The Oxford Companion to Philosophy Part 90 docx

affairs or event may be any indication, evidence, manifest-
ation, portent, trace (which seems to be what Peirce
called an ‘index’), or mark that is regularly correlated with
it, and hence can be used to infer its presence. In that case,
to take something as a sign of something else is to use it to
infer the presence of the other thing. This is the use of nat-
ural signs, but we can of course invent signs or signals: in
heraldry specified emblems indicate the identity of the
person wearing them; or a picture of a man with a shovel
on the roadside indicates the presence of roadworks; or
the picture of beans on the can indicates beans within. In
Peirce’s view the latter signs work as icons, by bearing a
natural resemblance to what is depicted. Icons are signs
that work in virtue of sharing properties with what is sig-
nalled. But most such signals work by *convention, and it
requires a process of being inducted into the convention
to learn to interpret them.
Peirce may have supposed that a symbol was a manu-
factured sign. He defines a symbol as a ‘sign which is con-
stituted a sign merely or mainly by the fact that it is used
and understood as such’ (Collected Papers, ii. 307). But this is
quickly seen to be inadequate. With symbols we enter a
different domain from that of the sign, since the role of a
symbol is not that of correlating with the presence of the
thing signified. There is no regular correlation of this kind
in question. A portrait is not a signal that the sitter is near,
but a representation of her. A symbol is not used as a mark
that something else is present, but in place of the some-
thing else, to bring it to mind, or to identify it as a topic (or,
of course, to elicit the emotions and reactions that are sup-
posed appropriate to that other thing, as when a flag is a

symbol of a country). Certainly, if we are to think of words
as symbols, it is hopeless to see them as kinds of signal or
sign of whatever it is they represent. The presence of the
word ‘giraffe’ on a page is no sign that there are giraffes
about. A symbol is not something that is used as a sign of
things, given the function of signs that we have sketched.
The alternative position is that words and symbols do
function as signs, but of states of their producers rather
than the states of the world that they signify. Thus Locke
took it that words are external signs, in the signalling
sense, of ideas in the mind of the person producing them.
But this can only be one part of an overall theory, since it
requires a supplementary story about the way in which
ideas serve as symbols or representations of whatever it is
that we end up talking about. Peirce himself was driven to
the regressive suggestion that as well as a sign and its
object we need to postulate a ‘more developed sign’ or
interpretant in the mind of the user. The problem of how
such things represent substitutes for the problem about
how words represent. A more modern view is that they
may be signs of the beliefs or intentions of the person, but
the question arises how the presence of belief or other
intentional states can consist in the presence of something
invested with representative power. s.w.b.
*representation; semantics; meaning.
C. S. Peirce, Collected Papers (Cambridge, Mass., 1932–5), ii.
simplicity. Sometimes thought to provide a criterion for
choice among scientific theories, with varying accounts of
how simplicity might be measured. If simple theories are
easier to use, their adoption might be on pragmatic

grounds. Poincaré, in contrast, identified mathematical
simplicity as a marker for truth, which makes sense only if
one believes that nature is simple, and will appear so
through the filter of theory and language. n.c.
r.f.h.
*Ockham’s razor.
Henri Poincaré, The Foundations of Science, tr. G. B. Halstead
(Washington, DC, 1982).
Hans Reichenbach, The Philosophy of Space and Time, tr. M.
Reichenbach (New York, 1957).
simulation. How best to understand the nature and basis
of folk-psychological predictions, explanations, and
descriptions of human behaviour and mentality couched
in terms of belief, desire and the like? Theory theorists
maintain that in such activities folk psychological ascrip-
tions are underwritten by the tacit grasp of a theory speci-
fying the use of notions such as belief and desire—
informally much like theoretical explanation in the sci-
ences. Simulation theorists claim that we understand one
another by using our own minds in a process of simula-
tion, generating processes in ourselves similar to those in
other people, informing ourselves of the mental states of
others by running our own cognitive machinery ‘off line’.
This is in contrast to the positing by theory theorists of a
system of laws and logical relations which connect beliefs,
desires, and the like with behaviour. But if we can use our
own minds to simulate the minds of others without invok-
ing such laws, parsimony counsels against theory theory.
Much is made of the pretend play of young children, and
the importance of simulation in ethical evaluation, empa-

thy, fictional narrative, and aesthetics. Whether this
amounts to new interpretations of phenomena or genuine
arguments for the view remains unclear. j.gar.
*theory theory of mind.
M. Davies and T. Stone (eds.), Folk Psychology: The Theory of Mind
Debate (Oxford, 1995).
—— (eds.), Mental Simulation(Oxford, 1995).
sin is moral wrongdoing, or in some cases the omission of
what one ought to do. It is usually thought of as the viola-
tion of natural law or the commands of a deity. A person’s
sins are ordinarily characterized in terms of actions or
omissions, but in some cases sin can be more meaning-
fully construed in terms of faults of character or in terms of
states, such as a state of rebellion against God or estrange-
ment from God. From medieval times the Church has dis-
tinguished mortal sins from venial, or less serious, sins.
More controversial is the notion of *original sin, or guilt
inherited from Adam, the first man. Those who take ser-
iously the notion of original sin place great emphasis upon
the effects of sin in the world. Some religious traditions
allow for the possibility of the forgiveness of sin. g.f.m.
L. Berkhof, Systematic Theology (Grand Rapids, Mich., 1939).
870 sign and symbol
H. Davis, Moral and Pastoral Theology, 4th edn. (London, 1945),
vol i, treatise 4.
sin, original: see original sin.
sincerity. In his History of England Hume described men as
given to ‘feigning’. Sincerity implies by contrast that we
have given a full and frank account of ourselves and have
not added anything extra. So philosophers have debated

