
criticize society using a vocabulary borrowed from medicine. Establishing
this constitutes a limited defense of the concept of social pathology by
showing that theorists who employ that concept have good reasons for
turning to the language of illness; that their doing so is motivated not
by a priori philosophical commitments but by empirical inquiry into the
real phenomena of social life; and that conceiving of social problems as
pathologies enables one to discover and think productively about aspects
of social life that cannot be grasped by discourses confined to the catego-
ries of legitimacy, justice, or moral rightness, as typically (and narrowly)
construed by most Anglo-American political philosophy.
As a result of these revisions of my project, its central argument is no
longer that critical social philosophy must employ the language of social
pathology but, more modestly, that there are good reasons for doing so and
that an outright dismissal of that theoretical framework risks losing sight
of important social phenomena that purely moral or political approaches
to social life cannot capture. It is true that many of the critical concepts of

4 The metaphor of social illness is so widespread that one can find it in nearly every issue of a serious
newspaper or treatise devoted to social issues. Two examples are Krugman (2019) and Mau (2019),
which analyzes the problems of contemporary eastern Germany using the analogy of a bone fracture.
5 A caveat: social ontology as pursued here is a less abstract project than many contemporary analytic
philosophers take it to be, e.g., Gilbert (1989), Tuomela (2013), and Searle (1995). A good discussion
of analytical social ontology can be found in Stahl 2013: ch. 4. My project is continuous with but still
broader than the accounts of social reality offered by Searle (1995 and 2010) and Descombes (2014).
Anthony Giddens uses the term in roughly the sense in which I use it (Giddens 1984: xx).

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xii Preface
social theory that we should continue to take seriously have been, or can
be, formulated without explicit reference to pathology. Among them are
alienation, ideology, reification, colonization of the life-world (Habermas
1987: 232; Hedrick 2018: ch. 5), and the tendency of capitalism to generate
recurring crises. And yet even when the language of pathology is absent,
most of these critiques have been formulated within the framework of a
conception of social reality that places the idea of life at its core. It is note-
worthy that almost every thinker who can be read as a theorist of social
pathology – including Hegel, Marx, Nietzsche, Freud, Durkheim, Dewey,
and Habermas – understands social reality as social life, where the term
“life” is just as important as “social.” That social reality is social life is the
main ontological claim I investigate here.
No doubt this book has many defects, but one is especially worthy of men-
tion upfront: the accounts of social pathology reconstructed here take the
nation-state as the basic unit of social analysis despite the increasingly glo-
balized nature of social life nearly everywhere. Globalization does not mean
that the nation-state has become irrelevant to social theory and c­ ritique –
numerous decisions of import are still made at that level – but it does mean
that many determinants of social life within nation-states are inseparable
from processes and developments that extend far beyond their national
borders. To varying degrees, Hegel, Marx, and Durkheim are aware of the
increasingly international character of modern life, but their diagnoses of
social pathology, and my reconstructions of them, do not for the most part
reflect this awareness. (Such awareness does appear, among other places, in
Hegel’s allusions to the “necessity” – internal to civil ­society – of colonial
expansion [PhR: §248], and Marx, more than any thinker covered here,
provides resources for considering how, under capitalism, international
social life might exhibit pathologies not visible from a merely national per-
spective.) Contemporary critical theorists urgently need to think further
about whether – and if so, how – classical accounts of social pathology can
be expanded to take account of global interdependence. At the very least,
there are surely distinct pathologies that afflict formerly colonized societies
that do not show up if one focuses only on states in Western Europe and
North America. Even more important, the social dynamics between the
global North and South, or between former colonizers and colonized, can
be expected to exhibit patterns of “functioning” not visible from a merely
national perspective. The question is: Is the category of pathology useful
for understanding these dynamics? Is dysfunction a relevant concept, given
that the “healthy” functioning of former colonizing nations relies on ethi-
cally objectionable relations to their counterparts? Or are the interactions

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Preface xiii
between these two poles (and among the nations that somehow lie between
them) so asymmetric and oppressive that thinking of them as composing
a single “organism” that might or might not function well obscures rather
than illuminates our contemporary condition? (Is there, even in biology,
an example of an organism whose functioning depends so thoroughly on
“higher” organs living at the expense of the “lower”?) These are important
questions that I have not addressed here.

Although the chapters of this book are devoted mostly to specific think-
ers, its structure is unusual and calls for explanation. Most obviously, I
do not discuss the figures I treat in chronological order. Instead, chapters
are arranged conceptually, beginning with less complex conceptions of
social pathology and social ontology and proceeding to increasingly richer
accounts of what human societies are and of the illnesses to which they
are susceptible. As readers will quickly discover, this scheme yields only
a loose form of organization. For the most part, I do not offer a develop-
mental argument that proceeds by revealing defects in the theories covered
in earlier chapters and showing them to be remedied by the theories that
come after them. I in no way want to suggest that the specific pathologies
discussed in earlier chapters are less deserving of our attention than those
examined later. Still, the general account of society and social pathology
found in the final three chapters is more sophisticated and theoretically
adequate than those treated earlier. In this sense, then, Hegel is the hero of
this book, although I do not take this to mean that Hegelians have noth-
ing to learn from Marx, for example, the first figure discussed in detail.
Perhaps I am trying to say that much of what we can learn from Marx can
be integrated into Hegel’s framework, whereas important possibilities for
pathology rendered visible by Hegel would go undetected if we restricted
ourselves to Marx’s understanding of (capitalist) society. It follows that my
approach here, like that of my past work, is more syncretic and concilia-
tory than many readers find appropriate. I will not defend this approach
beyond saying that, as with most ways of doing things, it has its advantages
and disadvantages. I hope that some of those advantages come across to
readers of this book despite its less than perfect structure.
The initial two chapters of this book are introductory. The first
explores the concept of social pathology in general, distinguishing five
interpretations of that idea from the conception of social illness I adopt
here. It also discusses various advantages and disadvantages of the con-
cept of social pathology, especially the circumstance that diagnosing
a society as ill allows one to thematize defects in social life that the

