This chapter defines the field of history by examining both the topics it investigates and some of its long-standing and unique epistemological and methodological assumptions. It points out the unique breadth of the discipline, which has always taken the whole of human experience as its object of study. It emphasizes the holism of the discipline – that is, History’s consistent interest not in particular parts or aspects of that experience, but in the interactions between different aspects of human societies. It examines the historicist tradition within the discipline – the fundamental assumption that every aspect of human life is conditioned by its broad historical context. And it explores the way in which that fundamental assumption has contributed to a primarily idiographic epistemological position – an interest in the analysis of the particular and specific, rather than the general or universal.

Many philosophers who endorse an environmental ethic are uneasy with animal protectionist philosophies. They reject sentientism – the view that sentience is necessary and sufficient for moral considerability – in favor of biocentrism, the view that being alive is necessary and sufficient for moral considerability. It is difficult to characterize both sentience and being alive in ways that are both informative and noncontroversial. Some environmental philosophers reject the individualism of both these views, and embrace instead holistic views that place such entities as ecosystems at the center of moral concern. Deep ecologists go even further, making it difficult to know how to live in accordance with their principles. Such views provide insight, but seem to abandon the fundamental questions of ethics.

There is a connection between the habits of thinking in science, economics, and diplomacy that are hindering our response to climate change. Western science since the Enlightenment has built its success on reductionism. This has left us less good than we need to be at thinking holistically, and at understanding the potential for systemic change in our environment, economy, and international relations. New ways of thinking can take generations to spread through society and displace their predecessors. In our present crisis, we must accelerate this process deliberately – we cannot afford to wait.

Localization is a key move in the history of medicine across cultures, arguably; but a parallel, if not alternative, narrative can be noticed in the Graeco-Roman tradition (and elsewhere), which I have called one of ‘delocalization’, discussed in Chapter 3:namely, the approach to disease, and especially mental disease, in terms of ‘holistic’ impact on the patient. This surfaces most prominently in some authors, but can also be noticed as a matter of discussion of the locus affectus in great thinkers like Galen. In this particular strand of the history of phrenitis the key authors who have reached us are the Roman author of De medicina, Celsus; the Atomist philosopher and doctor Asclepiades; and the thinkers of the Methodist tradition, represented most extensively by Caelius Aurelianus as far as phrenitis is concerned. This chapter surveys the relevant texts by Celsus and Caelius and the fragmentary evidence on Asclepiades, where an important cluster of shared principles emerges: an interest in psychology and in the health of the individual ‘as a whole’, a disregard for the localization of the disease in a specific body part, and of fever as a key pathological indicator, and a strong inclination towards psychotherapeutical and ‘soothing’ measures.

The life sciences and social sciences typically study “complex adaptive systems:” nonlinear, self-organizing, adaptive, multilevel, multicomponent systems in which dense interconnections between elements produce irreducible/emergent systems effects. Systems and their components are partially (in)separable: they can be fully understood neither solely in terms of their parts (some outcomes are emergent) nor solely in terms of the whole (the character of the parts is essential to the nature of the whole). Important implications of a complex adaptive systems perspective for IR include a new view of international systems and their structures; a distinctive understanding of social continuity and social change; new perspectives on levels, theory, and explanation; new tools for comparative analysis; renewed attention to hierarchy; and a distinctive understanding of globalization.

There is a connection between the habits of thinking in science, economics and diplomacy that are hindering our response to climate change. Western science since the Enlightenment has built its success on reductionism. This has left us less good than we need to be at thinking holistically, and at understanding the potential for systemic change in our environment, economy, and international relations. New ways of thinking can take generations to spread through society and displace their predecessors. In our present crisis, we must accelerate this process deliberately – we cannot afford to wait.

This analysis of Jacobi’s pivotal Spinoza Letters illustrates that the driving force behind his innovative altercation with Spinoza lies not in religious motives, but rather in motives derived from the philosophy of action. By putting into effect the contradiction between system and freedom in the practical sphere, Jacobi opened up new perspectives in modernity’s own self-understanding.

Better redress programmes demand local ownership and participation. Redress programmes always involve trade-offs between competing values; therefore, decisions about programme design and operations are likely to be better made when those decisions include those most closely affected. This concluding chapter underlines the argument for flexible programmes that enable survivors to control their journeys through the redress process. In closing, I outline the potential benefits of providing monetary redress as part of a holistic suite of remedial policies.

The introduction presents some general reflections on what characterises Heidegger’s fundamental ontology and what makes his thought a particularly promising point of departure for doing social ontology. I first introduce Heidegger’s holistic conceptions of Dasein and being-in-the-world by way of contrast to Cartesian atomism. I then go on to show that Heidegger conceives of intersubjectivity as a triangular relation between self, world, and other rather than a dyadic relation between two independent subjects. My claim is that Heidegger’s social ontology is found directly in his conception of the shared world and that his more well-known accounts of the Anyone and solicitude should be understood within this general framework. I also reflect on the relation between Heidegger’s social ontology and his politics and provide an outline of the book.

