An Ontological Account of Social Patholo

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CHAPTER 5
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An Ontological Account of Social Pathology
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Michael J. Thompson
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0 1 Introduction
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1 The idea that a society can be sick, can suffer as a biological organism, is
2 one that goes back to antiquity. As metaphor, it has been used in litera-
3 ture from Sophocles to Camus to indicate the idea of cultural and moral
4 degeneracy. In Book II of Plato’s Republic, Socrates invokes the image of
two kinds of city: one characterised by justice and the other by injustice.
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6 After describing the outline for what he deems to be a just city, one where
7 each member of the city has what they need to enjoy the pleasures of a
8 simple life rooted in sufficiency and mutual cooperation, Glaukon casti-
gates Socrates’ plan as a ‘city of pigs’ before asking about the pleasures of
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10 life that the city ought to provide. Glaukon insists on the idea that the city
11 should provide comfortable couches, fine foods and delicacies, elegant
12 tables and tapestries, relishes, cakes, incense, myrrh and girls. Pleasure
13 should be the defining trait of the good city. Socrates shows how this
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14 ‘inflamed’ or ‘feverish’ (ϕλεγµαίνoυσαν) city differs from his ‘healthy’
M. J. Thompson (B)
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Department of Political Science, William Paterson University,

Wayne, NJ, USA
e-mail: thompsonmi@wpunj.edu
© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature 1

Switzerland AG 2021
N. Harris (ed.), Pathology Diagnosis and Social Research,
Political Philosophy and Public Purpose,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-70582-4_5
492555_1_En_5_Chapter TYPESET DISK LE CP Disp.:11/3/2021 02:19PM Pages: 27 Layout: Pal-HusSci-A5

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2 M. J. THOMPSON
15 city or, as he puts it, the city that is ‘agreeable with truth’ (¢ληθινή),
16 where justice is constitutive of the relations, practices and goods of the
17 community well-ordered towards the Good. Whereas the latter is char-
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18 acterised by relations of reciprocity and sufficiency, the ‘feverish’ city is
19 defined by personal gain, by the consumption of surplus and by the instru-
20 mental use of others for one’s own pleasure and benefit. The feverish city,
21 Socrates finally tells Glaukon, leads to endless want and, in time, to war
(Plato, Republic 371b ff).
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22
23 In a similar vein, Erich Fromm argues that the affluent, technologically

24 advanced economies of the twentieth century also suffer from systemic
25 pathologies from suicide, alcoholism and war that can only be understood
26 through developing an idea he calls a ‘socially patterned defect’. Fromm’s
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27 approach to social pathology is similar to the insights of Plato insofar as he
28 sees that the general patterns of objective social conditions and the forms
29 and functions of social relations that any society manifests are determi-
30 native of the relative health of pathology of the individual. Fromm asks
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31 whether a society can be ‘sick’ in the way that individuals can suffer from
32 pathologies. But this is more than a mere medical analogy or metaphor.
33 Fromm begins from a similar place to that of Plato and Marx before him:
34 with the implicit thesis that it is the structures and dynamics of the social
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35 reality that one inhabits that fundamentally shapes the subject. One of
36 the core phylogenetic features of the species, for Fromm, was our essen-
37 tial capacity for relatedness with others—a relatedness that is shaped by
38 the organisational imperatives that pattern the social world.
But even more, there seems to be a more complex and more unex-
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39
40 plored thesis lurking behind these approaches. Stated most succinctly,

41 there is a sense that certain rational forms of social reality need to
42 be distinguished from those that are irrational and, so, pathological.
43 Although Plato was able to get around the thorny nature of this problem
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44 by collapsing this rational form of social reality into a static concept of

45 nature, Fromm takes a more Marxian position by arguing that there are
46 natural features (namely psychic drives) that each member of the species
47 possesses that are shaped and formed by social conditions—shaped and
formed in ways that either maximise self-determined agency and mutual,
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49 empathic relatedness with others, or negate that kind of individual and

50 group-agency and subjectivity. But in both cases, the position is that there
51 are forms of sociality that are more rational and hence less pathological
52 than others. This position is one that I see to be under-developed in much
53 critical social theory, not to mention political philosophy.

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5 AN ONTOLOGICAL ACCOUNT OF SOCIAL PATHOLOGY 3
54 The approach to social pathology I would like to develop here has

55 its roots in the ideas of both Plato and Fromm. Put briefly, it is my
56 contention that social pathology diagnosis must focus on the ways that
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57 our relational lives with one another are shaped and structured; it must
58 centre on the kinds of practices and norms that are constitutive of such
59 relational structures as well as the kinds of emotional and psychic states
60 that they produce. Pathological forms of sociality are dialectically linked
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61 to pathological forms of self, and in this sense, the question of social
62 pathology raises questions that confront in uncomfortable ways the trends
63 of much of contemporary social and political theory, not to mention
64 ethical and moral philosophy. We must be able to critique our social forms
65 not merely on the basis of their intersubjective norms, but as a totality:
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66 as a comprehensive synthetic whole of relations, practices, norms, institu-
67 tions and purposes. I will suggest that the proper means to achieve such an
68 approach to social pathology diagnosis will be via a critical social ontology
69 that is able to grasp the social totality as a distinct object of critical cogni-
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70 tion and to be able to articulate value premises that can help us overcome
71 such pathologies and begin grounding a modern form of ethical life that
72 allows for the developmental self-determination of its members.
73 Contemporary critical theory has been almost exclusively concerned
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74 with an approach to social pathology as a distortion of intersubjec-

75 tive forms of practice. Generally construed, this has meant looking at
76 social pathologies as defects or failures of social rationality where what
77 is ‘social’ is consonant with some form of social action. Social pathologies
are those that inhibit or distort our rational capacities to reflect on the
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79 actual practices that are constitutive of our social world. These ‘second-
80 order’ pathologies, as Christopher Zurn (2011) and others refer to them,
81 are therefore viewed as cognitive and motivational disconnects from the
82 world that block critical relation to it and its effects. This essentially sees
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83 our pathologies in terms of the reflexive operations of our sociality, as

84 ‘constitutive disconnects between first-order contents and second-order
85 reflexive comprehension of those contents, where those disconnects are
86 pervasive and socially caused’ (Zurn, 2011: 345–346).1 In this sense,
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1 For an insightful and important critique of Zurn’s position, see Laitinen (2015).
Laitinen suggests that a more satisfying approach to social pathology can be found in
the exploration of the social reality rather than the second-order phenomena that Zurn
describes. I will take this approach here toward a social-ontological account of social
pathology, but in a way different from Laitinen.

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87 social pathology denotes the faulty processes of reason that emerge in

88 our cognitive and intersubjective domain as processes of reflexivity; Zurn
89 does not see pathologies as ontological in any genuine sense, but rather as
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90 restricted to the domain of social action and cognition, namely as defects
91 in reflexivity. Any time forms of social reflexivity are repressed, we find a
92 social pathology. It does not refer to the actual social substance as patho-
93 logical, since these approaches reduce the social to our sociality: i.e., to
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94 the structural relations and the ends and purposes and social artefacts that
95 govern the logics of our sociality. Whether it is communication, discourse,
96 recognition or whatever, the basic thesis is that any blockages or distor-
97 tions of what are considered these fundamental or basic forms of social
98 action result in pathologies of society and of self.
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99 For contemporary critical theorists, social pathologies are defects
100 in forms of social action and rationality that disables our ability to
101 obtain critical relation to our social world. Overwhelmingly, this refers
102 to disruptions in intersubjective patterns of social action rather than
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103 directly to pathologies in our objective social conditions. But not entirely.
104 Axel Honneth (2011) proposes that social pathologies be construed as
105 embodied in social institutions. But Honneth then falls back into a
106 neo-Idealist position by understanding rational institutions as essentially
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107 reflexive and those that fail this reflexivity as pathological. The problem
108 now becomes again reduced to reflexivity, to the pragmatic forms of social
109 action alone, not to the deeper structures that give shape and function to
110 the social reality itself.2 This again rests on the problematic thesis that
a social pathology is a second-order phenomenon: that it consists in the
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112 inability of members of a community with supposedly rational institutions

113 and norms to properly enact or be socialised into them. How can radical
114 critique really be enacted if we see that existing world of modernity, as
115 Honneth construes it, as largely already rational? The answer is that the
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116 problem lies with our own inability to properly absorb the normative core
117 of modern social institutions.3
2 For an insightful critique of Honneth’s position, see Freyenhagen (2015). Also see
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the more comprehensive critique of these approaches by Neal Harris (2019).

