Chapter Eight - Toward a Philosophy of the Social – Part Two: Whitehead on Sociology, Societies and the Social

Summary

In the first chapter of this book, I discussed how one of my aims was to outline what I have termed a “philosophy of the social”. I set out my initial view of such an enterprise as comprising not the philosophy of the social but as remaining with a set of problems which arose within the theoretical approaches of Durkheim, Marx and Weber. The following chapters then traced the character and status of the problem of the social in the works of these writers and provided a more detailed reading of why the social has, and still does, constitute a problem for sociology and social theory.

In this final chapter, I want to provide an approach to the social which recognizes the importance and difficulties of accounting for sociality within contemporary theory, and builds on some of the suggestions and ideas that were encountered in the texts of Durkheim, Marx and Weber. The mainstay of my argument will be the work of A. N. Whitehead. This choice might seem surprising, for even though Whitehead was a philosopher who was interested in the operations of sociology (see, for example, Whitehead 1933, 3–127), it might not immediately seem apparent why his work is relevant to this task. I have previously made moves which have tried to justify this choice (Halewood 2005, 2008, 2009, 2011) and instead of revisiting these arguments, I will first present an analysis of Whitehead's distinctive understanding of sociology which is offered as an innovative alternative to current approaches.

Before proceeding, it should be stated that while the material offered in this chapter is envisaged as a contribution to a philosophy of the social, it is not intended to provide a comprehensive theory of the social which solves or explains, once and for all, all the facets of the problem of the social which have been raised throughout this book. I believe such a theory to be impossible. Indeed the desire for such an overarching explanation goes against my understanding of the role and status of a philosophy of the social which, as Karsenti (2013) points out, must always be situated with regard to specific problems, ones that arise from within sociology and social theory, rather than being abstractly imposed upon them.