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xiv Preface
narrower category of injustice cannot capture. Chapter 2 investigates
the ways in which theories of social pathology do and do not rely on a
picture of human societies as akin to biological organisms and argues
for a limited version of that analogy.
In Chapters 3 and 4, after a brief survey of conceptions of social pathol-
ogy that can be found in Marx, I focus on those bound up with his account
in Capital of the formula for the circulation of capital, which distinguishes
money that is capital from money that is merely money (and, so, provides a
definition of capitalism) in terms of the function money plays in each case.
Marx’s biological language makes it plausible to interpret the dysfunctions of
capitalism he points to here as social pathologies. One of his contributions to
theories of social pathology is to bring to light an ambiguity in the concepts
“functional” and “dysfunctional”: the same phenomenon that appears func-
tional from the perspective of what capital requires to function can appear
dysfunctional from a broader perspective that takes into account the good
of capitalism’s participants. Exploring this point requires us to introduce the
idea of a distinctively spiritual aspect of human existence, an idea that will
accompany us throughout this book. Indeed, the chapters’ main thesis is
that Marx regards social life as spiritual in the same sense I attribute later to
Hegel’s social theory, namely, as informed by the aspiration of social mem-
bers to unite in their social activity the ends of life with those of freedom.
Related to this is the claim that capitalism’s failure to allow for the unity of
life and freedom constitutes its principal defect for Marx and the core of the
most important conception of social pathology I ascribe to him. Finally, I
argue that Marx’s conception of human society leaves out certain elements of
the spiritual aspect of social life that theories explored in later chapters enable
us to incorporate into a more adequate social ontology.
Chapters 5 and 6 focus on Plato and Rousseau in order to explore the
ontological thesis that thinking of societies as functionally organized systems
that are artificial, or humanmade, is crucial to understanding how theories
of social pathology can ascribe nonarbitrary standards of healthy func-
tioning to social institutions. The first of these points is set out in Plato’s
Republic, and it is appropriated by many later social philosophers, includ-
ing Hegel, Comte, Spencer, and Durkheim. Rousseau is the first modern
philosopher to elaborate the second point in a form that is promising for
contemporary social thought. The most important sense in which social
institutions are made by us is expressed in Rousseau’s claim that institu-
tions are grounded in conventions. The upshot of this claim is that a kind of
self-consciousness, or subjectivity, is intrinsic to social life, namely, a col-
lective acceptance of the authority of the rules governing social institutions,

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Preface xv
which, in the most fundamental of these, includes a shared conception
of the good that explains their “point,” part of which consists in (some
version of) the freedom of social members. Because acting in accordance
with such a conception is constitutive of the activity in which institutional
life consists, the functions of institutions – including a conception of their
healthy functioning – are accessible, if imperfectly, to the agents on whose
activity those functions depend.
Chapter 7 briefly treats two social philosophers who directly influenced
Durkheim: Auguste Comte and Herbert Spencer. Although Durkheim’s
position is more sophisticated and compelling than his predecessors’, exam-
ining their theories serves to introduce several themes that play a key role
in his social philosophy. Looking at his predecessors’ use of the society–
organism analogy, their versions of functional explanation and functional
analysis, and their conceptions of what a scientific sociology must be like
will help us to understand not only the content of Durkheim’s positions
but also some of the arguments – formulated in conversation with Comte
and Spencer – behind his claims. This chapter distinguishes three types
of functional explanation employed by Comte that shape the discussion
of Durkheim’s method in the following chapter, especially with regard to
what I call functional analysis. Perhaps most important, the chapter argues
that Comte and Spencer rely too heavily on the society–organism analogy,
leading to an overly biologistic understanding of the types of normative
critique available to social pathologists.
Chapter 8, the first of three devoted to Durkheim, examines his ver-
sion of functionalism in social theory. I reconstruct his position with an
eye to defending it as far as possible and to determining which aspects of
it are worth retaining for a contemporary understanding of social pathol-
ogy, including, most fundamentally, the functionally organized character
of human societies. Focusing on his claims regarding the moral function of
the division of labor, I examine the tortuous epistemological issues bound
up with his ascriptions of functions to specific features of society, includ-
ing the relation between functional explanation and functional analysis.
I argue that the method underlying his functional analysis is best under-
stood as a complex form of holism whose claims depend less on single facts
and individual arguments than on the plausibility of the whole picture of
society that emerges from a variety of mutually reinforcing arguments,
empirical facts, interpretive suggestions, and analogies. In this respect
Durkheim’s method for ascribing functions to social phenomena bears
similarities to other interpretive enterprises, from the reading of texts to
(even) the construction of theories in the natural sciences.

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781009235020.001 Published online by Cambridge University Press


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