3 Jörg Schaub points out this weakness in Honneth’s theory of social pathology, specif-
ically that this is a problem for a more radical and transformative approach to critique:
‘Social pathologies are presented as aberrations related to relationships of individual
freedom, whereas social misdevelopments denote aberrations of social freedom. Both forms
of aberrations are characterised as socially caused misunderstandings of the norms that are
already underlying existing, reproductively relevant social practices, which, in turn, lead to

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118 But this neo-Idealist and pragmatist position misses what thinkers like
119 Marx saw as central: namely that social pathologies are to be under-
120 stood as the structures ways that our social reality has been constructed;
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121 that the ways our social relations are shaped as well as the collective
122 goals and purposes towards which our institutions are oriented and the
123 collective-intentional rule-sets that are constitutive of these relations and
124 purposes, are the domain where social pathology exists. Power—specifi-
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125 cally the power to shape and transform our social relations, processes and
126 purposes—is missing from the pragmatic-Idealist account that Honneth
127 endorses. I will suggest here that social pathology is a feature of our social
128 ontology, a matter of how our world is formed institutionally as well as
129 normatively. This is resonant with Marx’s diagnosis of social pathology in
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130 the Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts which is rooted in the ways
131 that labour has been structured and the ways it deforms the relational
132 capacities and structures of the development of the person, and so on.
133 The key problem with emphasising pragmatic and normative modes as
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134 the locus of social pathology is that it does nothing to address the ways
135 that the ontic forms of social reality into which we are socialised have
136 the capacity to reify consciousness and naturalise or at least distort our
137 self-conceptions and the possibility of a more rational way of organising
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138 our collective lives together as well as the social artefacts that we should
139 consider worthy of our normative allegiance.
140 Neo-Idealist approaches to social pathology like those rooted in recog-
141 nition misconstrue the essential issue at hand. For once we restrict
ourselves to cognitive and epistemic defects of the subject, we sidestep
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142
143 the problem of pathologies in the objective conditions and features of

144 our social reality. Defects in consciousness and social action are clearly
145 important, but they alone cannot grant us a satisfying account of social
146 pathology nor lead us to more fruitful normative questions about social
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147 critique and social transformation. Indeed, the key idea seems to me to
148 be that a successful critical theory of society will be one that is able to (i)
149 diagnose the objective structures, processes and ends that give shape to
150 our social reality thereby (ii) granting us a critical theory of judgement
that calls into question such defective social forms while (iii) providing
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151
152 the groundwork for alternative ideals and conceptions of social value
a failure to realise the norms that are underlying them more adequately. For this reason,
the link between both forms of social aberrations, on the one hand, and radical critique and
normative revolution, on the other hand, is severed’ Schaub (2015: 107–130, 113).

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153 that can lead to social transformation. After all, the core question is
154 whether a society as a social form, as a totality, is fulfilling its potential
155 for rationality.4
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156 As I see it, we must see social reality as a totality of structures, norms,
157 practices, processes and ends. We cannot restrict social pathology to
158 pragmatic domains of social action alone if social criticism is to have
159 transformative potency.5 One core reason for this is that pathological
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160 social forms have constitutive power over consciousness thereby imbuing
161 pragmatic forms of action and intersubjective practices with patholog-
162 ical residues. The assumption that recognition, justification or discourse
163 can operate within a pathological social ontology seems to me to be
164 counter-productive. It is also something that Marx saw as essential to
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165 social criticism: to uncover not only defective modes of cognition (such as
166 ideology or false consciousness) but the ontological social structures and
167 processes that produce pathological human states: alienation, exploita-
168 tion and so on. The real question should therefore be: how is a social
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169 pathology a feature of the objective conditions of our collective lives. This,
170 as I will argue here, is the core question that an ontological approach to
171 social pathology will seek to address.
172 This means forging a different framework for understanding and
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173 critiquing social pathology. The approach I sketch and defend here
174 conceives of social pathology as patterned defects in our social ontology:
175 in the ways our congealed collective practices and relations as well as the
176 social purposes that organise these ensembles of practices and relations
are defective in promoting and realising self-determining personhood.
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178 This means conceiving of social reason as the ways that our social rela-
179 tions, processes and purposes are able to realise freedom-enhancing forms
180 of social agency and collective forms of life that engender robust forms
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4 Fabian Freyenhagen (2018) also gestures toward such an approach to ‘macro-social

entities.’
5 Again, I differ here with thinkers such as Honneth in that we must inquire into the
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ways that social power shapes the material and ontological structures of society because
these have constitutive power over the normative structures of consciousness. What this
entails is that the norms and practices of capitalistic life will infiltrate the recognitive and
discursive forms of social action that neo-Idealists see as the vehicle for immanent critique
and social transformation. In essence, they subscribe to a thin interpretation of reification.
See my discussion of this problem of the power of reification over the normative structures
of consciousness (Thompson, 2020a).

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181 of interdependence oriented towards the cultivation of individual self-

182 realisation. This thesis entails that there is a way to understand society
183 itself as an ontological entity, one that has distinctive features that can
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184 be the object of judgement, critique and transformation. It means that
185 there is more to social reality than norms and practices, more than the
186 pragmatic dimension, and that there are rational ways to conceive of our
187 ontogenetic processes of development. The ontology of social facts is a
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188 dense complex of norms and practices that produce specific social facts
189 and social artefacts that have causal power over the contents of our lives.6
190 Critical social ontology sees human essence as rooted in our phylo-
191 genetic capacities for relatedness and for practical intentionality. It also
192 views this social essence as itself historical: that the cooperative and collec-
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193 tive forms of practice change over time and take on different shapes or
194 forms. The underlying idea is that if there is to be an objective account
195 of social reason, it will need to be grounded in this ontology of human
196 sociality, that it will need to emerge in and through these shapes and
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197 forms of sociality and cooperation. This does not mean seeing objective
198 value in some transcendental-metaphysical scheme, but, rather, as a prop-
199 erty governing the relational forms of life and the norms and practices
200 that sustain them as well as the ends and purposes towards which they
are oriented to realise.7 Social reason, on this view, is not to be reduced
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201
202 to intersubjective theories of social action, but must be seen as proper-

203 ties of the ontology of our social reality itself. Again, this is not meant to
204 imply in any sense that there are some ideal forms of sociality from which
we deviate, or some forms that are set by nature, but rather that social
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206 reason be understood in terms of the capacity of any social-ontological

207 scheme to maximise self-determining social agency. This latter term itself
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6 As Frederick Neuhouser (2016: 31–48, 47) has argued, referring to a more materialist
interpretation of Hegel and social pathology: ‘social pathology must be theorised not
simply as false consciousness but, at the same time, as false material practices —social
practices that embody false, or unsatisfying ways of negotiating the opposition between
self-consciousness and life.’
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7 Erich Fromm gives us a sense of what a Marxian approach to social ontology would
look like where the essence of human life is seen in concrete, objective terms rather
than crude ‘materialist’ terms: ‘In our attempt to define the essence of man, we are not
referring to an abstraction arrived at by the way of metaphysical speculations like those of
Heidegger and Sartre. We refer to the real conditions of existence common to man qua
man, so that the essence of each individual is identical with the existence of the species’
(Fromm, 1973: 27).