whether true morality requires sincerity, or simply appro-
priate conduct and the ‘external’ performance of one’s
duties, and how sincere anyone can be morally required to
be. Kant’s discussion, ‘Concerning Lying’, in the Ground-
work of the Metaphysic of Morals concludes that insincerity
with oneself ‘deserves the greatest censure, for . . . from
such a rotten spot . . . the evil of untruthfulness spreads
itself also into one’s relationships with other men’.
The special problem of philosophical insincerity arises
because of the dual role of the philosopher as custodian of
the virtues and critic of orthodoxies. Thus Descartes has
been accused of hypocrisy in disguising his hostility to
religion and pandering to the Sorbonne, and Hume’s
Treatise of Human Nature invites us to reflect on whether a
philosopher can be a sincere and believing sceptic.
cath.w.
*lying.
I. Kant, Groundwork of the Metaphysic of Morals, tr. J. W. Ellington
(Indianapolis, 1983), pt. ii: ‘The Metaphysical Principles of
Virtue’.
Singer, Peter A. (1946– ). Best known for his writing in
areas of *applied ethics, starting with his best-selling
Animal Liberation (London, 1976), in which he argues that
most treatment meted out to animals is morally intoler-
able. He has continued to write about such issues, but has
also put the ideas and theories of moral philosophy to work
to provide assessments of the morality of euthanasia,
in vitro fertilization, the distribution of world resources,
and many allied topics (see especially his Practical Ethics
(Cambridge, 1979)). His work is marked by a strong com-

mitment to *utilitarianism and by a wish to displace the
morality of what he has referred to as the ‘Judaeo-Christian
inheritance’. He lived and worked for many years in Aus-
tralia, along the way serving on government committees
and running a Centre for Human Bioethics, but in 1999
took a professorship at Princeton. n.j.h.d.
*animals; Hegel.
P. A. Singer, How Are We to Live? (Melbourne, 1993).
—— Rethinking Life and Death (Melbourne, 1994).
Sinn
: see sense and reference.
Skolem paradox. A collection is countable if it is either
finite or has the same size as the natural numbers, the
smallest infinite set. It is a theorem of standard *set theory,
due to Cantor, that the set of real *numbers is not count-
able—there are more real numbers than natural numbers.
However, the Löwenheim–Skolem theorem states that if
a countable set of (first-order) sentences has a model at all,
then it has a model whose domain is at most countable.
The ‘paradox’ is that if real analysis is consistent, it has a
countable model. Similarly, if set theory is consistent, it
has a countable model that satisfies an assertion that one
of its members is not countable. Such models are called
‘non-standard’. The fact that a model of set theory satisfies
an assertion that a set is uncountable only entails that
there is no function in the model that maps the natural
numbers on to the ‘members’ of the set. It does not rule
out the existence of such a function—outside the model.
The ‘paradox’ has been thought to raise doubts concern-
ing the referents of expressions like ‘natural number’ and

‘finite’. In what sense can we say that the aforementioned
non-standard models are ‘unintended’? s.s.
*satisfaction.
Thoralf Skolem, ‘Einige Bemerkungen zur axiomatischen
Begründung der Mengenlehre’; tr. as ‘Some Remarks on
Axiomatized Set Theory’, in Jean van Heijenoort (ed.), From
Frege to Gödel (Cambridge, Mass., 1967).
slave morality. Nietzsche’s designation of one basic type
of morality which he contrasts with another he calls ‘mas-
ter morality’. Whereas ‘master morality’ is fundamentally
a morality of self-affirmation on the part of the powerful,
‘slave morality’ is a reactive morality originating in resent-
ment of the powerful on the part of the powerless. The
qualities of the powerful which they affirm as ‘good’ are
deemed ‘evil’ by the powerless, for whom ‘good’ is deriva-
tively conceived in terms of the absence or repudiation of
those qualities. Nietzsche contends that this reactive, fear-
ful, and resentful type of morality (and its ‘good versus
evil’) has triumphed over its ancient rival (and its contrast-
ing opposition of ‘good versus bad’, i.e. superior versus
inferior) in the modern world, to the detriment of the
quality of human life. (See Beyond Good and Evil, sects.
260–8; Genealogy of Morals, First Essay.) r.s.
Richard Schacht, Nietzsche (London, 1983), ch. 7.
slave of the passions: see reason as slave of the passions.
slime. Sartre invokes le visqueux (slime, stickiness, the vis-
cous) in discussing how feelings, acts, character traits, are
‘charged with something material’, while, equally, mater-
ial substance is engrained with ‘affective meaning’. The
disgustingness of slime seems to have an objective quality,

neither physical nor psychic but transcending both.
Slime’s connotations cannot be derived from slime as
brute fact, but they cannot be a projection of our feelings
either, since to establish the connection between literal
physical sliminess and the slimy quality of a person
requires us to recognize baseness already in sliminess, and
sliminess in a type of baseness: there is ‘pre-ontological
comprehension’. However experienced, slime is comprom-
ising, duplicitous, ‘leechlike’, the potential ‘revenge of the
in-itself’ on the *for-itself it seeks to engulf. j.o’g.
slime 871
slingshot arguments. Such arguments purport to show
that distinct true sentences p and q (or nominalizations of
them, such as ‘the fact that p’ and ‘the fact that q’) can
never have different references. Assuming, as seems plaus-
ible, that any sentence logically equivalent to p has the
same reference, and that the reference of a sentence is not
altered by replacing any term in it by another term with
the same reference, it appears to follow that the reference
of pis the same as the reference of any other true sentence
q. This seems to spell trouble for the *correspondence the-
ory of truth and for an *ontology of *facts, but it is thought
by many that the fault lies more with slingshot arguments
than with their targets. e.j.l.
S. Neale, Facing Facts (Oxford, 2001).
slippery slope. The ‘slippery slope’ is the name of an argu-
ment based on a certain view of human nature, not on
logic, and commonly used in non-philosophical discus-
sions of moral issues. The reasoning is that, though a prac-
tice may be unobjectionable in one type of case, if it is once