This chapter discusses whether Heidegger’s holism – roughly, the view that the meaning of the parts (entities) depends on the whole (the world) – entails a vicious relativism. I argue that Heidegger is a holist because he is committed to both object externalism (the view that intentional states depend on environmental objects) and social externalism (the view that intentional states depend on other people). Whether his holism entails relativism depends on how we understand these two commitments. Discussing recent interpretations of Heidegger’s holism (Lafont, Dreyfus, Okrent, Carman), I argue that Heidegger’s holism entails a form of relativism only if we take his social externalism to be a function of social conventions. I then go on to challenge that this is the case by arguing that Heidegger is an open-ended social externalist according to whom intentional states do not depend solely on our relation to social conventions (or any other particular social formation such as language or tradition) but on our on-going social interaction broadly construed.

Chapter 5 examines Plato's account of the "fevered" polis in exploring the thesis that societies are to be understood as composed of parts well suited to carry out specific functions and that it is primarily in this respect that they resemble biological organisms. Thus, in the healthy polis each part carries out the specific function appropriate to it, and functions are coordinated such that all are well executed and society's essential needs satisfied. From Plato we learn that a defensible account of social pathology embraces a weak holism, according to which "ill" may apply to society as a whole without any part of it being ill (since it is institutions or societies that are dysfunctional, not individuals). At the same time, it eschews strong a normative holism that holds that things can be good or bad for societies without them also being good or bad for individual members.

Chapter 2 examines the extent to which theories of social pathology are committed to thinking of human societies on the model of animal organisms. It rejects the thought that societies exhibit a complete teleological harmony, where all parts work together perfectly to maintain the organism's stability and cohesiveness. Societies are totalities in the more modest sense that their parts – institutions or practices – cannot be adequately grasped or evaluated in isolation. Like organisms, societies are functional beings in that how they are constituted and how their parts interact cannot be understood without ascribing ends to both parts and the whole they make up. Societies are, moreover, functionally organized in that they carry out their characteristic functions – including both material and spiritual reproduction – via specialized and coordinated functional subsystems (or social spheres). Finally, even though social functions extend beyond material reproduction, the latter remains an essential part of healthy social functioning.

Chapter 12 examines Hegel's characterization of human society as the "living good," which expresses his version of the analogy between societies and organisms. For him the analogy implies that societies both incorporate processes of life (in carrying out the activities necessary for material reproduction) and possess the same structure as biological life (that of a "self-positing" subject, which maintains itself by positing "contradictions" internal to itself and then negotiating them so as establish its own identity). Hegel also insists on the differences between life and social being: the presence in social life of self-consciousness and the capacity for freedom. Thus, societies are normatively and functionally constituted living beings that realize the good via specialized, coordinated functions, which, unlike the activities of organisms, are infused with ethical content deriving from their potential to be consciously self-determined. Analyzing Hegel's master–slave dialectic illustrates these ontological claims.

This book examines the concept of social pathology as it figures in the thought of Plato, Rousseau, Hegel, Comte, Marx, and Durkheim, demonstrating what it means to describe societies as "ill" and what the fact that we are so often drawn to conceiving of social problems as illnesses says about social ontology, or the kind of thing human society is. It explores the connections between social pathology and such phenomena as alienation, anomie, ideology, and social dysfunction and argues for the continuing relevance of the idea of "social sickness" for social critique. The aptness of the concept of social pathology in comprehending social ills points to important respects in which human societies are to be grasped as functionally-constituted, "living" beings and therefore as analogous to biological organisms, even if there are equally important respects in which the analogy does not hold, deriving primarily from the self-conscious and potentially free character of social activity. Human societies are understood as "spiritual" entities, the functions of which extend beyond material reproduction to include freedom, recognition, and self-transparency.

Chapter 9 explains Durkheim's understanding of moral facts and the conception of social solidarity at the core of his account of the division of labor's function in organized societies: crucial to what holds societies together and enables them to live are moral facts that inform relations among social members. Durkheim views human society as normatively constituted – governed by rules accepted as authoritative by social members – and claims that social institutions serve moral and not merely "useful" social functions. The chapter articulates the resources Durkheim has for conceiving of social pathology (itself an ethical phenomenon), examines the modern pathology most important to him, anomie, and coins a term for a related social pathology, hypernomie, a condition in which social rules are excessively rigid or constraining. Finally, the chapter reconstructs Durkheim's understanding of what is bad about social pathology – why social members should care whether their society is ill.

Chapter 11 reconstructs Hegel's conception of objective spirit, which specifies the kind of being, or reality, characteristic of the social world and distinguishes it from other domains of reality, such as nature and subjective spirit (or mind). It begins by examining what objective spirit means for Vincent Descombes and, to a lesser extent, for Durkheim and John Searle. Four claims associated with Hegel's account of objective spirit are distinguished and defended: 1) there is a form of mindedness that exists outside the consciousness of individual social members; 2) externally existing mind, embodied in social institutions, is metaphysically prior to the minds of the individuals who live within those institutions; 3) social reality depends on a collective acceptance of its institutions' normative rules; and 4) such rules constrain what social members do but also expand their practical possibilities and hence enrich their agency