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208 describes a form of agency and self-consciousness that has in view the
209 essential cooperative inter-relatedness that serves as the framework for all
210 forms of distinctly human life and culture. This social ontology is crit-
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211 ical because it is more than a merely descriptive enterprise, it is also, at
212 the same time, a theory of value, or an evaluative theory enabling us to
213 employ judgement concerning that which makes our social relations either
214 rational or irrational.
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215 Once we grant that there is an ontological framework that makes even
216 our communicative and recognitive capacities possible and gives them
217 shape, we can begin to delve into the deeper structures of social reality
218 and the ways that it is constituted. The key problem in the neo-Idealist
219 shift in critical theory has been the turn towards forms of social action
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220 and pragmatic forms of relations which view them as the core essence of
221 sociality.8 My proposition is that this is a partial and insufficient way to
222 conceptualise the social. My view is that we must understand the social as
223 an ontological category with various types of features and dynamics that
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224 can be discerned as causal on individuals and the site of social pathology
225 diagnosis. But at the same time, the point of a critical social ontology is
226 to articulate ethical and evaluative categories that can address the social
227 schemes that are constitutive of our collective lives—as features of the
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228 optimal forms of cooperative relations that will secure self-realisation and
229 self-determining life forms. This means articulating criteria for diagnosing
230 the extent to which social schemes are rational as opposed to patholog-
231 ical, and for understanding that social reason itself is not merely a matter
of mental states, but of the metaphysical features of the social world as
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233 well.
234 The point here is that properly grasping a social pathology entails
235 thematising the social totality in order to understand the ways that defec-
236 tive social relations operate and pattern other dimensions of social reality.
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237 As I see it, emphasis on second-order pathologies, although important, is

238 not sufficient for social critique nor to grasp a more compelling theory
239 of value requisite for social transformation. This is not a defense of some
240 sort of anachronistic metaphysical or ideal theory. Quite to the contrary,
it is an attempt at granting immanent critique a firmer foundation as
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241
8 Essentially, neo-Idealism is a mode of critical theory that has been dominant since
Habermas’ break with Marxism and the positing of pragmatic modes of social action as
the central framework for establishing social criticism and ethical validity of norms. See
my (2016) The Domestication of Critical Theory.

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242 well as clarify a more critical framework for critical judgement and a crit-
243 ical framework for value and the rationalisation of modern ethical life.
244 Since the expansion of techno-administrative forces in modern society
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245 entails a more pervasive and trenchant form of reification over modern
246 self-consciousness, it is even more essential to provide critique with the
247 immanent power and transformative potential.
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248 2 A Basic Framework
249 for Critical Social Ontology
250 As a matter of prerequisites, it is important to clarify the theoretical frame-
work that forms the basis for the approach I am advocating.9 As I see it,
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251
252 the concept of a critical social ontology is concerned with the various ways
253 that our sociality is enacted according to the constraints imposed by social
254 structures and the governing regimes of power that embed normative
255 and constitutive rules within the collective forms of life that we inhabit.
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256 In order to lay out the basic framework of a critical social ontology,
257 we should begin by stressing the two-fold character of this ontology.
258 It refers to two interrelated aspects of human social reality: first to the
259 innate phylogenetic capacities that human individuals possess, and, second,
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260 the shapes of sociality that are produced by, and which in turn shape
261 and determine, these essential phylogenetic capacities. So, for example,
262 we can say that some essential phylogenetic features such as intention-
263 ality or relatedness which are common to each member of the species,
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264 morph into cooperative and joint forms of action that in turn become
265 congealed into ontological forms of life. These phylogenetic capacities
266 are therefore shaped in different ways by institutions and sustained forms
267 of practices that have their own logic and dynamics—their own ontology,
AQ1 268 as it were. Adding to this these ontological forms have causal powers over
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269 the further development of individuals through socialisation and integra-

270 tion mechanisms thereby mediating the ontogenetic processes of concrete
271 individuals.
272 Any individual’s innate capacity for intentionality and relatedness, for
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273 instance, gives rise to more complex forms of cooperation and joint plan-
274 ning. As these cooperative and joint forms of action become sustained
9 Because of space constraints, what follows here is a mere sketch. I elaborate a more
systematic theory for a critical social ontology in The Specter of Babel: A Reconstruction of
Political Judgment.

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275 practices, collective forms of intentionality, norms and social structures

276 emerge and mechanisms of social integration also shape future cohorts of
277 the community. These collective patterns of cooperation and joint activity
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278 congeal into ontological forms of life; that it is to say, they become
279 responsible for shaping these phylogenetic capacities that are innate, if
280 not inchoate, transforming them into concrete expressions of social being.
281 Hence, the second feature of the basis for any social ontology, the socio-
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282 ontogenetic forms of social reality that have constitutive powers over the
283 integrative and developmental processes of the individual.10
284 Social ontology therefore refers to this complex of social forms that
285 possess definitive shapes, or, to be more precise, specific patterns of
286 norms, practices, collective-intentional rules that produce social struc-
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287 tures (stable and enduring relational patterns), as well as collective ends
288 towards which those patterned relations and practices are oriented, and
289 for which they are organised. In its most basic form, a critical social
290 ontology wants to be able to understand the ways that our social reality
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291 is shaped, in other words, to be able to grasp what relations and purposes
292 our collective forms of life are organised to realise. The reason for this is
293 that these become the determining features of any historically given social
294 scheme. So, we can say that the ontology of any given society’s schools
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295 is fundamentally constituted by certain relations between students and

296 teachers, norms and practices that are constitutive of those specific struc-
297 tural relations, and that those relational structures as well as the attendant
298 constellation of norms and practices are defined by the end of that insti-
tution: to ‘educate’ the youth, in whatever sense that is meant. But any
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300 schooling system itself is embedded in broader contexts of social reality.

301 Hence, understanding how schools are organised is a function of the value
302 or purpose that the broader society places on its function. In societies that
303 depend on subsistence agriculture, the role of education and schools may
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304 be different from an industrial society and a more technologically complex

305 society. The key here is to see that the social totality, or social whole, is
306 the defining framework for grasping the sub-systems or social schemes
307 that it frames.
Relations between people are constituted by certain norms and prac-
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309 tices, and so these relations are not static, they are processual in the sense
310 that they are active, require some degree of socialisation and integration
10 For a more developed discussion, see Thompson (2019).

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311 for the absorption of such norms, and insofar as these relations seek to
312 achieve some kind of end or purpose—they are teleological in some basic
313 sense. These three elements of social ontology are also mutually interde-
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314 pendent on one another in terms of their causal powers. Relations shape
315 social processes including developmental processes, but so too do they
316 affect the ends or purposes of those processes. But the kind of ends that
317 our associations are oriented towards also define the kinds of relations and
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318 processes that are instantiated. It matters that an economic association is
319 oriented towards profit or non-profit purposes since these will also affect
320 the relations of ways work is organised, and so on. A family that has as its
321 purpose the humane development of its children is quite different from
322 one that has paternal power as its directive ideal. The point here is that
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323 the telos of associational structures of relations is not natural but ethical:
324 it is posited by collective norms that organise and enact forms of social
325 reality. But these values that govern collective norms are determined by us,
326 by human rationality, and the question now becomes what kinds of social
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327 reality qualify as rational and which do not, which warrant our rational
328 obligations and which do not.
329 What makes this approach to social ontology distinct from more main-
330 stream approaches is that it leads us to a thesis about the nature of value
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331 and social rationality that departs significantly from analytic and intersub-
332 jectivist approaches. Critical social ontology is concerned with the ways
333 that social reality manifests specific features that we can judge as rational,
334 or freedom-enhancing on one hand, or defective and pathological, on the
other—pathological, in the sense that they are freedom-reductive, causing
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336 other negative forms of personal and social consequences. In this sense,
337 social pathologies are not merely pathologies of reason, in some intersub-
338 jective, second-order sense, but more fundamentally, they are pathologies
339 of the social world itself , the product of defective forms of social-relational,
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340 processual life that are organised towards ends and purposes that we can
341 characterise as irrational. Suicide, drug addiction, alienation, aggression,
342 destructive behaviour, the search for profit and particular gain at the
343 expense of common goods, among so many other pathologies become the
product of a social ontology that is shaped in ways that are not beneficial
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344
345 for human needs.