permitted, its use will inevitably be extended to other
more morally dubious cases. Thus it is argued that,
though research using human embryos immediately after
fertilization may be morally defensible, the period for
research will inevitably be extended, until we shall find
ourselves using children and adults for research, without
their consent. The inevitability here supposed is not
logical inevitability, but is thought to result from people’s
always wanting more than they have. In fact legislation or
other forms of regulation can usually control an undesir-
able slide down the slippery slope. m.warn.
Michael Lockwood (ed.), Dilemmas in Modern Medicine (Oxford,
1985).
Mary Warnock, The Uses of Philosophy (Oxford, 1992).
Slovene philosophy. Its main areas of activity have been
ethics, natural philosophy, and philosophical psychology,
while the Aristotelian and Thomistic traditions have been
the principal influences.
Medieval disputes in ontology and logic were chiefly
concerned with the meaning, interpretation, and defin-
ition of terms; in the twelfth century, Hermanus de
Carinthia wrote a treatise on essences.
At the time of the Slovene Cultural Revival (the late
eighteenth century) the most prominent philosopher was
Franc Samuel Karpe (1747–1806), whose central philoso-
phy was associative psychology in the tradition of Locke.
His empirical psychology distinguished between the
lower epistemic capabilities, such as sensations and pre-
sentations, and the higher epistemic powers including the
ability to form concepts, conceptual association, memory,

speech, and prediction. Others followed a psychological
approach to epistemic certainty.
Ethics was empirically and psychologically based, tak-
ing as its starting-point the needs of human beings and
their desire for survival as the spur to cultural develop-
ment. Morality was felt to be required where life does not
follow the exigencies of nature. For Karpe, moral philoso-
phy was an extension of thought and imagination by the
introduction of the emotive element. Reflexes determine
personal behaviour, but human beings also possess the
power of decision and free will. Whereas the pure qual-
ities of mind are measurable, a particular soul may only be
compared to them. Also in the period of the Cultural
Revival mathematical metaphysics aimed to replace ver-
bal argumentation by a system of mathematically based
pictorial argumentation.
Starting from Meinongian theory of objects, France
Veber developed his idea of knowledge of reality with the
help of basic sensory experience. Recently the Veberian
tradition has seen a revival with meetings of the
Slovene–Austrian Philosophical Society (Ljubljana and
Graz), and with Acta Analytica, an international journal
dedicated mostly to the philosophy of psychology, edited
by the Ljubljana-based Slovene Society for Analytical Phil-
osophy, one of several active Slovene philosophical soci-
eties. Important work is also being done in the philosophy
of science. m.pot.
*Croatian philosophy; Serbian philosophy.
F. Jerman, ‘The History of Philosophy in Slovenia’, Slovene Stud-
ies, i (Indiana, 1991).

M. Stock and W. G. Stock, International Bibliography of Austrian
Philosophy, i: Psychologie und Philosophie der Grazer Schule (Ams-
terdam, 1990).
Smart, J. J. C. (1920– ). Emeritus Professor of the Aus-
tralian National University and the University of Adelaide,
Companion of the Order of Australia, Cambridge-born,
educated at Glasgow and Oxford, and since the early 1950s
a leading Australian philosopher, widely recognized for
contributions in the philosophy of mind, philosophy of sci-
ence, metaphysics, and ethics. Smart was an original archi-
tect of the brand of tough-minded *realism nowadays
associated with philosophy in Australia. His realism, like
his uncompromising *materialism, is the product of a con-
viction that philosophical theories are constrained by their
scientific plausibility. This conviction underlies Smart’s
defence of a ‘non-cognitivist’ account of the basis of moral
judgement and an advocacy of utilitarian normative prin-
ciples, which are recommended by their simplicity and
generality, features they share with an appropriately mod-
est scientific perspective on the world. j.heil
J. J. C. Smart, Philosophy and Scientific Realism (London, 1963).
Smith, Adam (1723–90). The famous economist was born
in Kirkcaldy and educated at Glasgow and Oxford.
Between 1751 and 1763 he was Professor of Logic and
then of Moral Philosophy in Glasgow. He became tutor to
a Scottish nobleman, whom he accompanied to Europe,
returning to Kirkcaldy in 1767 where he lived with his
mother. Latterly he was a Customs Commissioner in
Edinburgh. He was intimate with Hume, whose views on
morals and economics he shared. A Stoic rather than an

