Chapter 2 - Society as Organism?

Summary

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.