346 The ontological approach to social critique now can be seen to begin
347 with fundamental cooperative and social-relational essence of human exis-
348 tence, but then to proceed into broader frames of social reality such as
349 institutions and inter-institutional logics and dynamics. It is at this level

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12 M. J. THOMPSON
350 that we can grasp the constitution the social totality: in modern societies,
351 for example, the ways that capitalist logics of social purposes and relations
352 comes to determine the sub-logics of different institutional spheres of life.
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353 In this way we are able to have society as an object of critical investiga-
354 tion rather than merely sociality and social action. Any social scheme can
355 be understood as a consisting of a specific structure of relations that are
356 organised according to set ends or purposes that define those relations as
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357 well as the norms and practices to which participants in that scheme must
358 adhere and which form the basis of their collective-intentional rule-sets.
359 But again, each social scheme—a school, religious institution, economic
360 life, political and cultural institutions and forms—are themselves always in
361 relation to the social totality which, in modern societies, has the capacity
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362 to redefine and embed smaller social schemes into its logic (technolog-
363 ical, administrative capitalism can be seen as the structure of the totality,
364 for instance). The importance of this cannot be over-emphasised: that
365 without the capacity to judge any social scheme with relation to the logic
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366 of the totality, the danger for reification becomes increasingly real.
367 3 Grounding Evaluative

Criteria for Social Pathology
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368
369 My discussion thus far has been to defend the idea that an ontology of
370 society can serve as an object for social critique. This lays a foundation for
371 the next thesis I want to explore: namely that there exist criteria for social
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372 rationality that are themselves ontological. What I mean by this is that
373 a society is pathological to the extent that it is irrationally constructed,
374 to the extent that it exhibits relations, institutions, practices, norms and
375 purposes that are not organised for the common benefit of the members
376 of the association but instead shape these socio-ontological forms towards
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377 some particularist, extractive, destructive, ends and purposes. If we pick

378 up from the discussion I was exploring above concerning the viability of
379 social reason, then we can see social pathology as consisting of defects
380 in the relations, practices and ends and purposes that give shape to our
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381 cooperative lives with others. The beginning of this insight can be found
382 in Rousseau’s thesis about the nature of the relation between self and
383 other as well as the defective features of unequal society. Rousseau’s basic
384 claim is that once humans discovered their powers of cooperation, this
385 opened us up to the possibility for pathological relations, both of self-
386 relations as well as relations with others.

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387 The key to understanding defective social forms is the ways that the
388 drive for inequality, particular gain or self-aggrandisement (amour propre)
389 is able to achieve the power to shape unequal and even extractive relations
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390 with others. Rather than being an object of care, the self and the other
391 become instruments for conspicuous status; for propping up the false self
392 that is merely the means for competing with others for material gain or
393 for self-glorification. Either way, this power exerted is a function of a
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394 fundamental weakness of the individual who then irrationally uses rela-
395 tions with others for defective and pathological ends. Cooperative forms
396 of life, according to Rousseau, emerge to solve certain problems that indi-
397 viduals in the state of nature cannot solve as isolated beings. These forms
398 of cooperation, according to Rousseau’s genealogy of social inequality,
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399 initially seek mutual benefits and the good of each member of the associ-
400 ation, but soon devolves into extractive relations of inequality once amour
401 propre is able to achieve organisational power over the relations and coop-
402 erative practices of the community: ‘the instant one man had need of
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403 the services of another, perceived that it would better to have provisions
404 for two to himself, equality vanished, property was introduced, labour
405 became necessary, and vast forests were transformed into smiling fields,
406 which man had to water with the sweat of his brow, and where slavery
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407 and misery were soon seen to germinate and grow up with the crops’
408 (Rousseau, 1964a: 167).
409 This is accompanied by a transformation of the collective-intentional
410 norms that make up the consciousness of members of this defective
sociality. ‘The first person who, having enclosed a plot of land, took it
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411
412 upon himself to say, “this is mine”, and found people who were simple
413 enough to believe him, was the true founder of civil society’ (Rousseau,
414 1964a: 164). The pathological depth of these developments begins to be
415 seen in the beginning chapters of his Social Contract, where he intro-
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416 duces us to a world where man is ‘born free, yet everywhere in chains’
417 (Rousseau, 1964b: 351). The problem of domination means the degen-
418 eracy of the individual. Rousseau diagnoses social pathology, then, as a
419 kind of corruption of our relational bonds with others; it is caused by
the kinds of inequality that is itself spawned by defective psychic drives
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420
421 for surplus, for gain and for dominance. Corrupted relations give rise
422 to corrupted patterns of the self. The cognitive and emotional struc-
423 tures of the self now become impressed with the defective patterns of

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14 M. J. THOMPSON
424 norms, practices and conventions (moeurs ) that sustain the pathological
425 community.11
426 Rousseau’s solution to this problem is one of a new form of social
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427 reason, a form of cognition that is able to grasp the fundamental mutuality
428 and social relatedness that underwrites socialised human beings. In his
429 Emile, we see the training for this kind of social practical reason where
430 Emile’s capacity for empathy and relatedness to others is taken as a kind
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431 of psychological foundation for the more mature thinking required for
432 civic reason, one needed in order to uphold the general will —that form
433 of social cognition that allows the individual to think in terms not of
434 his own particularity, but rather in terms of the common interest of its
435 members. Social reason in the form of the general will is not merely a
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436 formulaic procedure, however. Rousseau is suggesting that it is closer to
437 what we would understand as a kind of collective-intentional rule-set that
438 would be capable of articulating a new form of political and social reality:
439 a genuine, free republic.12
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440 The project of conceiving of a more robust form of social rationality
441 is taken further by Hegel for whom social rationality is not a product of
442 subjective or particular interests nor is it possible to find it through mere
443 forms of agreement with one another. Hegel proposes that social ratio-
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444 nality is tied with freedom. This is because the nature of the concept is
445 such that freedom is a property of self-determining reason. So, relations
446 take on different forms before maximising their highest, most rational
447 potential. Mechanistic relations, for instance, do not manifest freedom
because the parts of such a relation are acted upon from the outside,
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448
449 they are based on power or force (Gewalt ) rather than self-determination,
450 freedom. Parts of such an order are dependent on one another, like
451 the parts of a clock. Similarly, with relations he terms ‘chemism’, where
452 the relation between parts of the whole are interdependent, but lack
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453 self-consciousness of their functions and roles and the purpose of their
454 collective action (Hegel, 1969: 402–486). (The cells of an organism,
455 for instance, are not conscious of anything, let alone a higher purpose
456 of life of which they are the building blocks). It should be emphasised
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11 See the insightful discussion by Nicholas Dent (1988), Rousseau: An Introduction to

his Psychological, Social and Political Theory (1988) as well as Katrin Froese (2001).
12 Elsewhere (Thompson, 2017) I have suggested this reading of Rousseau’s general
will. Also see the superb discussion by John B. Noone, Jr. (1980), Rousseau’s Social
Contract: A Conceptual Analysis.