Epicurean, he inherited the spectator theory of virtue
from his teacher Francis Hutcheson. The theory is a form
of psychological *naturalism, explaining moral good as a
872 slingshot arguments
particular kind of pleasure, that of a spectator watching
virtue at work. Smith suggested that the reason for the
pleasure is the similarity between the virtue of the agent
and that of the spectator himself. What makes the specta-
tor’s pleasure moral is its object, the agent’s motive of con-
sciously conforming with agreed standards of not
harming the innocent, benefiting oneself, one’s family and
friends, and the societies to which one belongs, and being
grateful to one’s benefactors. v.h.
*hidden hand.
Adam Smith, The Theory of Moral Sentiments, ed. D. D. Raphael
and A. L. Macfie (Oxford, 1976).
snow is white. ‘“Snow is white” is true if and only if snow
is white’ was Tarski’s celebrated example of what he called
an equivalence of the form T. He showed how truth, for
sentences of a formalized language L, could be defined in
such a way that an equivalence of the form T for each sen-
tence of L is a consequence, and yet without generating the
notorious *liar paradox. Some, notably Davidson, have
attempted to exploit Tarski’s ideas to provide an analysis of
the *semantics of natural language. The interpretation of
Tarski’s results in the context of natural languages, as a the-
ory of meaning, or as a diagnosis and solution of the liar
paradox, has attracted criticism, however, largely because
of what are seen as strong disanalogies between the struc-
tures of formalized and natural languages. c.h.

*semantic theory of truth.
A. Tarski, Logic, Semantics, Metamathematics, 2nd edn. (Indianapo-
lis, 1983).
social change, means of. In a democracy, ideally speak-
ing, citizens produce social change by bringing problems
to the attention of a government, which then gathers evi-
dence and expert opinion. All important social issues are
addressed, evidence is publicly discussed, and decisions
are made by the people as a whole. Transparency and
maximum citizen participation characterize all stages.
Reasoned, just, and non-violent social change is the result.
Since this ideal process is realizable only in democra-
cies, and achieved only rarely there, activists have used
extra-governmental means to try to bring about change.
Social movements, which may include demonstrations,
heroic or self-sacrificial acts, advocacy and organizational
groups, spokespeople, promotional writings, and artistic
expressions, have brought important reform. Such move-
ments—e.g. those for women’s rights and for civil
rights—typically go through many stages over long per-
iods of time. They may be limited to civil disobedience
and other non-violent tactics to appeal to conscience and
generate sympathy, or they may employ violence to retal-
iate for perceived wrongs or to weaken opposing forces
and compel negotiations. More extreme are revolutions
attempting to alter basic social institutions and not work
within them; proponents justify them as the only means of
eliminating pervasive and destructive conditions (e.g. a
repressive regime, an exploitative economic system).
One country may try to produce social change in

another by diplomatic means, by imposing economic
sanctions, or by supporting revolutionary movements or
terrorist activities within it. Even more direct is the inva-
sion and subjugation of another country, defended as
alone effective in eliminating great evils within that coun-
try or in preventing it from causing enormous harm to
others. These methods are increasingly controversial, as
they appear to violate moral standards, international law,
or the United Nations Charter.
Attempts at reform always face the conservatism of the
public media, controlled by the state in authoritarian
regimes and strongly constrained by financial pressures in
liberal ones. The media are usually part of the very power
structure being challenged. Recognizing that media have
a central role in shaping public opinion, activists use mass
demonstrations, art, sympathetic publishers, and ‘alterna-
tive’ media developed by the activist community itself to
gain a public voice. c.c.
Edward S. Herman and Noam Chomsky, Manufacturing Consent:
The Political Economy of the Mass Media (New York, 2002).
J. L. Holzerefe and Robert O. Keohane (eds.), Humanitarian Inter-
vention: Ethical, Legal and Political Dilemmas (Cambridge,
2003).
S. Tarrow, Power in Movement: Social Movements and Contentious
Politics, 2nd edn. (Cambridge, 1998).
social constructionism. Analysis of ‘knowledge’ or ‘real-
ity’ or both as contingent upon social relations, and as
made out of continuing human practices, by processes
such as reification, sedimentation, habitualization.
Schutz’s *phenomenology—the analysis of the structure

of the common-sense world of everyday life—is an
important influence, although current exponents draw on
a variety of sources including *hermeneutics, the later
Wittgenstein’s intersubjective theory of meaning, and the
Marxist conception of *praxis (which emphasizes how
knowledge and politics are contingent upon work and
economic relations). Social constructionists do not
believe in the possibility of value-free foundations or
sources of knowledge, nor do they conceptualize a clear
objective–subjective distinction, or a clear distinction
between ‘knowledge’ and ‘reality’. The position, there-
fore, has profound implications for the practice and phi-
losophy of science, and for political philosophy. e.j.f.
*social facts; communitarianism.
Peter Berger and Thomas Luckmann, The Social Construction of
Reality: A Treatise in the Sociology of Knowledge (Har-
mondsworth, 1967).
social contract: see contract, social.
Social Darwinism. Social Darwinism is a diverse collec-
tion of nineteenth- and early twentieth-century doctrines
that enjoyed considerable popularity and that interpreted
various human social phenomena in the light of (what was
taken to be) Darwinian evolutionary theory. Perhaps the
most influential form of Social Darwinism viewed society
Social Darwinism 873
and the economy as a competitive arena in which the
‘fittest’ would rise to the top. With this doctrine went the
worry that various cultural practices and social reforms
meant to provide for the least well-off in fact lessen this
‘natural selection’ and promote instead a ‘degeneration’ of

