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 8 examines and partially defends Durkheim's functionalism as practiced in The Division of Labor in Society. His position is reconstructed with an eye to determining which aspects are worth retaining for a contemporary theory of social pathology, including the functionally organized nature of society. Focusing on claims regarding the moral function of the division of labor, it examines epistemological issues bound up with ascribing functions to features of society, including the relation between functional explanation and functional analysis and the role played by historical narratives. Durkheim's method is a complex holism whose claims depend less on single facts and individual arguments than on the plausibility of the whole picture that emerges from mutually reinforcing arguments, empirical facts, interpretive suggestions, and analogies. Thus, Durkheim's method for ascribing functions to social phenomena bears similarities to other interpretive enterprises, from the reading of texts to the construction of theories in the natural sciences.

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 1 begins to define the concept of social pathology and to assess its usefulness for social philosophy. It distinguishes five conceptions of social illness different from the one employed in this book, which places dysfunction, rather than suffering, at the core of social illness. It argues, further, that while social pathologies must be bad in some way for social members, those individuals are not typically ill themselves. Although there are good reasons for approaching the concept of social pathology with caution – societies differ in important ways from biological organisms, for example – judicious use of the concept can bring to light critique-worthy social phenomena to which theories focused exclusively on justice are blind. The method espoused for diagnosing social illnesses is a form of ethically informed immanent critique that bears some similarities to medical diagnosis but refrains from ascribing moral blame to the individual participants in unhealthy social practices.

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 3 examines some problems Marx takes to be inherent in capitalism that can be regarded as social pathologies, clarifying how dysfunction must be understood if his most sophisticated critiques are to be grasped. It focuses on forms of social pathology bound up with Marx's account of the formula for the circulation of capital, which distinguishes capital from mere money in terms of the function of each. Marx's biological language makes it plausible to interpret the dysfunctions of capitalism as pathologies: for example, its cancer-like growth that ignores the needs of producers. Yet these dysfunctions cannot be grasped without taking into account the spiritual aspects of human social being. Marx regards social life as spiritual – as informed by the aspiration to unite the ends of life with those of freedom in one's social activity – and capitalism's failure to allow for this unity as its principal defect.

Chapter 7 treats two philosophers who directly influenced Durkheim: Auguste Comte and Herbert Spencer. Looking at their use of the society–organism analogy, their versions of functional explanation and functional analysis, and their conceptions of what a scientific sociology must be like helps one to understand both the content of Durkheim's positions and why he held them. Three types of functional explanation employed by Comte are relevant: two forms of existential functional explanation as well as functional analysis, which makes no claims regarding the existence of what it analyzes but "explains" what it is by specifying the function it serves and showing how its features are suited to accomplishing that purpose without implying anything about how it originated or why it persists. The chapter argues that Comte and Spencer rely too heavily on the society–organism analogy, leading to an overly biologistic understanding of normative critique available to social pathologists.