Author Pr
457 that Hegel views these kinds of relations not as empirical objects nor as
458 a priori formulae. Rather, his thesis is that these are metaphysical struc-
459 tures of reason, dimensions of the concept (Begriff ) itself. Since freedom
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460 for Hegel is the feature of concepts that are self-determining rather than
461 dependent on something else for their existence, his systemic and holistic
462 understanding of rationality requires that the internal relations of objects
463 achieve this self-determination in order to be rational and free.
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464 Truly free relations, Hegel seems to suggest, are those that act out of
465 interdependence where the particular components of the relational order
466 possess conceptual grasp of the ends and purposes of the actions of that
467 relational order. And these ends and purposes will not simply be those
468 that have been posited heteronomously, or according to dependent rela-
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469 tions, from the outside, as it were.13 Rather, the idea here is that if we
470 see human life as essentially social and relational, then we must also see
471 that the ends of human society must be more than mere life itself, it
472 must also be constituted by, and for, freedom. Social rationality is not met
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473 by formal criteria, but by, or through, the actual ontology of our social
474 forms and both the concepts of self-understanding we employ, as well as
475 the actual concrete practices that instantiate our collective lives. Individ-
476 uality becomes robustly rational and ethical only once it has been able to
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477 absorb into its self-consciousness the systematic holism that underwrites
478 our social reality: that our essential relatedness is a constitutive dimension
479 of our freedom as persons.14 Pathologies in the institutional world—i.e.,
480 in the ontology of our social schemes—are therefore irrationalities in the
metaphysics of our social world: they are defective ways of relating, acting,
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481
482 practicing, that are framed by ends and purposes that do not seek the
483 cultivation of the common life of its members.
484 Much of the work on Hegelian ideas about pathology take
485 their starting point from the Lord and Bondsman section of the
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486 Phenomenology. But this is not exactly the best way to enter into Hegel’s
13 Elsewhere, (Thompson, 2018) I have developed the relation between Hegel’s logical
categories and his political and ethical theory Also see Kevin Thompson’s (2019), Hegel’s
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Theory of Normativity: The Systematic Foundations of the Philosophical Science of Right.

14 Frederick Neuhouser argues on this point: ‘Full spiritual satisfaction, in contrast,
requires that life be elevated to freedom and that self-consciousness be filled with the
aims of life. On this view, social pathology exists whenever the basic conditions of society
prevent its members—in their self-conceptions, in their recognitive relations to others, and
in their material practices—from bringing together their membership in both the realm
of freedom and the realm of necessity’ (Neuhouser, 2016: 47).

Author Pr
16 M. J. THOMPSON
487 ideas about social rationality and social pathology. Indeed, both Lord and
488 Bondsman exist in a pathological relation for many reasons, but the key
489 problem is in the particular ways that the ‘ethical life’ of any community
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490 is shaped and structured. The reason for this is that Hegel views social
491 reason as emergent in the ontology of our institutional forms. The rela-
492 tions, processes, norms, practices and ends of our social schemes must be
493 directed towards common goods and be directed by rational agents that
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494 have their interdependence on others as the basis of their own ethical
495 agency. For Hegel, this rationality also has freedom at its core since it is
496 only through freedom that members of a community can self-determine
497 their own lives as developmental, processual beings.
498 If we return to the fundamental ontological properties of human
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499 sociality, we find that relationality, cooperation and intentionality are core
500 species-specific, phylogenetic features. These can be worked up, or devel-
501 oped historically via the production of more complex forms of sociality,
502 more elaborate relational structures and institutions that in turn require
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503 more complex normative rules. But the key idea here is that we can
504 evaluate these various forms of sociality based not on spontaneous reflec-
505 tion or intersubjective consensus alone, but, rather, according to certain
506 objective features of those social forms themselves. This means seeing our
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507 evaluative categories, our ethical concepts, as ontological as opposed to

508 merely formal or pragmatic in that they refer to actual social states—i.e.,
509 relational structures, practices, norms and purposes—that have ontolog-
510 ical status in the world. Indeed, they in fact shape the very contours of
our social reality.
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511
512 We can begin to distinguish between what I will refer to as anabolic

513 and katabolic (or pathological) forms of social reality by referring to a
514 cluster of ontological features of sociality and evaluating them based on
515 the character of the basic ontological categories I explored above, namely:
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516 relations, processes and ends or purposes.15 These terms describe the
517 ways that any structure of relations, or relatum, acts on its relata: put
15 The distinction between anabolic and katabolic drives in the personality is first
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pointed out by Freud in his The Ego and the Id. I am borrowing these terms from
Karl Menninger’s (1938), Man against Himself . Menninger employs these concepts
to refer to tendencies within the personality, but extends them to patterns of human
behavior as responses to social forces. ‘Freud makes the . . . assumption that the life—
and death-instincts—let us call them the constructive and destructive tendencies of the
personality—are in constant conflict and interaction just as are similar forces in physics,
chemistry, and biology. To create and to destroy, to build up and to tear down, these are

Author Pr
518 more specifically, each term refers to the ways that relational forms and
519 processes of social reality either act to creatively enhance and develop the
520 capacities and functionings of its members (anabolism) or act to frus-
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521 trate, negate or destroy their capacities and functionings (katabolism).16
522 These terms are not only to be understood in terms of the biological levels
523 of life (i.e., of nutrition, and so on) but in ethical terms as well, as the
524 reduction of the creative, rational, moral and aesthetic capacities of the
self as well.17 In this sense, anabolism and katabolism describe the socio-
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525
526 ontological patterns that underwrite our social world—but they are also
527 ethical criteria in the sense that they describe social structures and prac-
528 tices that articulate social reality. The key idea behind the critical power
529 of social pathology diagnosis has to be that it refers to the kinds of onto-
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530 logical structures and practices that we could otherwise change that do
531 not enhance or cultivate the highest possible capacities of our collective
532 efforts as well as our individual potentialities.
533 But what makes any given relatum pathological? Why will some
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534 engender katabolic structures and others anabolic structures? An answer
535 can be coherently given by understanding the broader ontological shapes
536 that these structures can take. A given relatum is not in and of itself the
537 cause of pathological tendencies. Rather, the key needs to be found in
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538 the nature of social power and the ways that it is able to shape not only
539 relational structures but also the ends and purposes of those relations.
540 The end that is posited defines not only the structure of the relations, it
541 also circumscribes the practices that enact those relations and the norms
that guide subjective actions within that social scheme. An example can
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542
543 be found in the Stanford Prison Experiment by Philip Zimbardo (2007).

544 In his experiment, Zimbardo arbitrarily placed volunteers in the roles
545 of guards and prisoners in a simulated prison. Guards were then told
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the anabolism and katabolism of the personality, no less than of the cells and the corpus-
cles—the two directions in which the same energies exert themselves.’ (Menninger, 1938:
5). Although Menninger employs these categories to describe aspects of the personality,
I use them to describe the effects that relations have on the individuals who constitute
them. Pathology is now a concept that describes both the ontological relational structures
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and the subjects within and affected by them. Also cf. Fromm (1973: 102ff.).
16 It should be emphasised that pathological social schemes also produce pathological
personalities and that the categories of anabolism and katabolism become features of
pathological personal drives and tendencies (Fromm, 1973: 246).
17 Frederick Neuhouser (2020) describes this aspect of social pathology through
Nietzsche’s diagnosis of the decadence of life and as a cultural pathology.