the species. From a contemporary perspective, Social Dar-
winists conflated social success with reproductive fitness
(wealth and education in fact tend to be inversely correl-
ated with birth-rate) and questions of moral rightness with
matters of a supposed ‘natural order’. p.r.
*evolution.
R. C. Bannister, Social Darwinism: Science and Myth in Anglo-
American Social Thought (Philadelphia, 1979).
social engineering. Concept popularized by Karl Popper’s
critique in his Open Society and its Enemies (Princeton, NJ,
1950), it takes two forms. Utopian social engineering, asso-
ciated with Plato, Hegel, Marx, and their totalitarian heirs,
is committed to the wholesale transformation of society
through central planning according to a comprehensive
ideal plan and unlimited by any constraints from compet-
ing social institutions (e.g. the church). Piecemeal social
engineering involves only ‘searching for, and fighting
against, the greatest and most urgent evils of society’. Pop-
per’s distinction aside, social engineering as a legitimate
activity of government is essential to the welfare state and
to all versions of *socialism and *communism. It is anath-
ema to *libertarianism but endorsed under constraints by
modern *liberalism. h.a.b.
Friedrich A. Hayek, The Road to Serfdom (Chicago, 1944).
Barbara Wootton, Freedom under Planning (Chapel Hill, NC,
1945).
social epistemology. Two distinct, but not unrelated,
fields of study compete for this label. The first is a version
of the theory of knowledge which fully acknowledges our
dependence on other people in this matter, and does not

relegate it to the marginal or supplementary status of ‘tes-
timony’. All but the most elemental knowledge—of the
sort possessed by infants and animals—presupposes the
mastery of the indisputably social institution of language.
The second, and less philosophical, is a concern with the
social determinants of belief. It has obvious relevance to
moral and political convictions. Attempts to apply it to the
findings of natural science—let alone those of mathemat-
ics—are less persuasive. a.q.
*sociology of knowledge.
Alvin Goldman, Knowledge in a Social World (Oxford, 1999).
social facts. A *fact is a social fact when it is a statement
concerning the forms of organization present in a society
or it ascribes an irreducibly social property to an entity.
According to Durkheim, social facts result from treating
social phenomena, including ourselves, as things; they can
therefore be approached, it is claimed, in the same object-
ive way as the facts with which the natural sciences deal.
Social facts, such as ‘George W. Bush is President of the
United States’ and ‘France is a charter member of the
United Nations’, are the concern of sociologists, whose
task it is to attain a body of knowledge on the basis of
which the actions of human beings as members of society
can be understood. The main question in this area con-
cerns the relationship of such facts to facts about individ-
uals: are social facts reducible to, or explained solely by,
facts such as the beliefs and desires of individuals, i.e. non-
social facts? Methodological individualists have answered
in the affirmative, insisting that there are not both soci-
eties and their members, and that everything that happens

can be explained without recourse to social entities and
social properties. Methodological holists, on the other
hand, claim that understanding some types of behaviour
necessarily depends upon understanding the holistic phe-
nomena of social structures.
The debate about social facts has thus centred on ambi-
guities in the important but unclear concept of ‘reduction’
and is bound up with the question of the merits and
demerits of functionalist explanations in sociology.
Clearly, it is also a debate about the purposes of social
science. p.w.
*methodological holism and individualism.
E. Durkheim, The Rules of Sociological Method (New York, 1964).
M. Gilbert, On Social Facts (London, 1989).
D. Ruben, The Metaphysics of the Social World (London, 1985).
socialism. It is difficult to subsume all the various socio-
economic beliefs that have been referred to as ‘socialism’
under one definition. In its broadest sense, socialism refers
to the views of those who: (1) claim that *capitalism has
grave moral flaws and (2) advocate some revolutionary
socio-economic reform to remedy these flaws.
Certain elements of what is typically thought of as
socialist thought appear throughout the entire history of
philosophy, such as in Thomas More’s Utopia and even
Plato’s Republic. But the term ‘socialism’ was first used in
connection with the views of early nineteenth-century
social critics, such as Robert Owen, Saint-Simon, Charles
Fourier, and Pierre Proudhon. These social critics were
reacting to the excesses and injustices of early capitalism,
and advocated reforms such as the transformation of soci-

ety into small communities in which private *property
was to be abolished and the radical redistribution of
wealth. Socialism is also an important part of the philoso-
phy of Karl Marx and *Marxism. For Marxists, socialism is
viewed as a stage in history characterized, in part, by state
ownership of all capital goods and central planning of the
economy. This stage in history they see as transitional
between capitalism and the final stage of history, *com-
munism, which will be characterized by the absence of dif-
fering social classes and thus the end of class warfare.
Among the grave moral flaws that socialists typically
claim to be inherent in capitalism are vast, unjust
inequalities in wealth, income, opportunities, and power.
Other moral flaws seen in capitalism include excessive
individualism, competition and materialism, and the
874 Social Darwinism
*exploitation of ordinary working people. Perhaps more
than anything else, however, socialists oppose the unjust
oppression of one group by another, whether through
class domination, discrimination, or an unequal distribu-
tion of power. In short, socialism, in the broad sense,
champions the ‘underdogs’ of society. The revolutionary
socio-economic reforms that have been proposed by
socialists for remedying the declared moral flaws of cap-
italism are so diverse as to defy any precise characteriza-
tion. Typically, these reforms involve radical changes in
the ownership or distribution of property throughout
society. It is questionable, however, whether ‘socialism’
in this broad sense is a specific enough term to be very use-
ful. Moreover, not all those who see grave moral flaws in

capitalism and call for major reforms, or who have joined
the fight against oppression, consider themselves to be
socialists; to call them ‘socialists’ anyway invites confusing
their views with socialism in the narrower sense to be con-
sidered next.
The narrower, and thus perhaps more useful, sense in
which the term ‘socialism’ is often used is to refer to an
economic system which features: (1) state ownership of
the means of production and control over investment
throughout the economy; (2) a more equal distribution of
income and wealth than typically found in capitalism; and
(3) democratic election of government officials responsi-
ble for economic decisions. Those who advocate a system
with the above three features have, in the past, often advo-
cated a fourth feature as well: government planning of not
just investment, but the entire economy; that is, govern-
ment planning of what goods and services are to be pro-
duced, how they are to be produced, in what quantities,
and at what prices they are to be sold, rather then simply
allowing these matters to be determined by the market
through supply and demand. If the economic system
includes this fourth feature, it is referred to as ‘central-
planning socialism’.
The most significant of these features for defining
socialism in the narrow sense is state ownership of the
means of production and control over investment; this is,
arguably, the only feature that qualifies as being both a
necessary and a sufficient defining characteristic. The sec-
ond feature, that of income and wealth under socialism
being distributed more equally than under capitalism, is

something about which socialists generally agree,
although there is much disagreement about what prin-
ciple, exactly, should govern this distribution. A number
of alternatives that have been advocated, including, for
example, ‘To each equally’, ‘To each according to his or
her effort’, and ‘To each according to his or her need’. The
third feature, democratic elections, is one that most social-
ist theorists insist upon, although whenever socialism of
the central-planning variety has been put into effect in a
country, *democracy has not flourished. The fourth fea-
ture—namely, government planning of the entire econ-
omy—has been, perhaps, the most controversial feature.
Advocates of this feature argue that central-planning
remedies well-known flaws of capitalism, such as monop-
olies, business cycles, unemployment, vast inequalities in
the distribution of wealth, and the mistreatment of work-
ers. On the other hand, conservative economists, such as
Ludwig von Mises and Friedrich Hayek, argue that cen-
tral-planning can never come close to matching the effi-
ciency of the *market, because central-planners can never
match the overall information inherent in the decision-
making throughout a market economy, nor can business
managers in a centrally planned economy ever match the
motivation of entrepreneurs in a market economy, who
are driven by private profit.
The arguments of these conservative economists, as
well as the relatively poor performance of economies that,
for the most part, have been centrally planned, have led
many socialists to abandon feature four, and to propose
instead a reliance upon the market for almost everything

other than investment. State control over investment,
combined with a reliance upon the market for almost
everything other than investment, will, these new social-
ists argue, remedy the main flaws inherent in capitalism
while, at the same time, retaining the productivity advan-
tages of the market. The economists Oskar Lange and
Fred M. Taylor were early proponents of such an
approach, which is referred to as ‘market socialism’.
Recent proponents of a similar approach, such as the
philosopher David Schweickart, have added the feature of
*worker control to the general idea of market socialism to
form a system often referred to as ‘worker-control social-
ism’. With worker control, the workers of each business
enterprise are to manage it themselves through direct
democracy or, as will more often be the case, are to elect,
periodically, a team of managers who then manage the
enterprise for them. An advantage of worker control is
claimed to be that managers who must face workers in
periodic elections will therefore be motivated, above all
else, to do what is beneficial for workers, rather than
exploiting them. Still other reformers propose an eco-
nomic system featuring worker control, but without state
ownership of the means of production and control over
investment; rather, the workers of each business enter-
prise are themselves to own its means of production, and
investment is to be left to the market. But since, with such
an economic system, all the means of production are pri-
vately owned and the market prevails throughout the
entire economy, this system is more appropriately
referred to as ‘worker-control capitalism’, not socialism.

d.w.has.
*conservatism; liberalism; anti-communism; markets
and the public good; privatization.
N. Scott Arnold, Marx’s Radical Critique of Capitalist Society: A
Reconstruction and Critical Evaluation (Oxford, 1990).
G. D. H. Cole, History of Socialist Thought, 7 vols. (London,
1953–60).
D. W. Haslett, Capitalism with Morality (Oxford, 1994).
Kai Nielsen, Equality and Liberty: A Defense of Radical Egalitarianism
(Totowa, NJ, 1985).
David Schweickart, Capitalism or Worker Control? (New York,
1980).
socialism 875
social philosophy. The term ‘social philosophy’ does not
have a fixed meaning in current philosophical circles.
Sometimes it is used as more or less equivalent to *‘polit-
ical philosophy’: that is, to the normative discussion—ana-
lytical or substantive—of questions about how society
should be organized. But usually it is taken to be the non-
normative discussion—again, analytical or substantive—
of what is involved in having social organization: the
non-normative discussion of what sorts of entity appear
with the onset of society and of how they relate to individ-
ual human subjects. I shall take social philosophy in this
latter sense, as a sort of social ontology: as an account of
what there is in the social world.
Social philosophy in the ontological sense takes as
granted that there is no society without individual inten-
tional agents: without subjects who apparently act, other
things being equal, on the basis of their beliefs and desires,

and who are capable of exhibiting rationality—and of
seeking to exhibit rationality—in the formation and main-
tenance of those beliefs and desires (Pettit, The Common
Mind, pt. 1). The question which it raises bears on what
more we should include in our ontological stock-taking of
society; and of how the more we should include, if there is
any, relates to individual intentional subjects.
This question may be raised on the basis simply of our
everyday experience and understanding of social life: on
the basis of our commonplace sociology, as we might call
it. But it is usually raised not just on this basis, but equally
on the basis of what the best social science—whatever that
is taken to be—tells us about the social world. Social phil-
osophy becomes in good part an ontology of social sci-
ence. (*Social science, philosophy of.) Consider an
analogy. The philosophy of mind seeks to tell us what is
involved in a creature’s being a psychological subject, as
social philosophy tries to say what is involved in an
arrangement’s being a social form of organization. In rais-
ing the psychological question, the philosopher will take
account of all that we know, in our experience of our-
selves and others, of human psychology. But if he is ser-
ious, he will also take account of what the best psychology
and neuroscience, as he sees it, says about psychological
subjects. Similarly, the social philosopher who is anxious
to provide an ontological inventory of the social realm
will take account not just of the sociological common-
places, but also of the scientific verities—as he sees
them—about the social realm.
We should note, in passing, that the stock of common-