Author Pr
18 M. J. THOMPSON
546 their roles and the purposes of what they were there to do. They were
547 instructed that they were there to control and contain the prison popu-
548 lation. Guards became increasingly abusive towards the prisoners as the
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549 experiment went on. The dehumanisation of the prisoners by the guards
550 accelerated to the point that Zimbardo had to shut the experiment down.
551 When the experiment was replicated years later, it was found the guards
552 were not acting in a dehumanising manner until the researchers realised
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553 that they had not included the instruction session for the guards. Once
554 this was added to the experiment, the guards became dehumanising and
555 sadistic, manifesting katabolic attitudes and imbuing the experimental
556 social scheme with katabolic features.18
557 The importance of this seems to me to be that it shows that roles and
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558 practices within a social scheme require the positing of ends and purposes
559 by some hierarchical authority in order for them to take on either anabolic
560 or katabolic tendencies. Social power and the shape it takes, have an
561 efficient cause: they require some kind of power to organise them and
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562 assign norms and collective-intentional rules that make the scheme what
563 it is. Prisons, in this example, were defined and assigned a teleological
564 function according to the ends set by the organisers of the study who
565 assigned roles to the guards as well as, implicitly, to the prisoners. The
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566 relations between guards and prisoners were defined retrogressively in

567 accordance with the purpose (or telos ) of the institution of the prison
568 itself.19 Pathology here comes to describe not the psychological features
569 of the individuals involved per se, but rather the ontology of the social
scheme itself: the relations, norms, practices and purposes of the scheme
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570
18 This also holds for the famous Milgram (1974) experiments where participants were
told by an authority figure to obey commands for shocking other participants for errors
in an enacted learning experiment. One of the key findings of the study seems to me
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to be that the more authority is present and appears legitimate, the more likely that the
roles of the participants would be enacted and fulfilled. The structural relations between
the participants is again necessary but insufficient. What is crucial is that there be some
kind of efficient cause, power, that provides the structure with coherence and allows for
the enactment of prescribed structural roles and practices.
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19 Applying Aristotle’s metaphysical categories of causation, we can therefore say that

any social scheme in social ontology have: (i) a material or substantive cause: the relational
capacities of the species; (ii) a formal cause: the relations that are enacted in any scheme;
(iii) an efficient cause: the guiding power that assigns the roles and purposes of that
scheme; and (iv) a final cause: the purpose or end, the telos, of that scheme and its power
to retrogressively define the boundaries of the scheme itself as well as the parameters of
the roles, norms and practices that constitute the scheme.

Author Pr
571 as set out by some directing intelligence. As such, the formal cause of the
572 relatum is necessary but insufficient to determine whether a social scheme
573 will be rational or irrational. It requires that purposes and intentions be
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574 set for the collective efforts of all involved and that roles be defined as a
575 function of the collective purpose of that scheme.
576 What this shows us is that social schemes can be pathological and
577 irrational. That there is evidence for the thesis that the ontology of
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578 any given form of sociality can exhibit pathological or irrational features
579 and this is not reducible to the personality structures of the individuals
580 involved. Katabolic ontological forms of social reality exhibit forms of
581 self- and other-destructiveness in their most malignant forms and, in less
582 malignant modes, frustrates or even outright negates the developmental,
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583 self-determining capacities of individuals. But since it is ultimately we who
584 are the creators of these social forms, it is central to see that the moment
585 of emancipatory critique can only come about once the first step towards
586 de-reification is made: that is, towards the idea that there is an essen-
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587 tial, cooperative and social-relational essence to human life and that the
588 ends of those cooperative, interdependent forms of life are not defined by
589 ‘nature’ but by us. A community that exhibits anabolic life forms and self-
590 determining individuals is therefore the product of an ethical life whose
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591 members are self-conscious of the capacity to articulate such a social

592 reality—an ethical life that is saturated by reason and rational institutions.
593 This implies not only that our ethical and political categories such as
594 freedom or justice, need to be seen not in a priori, formal terms but
as rooted in actual social structures, but it also means that these cate-
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595
596 gories are themselves composed of certain ontological features that define
597 the relations, practices and purposes of those social forms. The ways that
598 our relations are structured also become causal in terms of the subjec-
599 tive forms of consciousness and the personality structure of the self.
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600 So, any relation that is to any significant degree exploitive, oppressive,
601 exclusionary or which marginalises others, is defective because it is irra-
602 tional: its irrationality lies in its abuse of the social bond, which exists
603 for mutual benefit. Aggression, sadism, masochism and so on—these are
also pathological drives because they do not exist or function to expand
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604
605 the freedom or the developmental aspects of those involved in the rela-
606 tion, but rather satisfy inflamed drives for dominance or control. Social
607 pathology embraces both the whole and the part, both the society and the
608 individual. The two are fundamentally in dialectical relation: our interde-
609 pendence on others is systematic and therefore takes on holistic features.

Author Pr
20 M. J. THOMPSON
610 As Erich Fromm insightfully notes on the evaluative concepts of rational

611 versus irrational: ‘I propose to call rational any thought, feeling or act
612 that promotes the adequate functioning and growth of the whole of which it
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613 is a part, and irrational that which tends to weaken or destroy the whole’
614 (Fromm, 1973: 295).20
615 Assume that our phylogenetic capacities for joint and cooperative forms
616 of relations are the basis for any higher forms of consciousness, moral
reasoning and cognition.21 Now, consider further that the social world
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617
618 into which we are born consists of a certain number of social integration
619 mechanisms meant to instill within its members the essential constitu-
620 tive rules that will maintain the collective-intentional rule-sets that will
621 sustain and reproduce the social institutions and practices of that society.
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622 The process of ontogenesis is therefore one that is a function of just such
623 a procedure. The problem here now is two-fold. First, is the social reality
624 into which I am socialised itself pathological or in some fundamental sense
625 sub-rational; and, second, will my cognitive and psychological capacities
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626 be able to perceive them where they exist. Here is where my account
627 becomes more complex. As I see it, there is no fundamental divide
628 between these, as if they were first- and second-order phenomena. Quite
629 to the contrary, I see them as unified into a more complex ontological
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630 structure. The key now is to understand what makes them patholog-
631 ical, and that means seeing social reason as consonant with the systemic
632 ontological complexes that instantiate our social reality.
633 Far from this meaning that we need to posit some natural basis from
which pathology is a deviation, we must see our ethical life as a construct
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634
635 that is guided by reason; and if social reason is to be seen in ontolog-

636 ical terms, then this means characterising pathological social structures,
637 norms, practices, ends and so on as those that do not maximise the self-
638 realisation of its members; that there exists a purpose to any basic kind
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639 of cooperative activity, relation or structure: that it be beneficial to all

640 members of that association. The idea here is not a natural one, but an
641 ethical one: it expresses the thesis that human social reality is a product of
642 the directing ideas that shape our collective forms of activity, practices and
institutions. Only by positing anabolic relational structures and practices,
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643
644 and common goods and purposes for our collective institutional lives can
20 Also cf. Laitinen and Särkelä (2019: 80–102).

21 See Tomasello (2019) for a more complete treatment of this thesis.

Author Pr
645 we strive to displace pathological expressions of social and cultural life.

646 The types of personalities spawned by katabolic relations and practices,
647 institutions defined by particular over common goods will inevitably suffer
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648 from the misshapen drives, the neuroses and psychoses that result from a
649 community that is shaped inhumanely and unjustly.
650 4 Macro and Micro Katabolic Dynamics
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651 Thus far my discussion has been relatively abstract and theoretical. I have
652 been trying to lay a basic groundwork for understanding the dynamics of
653 social pathology and to show that they can be understood as irrationalities
654 in the ways that our collective forms of life are shaped and the kinds of
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655 norms and purposes that they instill. Key to this is the issue of social inte-
656 gration, or the various ways that these ontological shapes of social reality
657 socialise and shape the individuals that will, in turn, sustain them. Social
658 pathologies may be rooted in our social ontology, but manifests most
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659 acutely in the individuals it produces. As Rousseau had initially pointed
660 out, and Freud much later, the problem of how certain basic impulses or
661 drives within the individual are shaped by the social-relational world is the
662 key issue. As I have been pointing out, social pathology denotes not only
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663 the objective irrationalities of the forms of social reality, but also, because
664 of the dialectical nature of the concept, of the personal character structure
665 as well.
666 Neoliberal society can be seen as particularly prone to pathologies of
society and self. The atomisation of secular and traditional forms of social
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667
668 life, the embedding of all dimensions of human society into the frame-
669 work of market dynamics, the vertiginous nature of social inequality, as
670 well as the absorption of non-economic spheres of life into capitalistic
671 and techno-administrative imperatives, have made alienation, reification,
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672 aggression, ego-withering and self-destructiveness particularly acute in

673 modern cultures. For individuals to succeed in any material sense, they
674 must increasingly abandon their own self-development to the needs and
675 prerequisites of the marketplace. The expansion of necessary labour time,
due in large part to the decline in wages and unionisation, as well as de-
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676
677 skilling, means longer working hours and multiple venues of employment.
678 The resulting anxiety from insecure labour positions, the rise of extractive
679 finance capital, as well as the demise of autonomous spheres of cultural
680 life, has meant an almost total absorption of the catallactic norms and
681 practices of capitalist market relations.