places that a social philosopher recognizes may vary,
depending on the scientific verities that he recognizes.
Someone who takes a radical Marxist view of social sci-
ence, for example, is likely to be less impressed than some-
one of a more conservative bent about the alleged
commonplace status of the claim that people generally
know the reasons why they do things: that they are not
generally ignorant or deceived about their motivations.
The situation here is again parallel to the situation in
psychology. As there are rival theories in social science, so
there are competing stories in psychology and neuro-
science; and as the social-scientific variation impacts on
what sociological commonplaces are recognized, so the
psychological and neuroscientific diversity correlates with
a variation in what are taken to be commonplaces about
psychological subjects.
What we have been saying bears on the *dialectic
whereby a particular social philosophy, a particular ontol-
ogy of society, will be defended. The dialectic will involve
arguing for a particular trade-off of apparent common-
places for alleged social-scientific verities and investigat-
ing what the preferred package of commonplaces and
verities suggests about the ontology of the social world.
But what are the different social philosophies between
which we are to judge? What are the main lines of division
in the area?
There are two aspects to social life. There is the social
interaction between individuals in virtue of which various
relationships get formed: relationships involving commu-
nication, affection, collaboration, exchange, recognition,

esteem, or whatever. And there is the social aggregation of
individual attitudes and actions in virtue of which various
institutions get established: these institutions will include
common instrumentalities such as languages, cultures, and
markets; groups, like the club or union or party, whose
essence it is to have a mode of collective behaviour; groups
that may have only a non-behavioural collective identity
like genders, races, and classes; and shared resources of the
kind illustrated by museums, libraries, and states.
Social philosophy concerns itself both with issues raised
by interaction and with questions associated with aggre-
gation. I will look at the interaction area first and then at
that of aggregation. But before going on, one preliminary
comment. Interaction need not involve people’s inten-
tional attitudes: after all, my breathing the oxygen that
you would otherwise consume is a form of interaction.
And, equally, aggregation need not involve such attitudes
either: aggregation accounts for the fact, for example, that
together you and I weigh twenty stone. When I speak of
social interaction and social aggregation, I assume that
these are forms of interaction and aggregation that require
the people involved to have certain intentional attitudes; I
ignore interaction and aggregation of the purely physical,
and certainly non-social, sort.
On the side of interaction, the main issue in social phil-
osophy is that which divides so-called atomists from non-
atomists (Taylor, Philosophy and the Human Sciences). The
atomist holds that individual human beings do not depend
on social relationships for the appearance of any distinct-
ive human capacities. The non-atomist holds that they do.

The atomist defends an image of human beings under
which they come to society with all the characteristic
properties that they will ever display; social life does not
transform them in any essential manner. The non-atomist
denies this, believing that it is only in the experience of
social relationships that the human being comes properly
into his own.
This formulation of the issue is crucially vague, in at
least two respects. First, it is not clear what sort of social
876 social philosophy
dependence is in question; and second, it is not obvious
what are to count as distinctive human capacities. The trad-
itional resolution of the second vagueness is to nominate
the relevant capacity as the ability—the actualized, con-
crete ability—to reason and think. And this resolution
prompts a resolution of the first vagueness. It suggests that
the question cannot be whether human beings depend
causally on their relationships with one another for having
the capacity to think. If that were the question, then the
atomist’s position would be extraordinarily weak; all the
evidence of children raised in isolation, as well as our sense
of what we learn from our parents and teachers, argues
against it. Thus the issue must be whether individual
human beings depend on their relationships with one
another in a non-causal way for having the ability to rea-
son and think (Pettit, The Common Mind, ch. 4).
It is plausible that individuals depend on social relation-
ships in a non-causal way for having the ability—the actu-
alized, concrete ability—to speak the local language;
without other individuals, or without social relationships

to such individuals, it is unclear how a person could count
as speaking a language shared with them. The non-
atomist holds that the same sort of social dependence gov-
erns the ability of an individual to reason and think: the
ability, as we may take it, not just to have beliefs and
desires, but to act with a view to having rational beliefs
and desires. The atomist denies this, sticking by the view
that all that is involved in reason and thought, all that is
non-causally required for their appearance, is available to
the individual outside society.
The debate between atomists and non-atomists has
centred around the connection between thought and lan-
guage. Atomists have taken their lead from Hobbes, who
argues that, however useful language is for mnemonic,
taxonomic, and communicative purposes, thinking is pos-
sible without speech, even without any inchoate form of
speech. Non-atomists have tended to follow Rousseau
and the Romantic tradition with which he is associated—
a tradition also encompassing Herder and Hegel—in argu-
ing, first, that language is social and, second, that thought
requires language.
The atomist tradition has been dominant in English-
speaking philosophy, while the non-atomist has had a con-
siderable presence in France and Germany. One source of
non-atomism in the English-speaking world has been the
work of the later Wittgenstein, in which it is suggested
that following a rule—and, therefore, thinking—is pos-
sible only in the context of social practices and relation-
ships. This very strong non-atomist thesis may also be
weakened, so that the claim is that following a rule of a