Author Pr
22 M. J. THOMPSON
682 Social integration into these forms of life requires the individual to
683 repress anabolic drives: desires for creation and play become displaced
684 by norms of necessity and conformity to workplace norms. At the same
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685 time, they are replaced with what Herbert Marcuse (1964) properly
686 called ‘repressive desublimation’: the alienated quest for satisfying erotic
687 derives in escapist forms of sexuality and other expressions of pleasure.
688 The erosion of robust social relations is a consequence of the inequality
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689 and intensified work-life of neoliberal society. Consequently, individuals
690 interact with one another on an increasingly reified basis. The reification
691 of others can become a pathological outgrowth of these dynamics where
692 others as mere objects for your own gain, pleasure or as obstacles to your
693 will or desire, means the diminution of agapic and empathic forms of
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694 relatedness, of the fulfilment of Aldous Huxley’s (1945) description of
695 modernity as ‘organised lovelessness’. Social solidarity with others, with
696 the ‘other’, more specifically, is replaced by in-group and out-group forms
697 of self-identification. The moral cognition that this leads to becomes
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698 increasingly simplistic and Manichean and tendencies towards political
699 authoritarianism and racism become ever more prevalent. As such, the
700 tendency for conflict and intolerance increases even as corporate forms of
701 media are able to extract profits by stoking collective fears and anxiety.
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702 At the same time, older models of autonomy that were rooted in the
703 rational-reflective capacities of the subject devolve into forms of group
704 narcissism and ideological self-identification. The capacity for a more
705 open-relatedness with others, to critique encrusted value systems and
norms, now becomes more difficult to achieve. The anxiety produced
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706
707 by a world that has so rapidly changed and which leaves few options for
708 personal security (material and emotional) means that forms of aggressive-
709 ness and intolerance will also rise and grip more members of society.22 Of
710 course, at the same time, these pathological social conditions can lead
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711 to frustration and a loss of legitimacy of those institutions, particularly

712 among younger cohorts. But the extent to which this can lead to actual
713 social change will be largely dependent on the extent to which new forms
714 of social relatedness and practices can displace the pathological ones and
new social purposes and ends can achieve collective-intentional embed-
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715
716 dedness. Only if anabolic relations, processes and purposes eclipse the
22 See the excellent discussion of this theme by Thorpe (2016).

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717 defective katabolic relations, norms, values and institutions, can genuine,
718 radical social change occur and achieve the rationalisation of society.
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719 5 Phronetic Criticism:
720 Judgement as Immanent Critique
721 Ethical life can now be seen as the central locus of transformative critique.
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722 I believe that the ontological approach to social pathology diagnosis can,
723 in dialectical fashion, lead us to rethink the ways that modern ethical life
724 can be rationalised, and the Hegelian-Marxist legacy be sustained. By now
725 we can see that conceiving of critique in ontological terms brings us to the
point where we see values not in neo-Kantian terms, or as abstract, subjec-
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726
727 tive and formalistic, but rather as embodied in the relational, structural,
728 teleological forms of life that are constituted by our material practices
729 and embedded and guided by forms of collective intentionality. An onto-
730 logical theory of value therefore describes how a given social reality is
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731 the product of collective mental states and material practices that serve
732 as guides for our conceptions of the good or valued form of life.23 The
733 value concepts we have in our minds shape the practices we enact in the
734 world. Friendship is not only a value, it is an ontology in the sense that
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735 it suggests certain norms, relations and practices as well as purposes. If

736 there exists a collective value within the fabric of ethical life about the
737 nature of friendship, then there will be general collective-intentional rules
738 that are constitutive of relations and practices and purposes of friend-
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739 ship. These values can change and their relative validity should be derived
740 not from abstract or formalistic criteria, but rather from the ontological
741 holistic perspective I have been suggesting here: a value is rational when it
742 enhances the self-realisation of the members involved in that association.
743 Ethical life now can be seen as both mental orientations to the world as
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744 well as embodied social states—an ontology of practices that congeal into
745 structures and institutions and with the power to routinise and socialise
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23 The ontology of value can therefore be seen as the constitutive interplay between
concepts and practices and the enactment of this practices within congealed ensembles of
broader social schemes. As Sally Haslanger has argued about the nature of our concepts:
‘our concepts and our social practices are deeply intertwined. Concepts not only enable
us to describe but also help structure social practices, and our evolving practices affect
our concepts’ (Haslanger, 2012: 368 and passim).

Author Pr
24 M. J. THOMPSON
746 its value concepts. It is defined by particular directive ideas that organise
747 and legitimate those same practices and institutions.
748 The diagnosis of social pathology therefore also entails a dialectical
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749 need to articulate valid or good forms of life that ought to command
750 our rational obligations. Social rationality therefore is a feature of the
751 extent to which our collective lives are genuinely self-determining, and
752 this, in turn, requires that the concept of autonomy be transposed into a
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753 new register. Once we see ourselves in de-reified terms, we can grasp the
754 fundamentally interdependent ontology that serves as the infrastructure
755 to our own lives. This is a new, expanded form of autonomy that requires
756 us to think in terms of the relational, structural, processual and teleolog-
757 ical substrates of our essentially associational lives. Reification becomes
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758 an important pathology once we see that it obfuscates this capacity and
759 actively shapes not only our cognitive stance towards social reality, but
760 also the kinds of practices we enact and the social reality they sustain.24
761 Phronetic criticism is therefore the capacity to shatter the effects of reifi-
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762 cation. It relies on the thesis that values and norms govern our practices
763 and that practices are the sustaining, active cause of the social world. But
AQ2 764 even more, it posits that social reason is measured by the extent to which
765 our self-determining lives are interdependent on specific kinds of relations
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766 and social structures; that the

767 Immanent criticism now can be recast as opening up the features of
768 our social schemes to judgement—judging how they either promote or
769 negate forms of associational life that cultivate and exhibit freedom. We
obtain this kind of immanence by achieving ontological coherence: a cogni-
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770
771 tive grasp of the directive ideas that organise our social schemes, how our
772 social relations are shaped, and the ends and purposes towards which they
773 are organised. This is the site of social pathology in the sense that these
774 constitute the constitutive parameters and dynamics for the articulation of
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775 persons and for self-consciousness. Since ethical value is now to be seen as
776 ontological instead of merely cognitive or pragmatic, it acts as a recursive
777 phenomenon. By this I mean that value is at once mental, practical and
778 a feature of our organisational reality. It emerges as a social fact in terms
of the unification of subject and object, but not merely in the sphere
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779
780 of intersubjective noumenalism, but in the concrete institutions and the

781 directive ideas that underwrite them. And since the social ontology that is
24 See the important discussion by Kavoulakos (2018).

Author Pr
782 constitutive of any institutional or social scheme requires specific patterns

783 of relations, practices, and ends, this means that value should be seen as
784 manifesting itself ontologically—not only in terms of our pragmatic prac-
OF
785 tices but also in terms of the social artefacts that we produce and for
786 which we organise our collective activities. For ethical life to be rational
787 means that the objective features of our world are freedom-enhancing and
788 self-determining.
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789 The criteria for the rational validity of these social schemes and institu-
790 tions are rooted dialectically in the pathological expressions of our social
791 forms. Here immanent critique becomes essential: for it is only by dialec-
792 tically exposing what a pathology represses that we can begin to uncover
793 the rational pulsating beneath the veneer of irrationality. The medical
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794 metaphor is one of knowing why an organ is ill or defective based on its
795 inability to perform its function. We know cancer cells to be pathologies
796 of an organism not because those cells are weak or in some way defec-
797 tive in and of themselves. They are defective with respect to the higher
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798 purposes of the system (the organ and the organism as a whole) of which
799 they are a part. Of course, the supreme limit of the medical metaphor
800 is that healthy cells and organisms are not free in the sense that ethical
801 life can be free. We do not have specific purposes or functions that make
EC
802 us free, but we can say that certain relational forms of life enhance self-
803 determining agency more than others; that interdependence rather than
804 dependence, reciprocity rather than exploitation, common rather than
805 particular goods and ends; and that the rational purposes of our asso-
ciations with others should be for the development and self-realisation
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806
807 of self-determining forms of personhood. All of these broad claims entail

808 ontological categories about our social world that can be seen as rational
809 or irrational, as being robustly fulfilled or defectively enacted.
810 A critical social ontology can now be seen to provide critical reason
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811 with a firmer and, I think, more powerful framework within which to
812 operate. It is critical as well as constructive, it can inform empirical social
813 science as well as political and moral philosophy. At its centre is the
814 idea that consciousness and being can be sublated into a more satisfying
and organic form of life. For not unlike Rousseau’s ‘general will’, we
UN
815
816 can glimpse a kind of de-reifying mode of reflection that forces us to

817 think outside and against the ontic forms of life that confront us. Social
818 pathology, viewed as a defect in the ontological properties of our rela-
819 tions, practices, institutions and the aims and purposes of our social world,
820 is the ultimate confrontation with forms of social reality that have not

Author Pr
26 M. J. THOMPSON
821 undergone any form of rational or reflective endorsement. The problem,

822 as I have been trying to demonstrate, is that rational reflection on its own
823 or merely via intersubjective practices, is not up to the task. The powers
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824 of reification to shape consciousness render these approaches ineffective.
825 The framework I have sketched here can be used to articulate a more
826 robust mode of critical rationality and, with hope, a more satisfying and
827 humane conception of ethical life and human value as well.
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828 References
829 Dent, N. (1988). Rousseau: An introduction to his psychological, social and
830 political theory. Oxford: Basil Blackwell.
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831 Freud, S. (1990). The ego and the id. New York, NY: W. W. Norton.
832 Froese, K. (2001). Beyond liberalism: The moral community of Rousseau’s social
833 contract. Canadian Journal of Political Science, 33(3), 579–600.
834 Freyenhagen, F. (2015). Honneth on social pathologies: A critique. Critical
835 Horizons, 16(2), 131–152.
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836 Freyenhagen, F. (2018). Critical theory and social pathology. In P. Gordon, E.
837 Hammer, & A. Honneth (Eds.), The Routledge companion to the Frankfurt
838 school. New York, NY: Routledge.
839 Fromm, E. (1973). The anatomy of human destructiveness. New York, NY: Henry
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840 Holt.
841 Harris, N. (2019). Beyond recognition: A critique of contemporary social pathology
842 diagnosis. Ph.D. dissertation, University of Sussex, Brighton, UK.
843 Haslanger, S. (2012). Resisting reality: Social construction and social critique.
844 Oxford: Oxford University Press.
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845 Hegel, G. W. F. (1969). Wissenschaft der Logik (Vol. 2). Frankfurt: Surkamp.
846 Honneth, A. (2011). Das Recht der Freiheit. Grundriss der demokratischen
847 Sittlichkeit. Frankfurt: Surkamp.
848 Huxley, A. (1945). The perennial philosophy. New York, NY: HarperCollins.
Kavoulakos, K. (2018). Georg Lukács’s philosophy of praxis: From Neo-Kantianism
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850 to Marxism. London: Bloomsbury.

851 Laitinen, A. (2015). Social pathologies, reflexive pathologies, and the idea of
852 higher-order disorders. Studies in Social and Political Thought, 25, 44–65.
853 Laitinen, A., & Särkelä, A. (2019). Four conceptions of social pathology.
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855 Menninger, K. (1938). Man against himself . New York, NY: Harcourt, Brace
856 and World.
857 Marcuse, H. (1964). One-dimensional man. Boston, MA: Beacon Press.
858 Milgram, S. (1974). Obedience to authority: An experimental view. New York,
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860 Neuhouser, F. (2016). Hegel on social ontology and the possibility of pathology.
861 In I. Testa & L. Ruggiu (Eds.), I that is we, we that is I: Perspectives on
862 contemporary hegel. Leiden: Brill.
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863 Neuhouser, F. (2020). Geistige Gesundheit und kulturelle Pathologie bei
864 Nietzsche. Deutsche Zeitschrift Für Philosophie, 68(1), 1–27.
865 Noone, J. (1980). Rousseau’s social contract: A conceptual analysis. London:
866 George Prior Publishers.
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14 ‘inflamed’ or ‘feverish’ (ϕλεγµαίνoυσαν) city differs from his ‘healthy’

Department of Political Science, William Paterson University,

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature 1

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23 In a similar vein, Erich Fromm argues that the affluent, technologically

40 plored thesis lurking behind these approaches. Stated most succinctly,

44 by collapsing this rational form of social reality into a static concept of

49 empathic relatedness with others, or negate that kind of individual and

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5 AN ONTOLOGICAL ACCOUNT OF SOCIAL PATHOLOGY 3

54 The approach to social pathology I would like to develop here has

74 with an approach to social pathology as a distortion of intersubjec-

83 our pathologies in terms of the reflexive operations of our sociality, as

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87 social pathology denotes the faulty processes of reason that emerge in

112 inability of members of a community with supposedly rational institutions

the more comprehensive critique of these approaches by Neal Harris (2019).

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5 AN ONTOLOGICAL ACCOUNT OF SOCIAL PATHOLOGY 5

143 the problem of pathologies in the objective conditions and features of

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4 Fabian Freyenhagen (2018) also gestures toward such an approach to ‘macro-social

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5 AN ONTOLOGICAL ACCOUNT OF SOCIAL PATHOLOGY 7

181 of interdependence oriented towards the cultivation of individual self-

202 to intersubjective theories of social action, but must be seen as proper-

206 reason be understood in terms of the capacity of any social-ontological

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237 As I see it, emphasis on second-order pathologies, although important, is

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5 AN ONTOLOGICAL ACCOUNT OF SOCIAL PATHOLOGY 9

269 the further development of individuals through socialisation and integra-

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275 practices, collective forms of intentionality, norms and social structures

295 is fundamentally constituted by certain relations between students and

300 schooling system itself is embedded in broader contexts of social reality.

304 be different from an industrial society and a more technologically complex

10 For a more developed discussion, see Thompson (2019).

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5 AN ONTOLOGICAL ACCOUNT OF SOCIAL PATHOLOGY 11

345 for human needs.

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367 3 Grounding Evaluative

377 some particularist, extractive, destructive, ends and purposes. If we pick

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5 AN ONTOLOGICAL ACCOUNT OF SOCIAL PATHOLOGY 13

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11 See the insightful discussion by Nicholas Dent (1988), Rousseau: An Introduction to

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5 AN ONTOLOGICAL ACCOUNT OF SOCIAL PATHOLOGY 15

Theory of Normativity: The Systematic Foundations of the Philosophical Science of Right.

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507 evaluative categories, our ethical concepts, as ontological as opposed to

512 We can begin to distinguish between what I will refer to as anabolic

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5 AN ONTOLOGICAL ACCOUNT OF SOCIAL PATHOLOGY 17

543 be found in the Stanford Prison Experiment by Philip Zimbardo (2007).

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566 relations between guards and prisoners were defined retrogressively in

19 Applying Aristotle’s metaphysical categories of causation, we can therefore say that

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5 AN ONTOLOGICAL ACCOUNT OF SOCIAL PATHOLOGY 19