characteristic kind—say, a suitably scrutable kind—
requires such a social context (Pettit, The Common Mind,
ch. 4). Another source of non-atomism in recent English-
speaking philosophy has been the argument that the con-
tent of a person’s thoughts is fixed not just by what goes on
in his head, but by the linguistic community to which he
belongs and to which he aspires to remain faithful
(Hurley, Natural Reasons).
So much for the main question raised in social philoso-
phy by the interactive side of social life. What now of the
issues generated by the aggregative aspect of society?
There are a number of interesting questions raised by the
aggregative structure of society (*methodological holism
and individualism), but one issue is of striking importance.
This is whether the entities that appear with the social
aggregation of individual attitudes and actions give the lie
to our ordinary sense of intentional agency: whether their
presence means that our commonplace psychological
sense of one another—our sense of one another as, most
of the time, more or less rational creatures—is unsound;
whether it means that, contrary to appearances, we are in
some way the dupes of higher-level patterns or forces
(Pettit, The Common Mind, ch. 3). The individualist, to use
a name that also bears further connotations, denies that
aggregate entities have this effect; the non-individualist
insists that they do.
One extreme sort of individualism would say that
intentional agency is not compromised by any aggregate,
social entities, because in strict truth no such entities exist;
they have the status of logical fictions, as it is sometimes

put, or something of the kind. This doctrine is not very
plausible, for who can sensibly deny, at least for reasons
specific to the social domain, that there are languages and
organizations and collectivities and the like? The more
appealing form of individualism would say that while
there are indeed a variety of aggregate entities, there is
nothing about those entities that suggests that our
received, commonplace psychology is mistaken. True,
there are aggregate regularities associated with such
entities: for example, a rise in unemployment tends to be
followed by a rise in crime; the fact that something is in an
organization’s interest generally means that agents of the
organization will pursue it; and the optimality of a certain
procedure in certain contexts—say, an economic deci-
sion-making procedure—often ensures its stability. But
the individualist will argue that the obtaining of those regu-
larities does not signal the presence of forces unrecog-
nized in commonplace psychology, nor the operation of
any mechanism—say, any selection mechanism—that
belies the assumptions of that psychology. That the regu-
larities obtain can be explained within that psychology,
given the context in which the relevant agents find them-
selves and given their understanding—perhaps involving
relevant aggregate-level concepts—of that context.
The issue between individualism and non-individualism,
as this should make clear, ties up closely with questions
of social explanation: questions in the philosophy of social
science about the resources required in order to make
sense of social happenings and regularities (James, The
Content of Social Explanation; Ruben, The Metaphysics of the

Social World). The individualist may admit that social
explanation can happily invoke structural or aggregate
factors, but he must be able to argue that the causal rele-
vance ascribed to those factors is not inconsistent with
the assumptions of commonplace psychology. The non-
individualist will maintain that, on the contrary, aggregate
social philosophy 877
factors have causal relevance in such a predetermining
way, or on the basis of such a predestining form of selec-
tion, that our commonplace psychology has to be seen as
deeply misleading (Pettit, The Common Mind, ch. 3). p.p.
*social facts.
Susan Hurley, Natural Reasons (New York, 1989).
Susan James, The Content of Social Explanation (Cambridge, 1984).
Philip Pettit, The Common Mind: An Essay on Psychology, Society and
Politics (New York, 1993).
David-Hillel Ruben, The Metaphysics of the Social World (London,
1985).
Charles Taylor, Philosophy and the Human Sciences (Cambridge,
1985).
social science, philosophy of. The philosophy of any sci-
ence comes in two varieties, as the methodology or as the
ontology of the discipline. The methodology looks at
questions to do with the nature of observations, laws and
theories, the logic of induction and confirmation, the
requirements of understanding and explanation, and so
on. The ontology looks at questions to do with what the
discipline posits—what it says there is—and with whether
those posits are consistent with more or less common-
place beliefs.

The philosophy of social science, as this distinction
would lead us to expect, has both a methodological and an
ontological aspect; we might do better, indeed, to regard it
as two disciplines, one methodological, the other onto-
logical. The methodology of social science concerns itself
with the implicit claim of social science to be able to gen-
erate knowledge, especially knowledge otherwise
unavailable, of the social world; in particular, it has tended
in recent years to focus on the claim of social science to be
able to provide distinctive explanations (James, The Con-
tent of Social Explanation; Ruben, The Metaphysics of the
Social World). The ontology of social science concerns
itself with the sorts of entity that the discipline posits—
entities like aggregate regularities and structural con-
straints—and at how far those entities are consistent with
our more or less commonplace view of human beings and
their relationships. I will discuss only the methodology of
social science here, as the ontology of social science is
covered under the heading of *social philosophy. (See
Ryan, The Philosophy of the Social Sciences, for an overview.)
The methodology of social science may be motivated
in one of two ways: internally or externally. The exter-
nally motivated methodology of social science sees its job
as the replication, in the social area, of the methodological
discussion of natural science. Every methodology of nat-
ural science will offer an account of observation, induc-
tion, explanation, and related topics. The externally
motivated methodology of social science looks at social
science with a view to seeing how far that account is borne
out there, and with what nuances. In principle, the possi-

bility is open that the account will be revised in the light of
reflection on social science. In practice, the lessons from
the area of natural science are often taken as more or less
canonical.
The upshot of this approach to the methodology of
social science may be conservative or critical. The conserv-
ative methodologist holds that, in general, social science
conforms to the canonical methods and that it deserves to
be treated as seriously as natural science (Papineau, For Sci-
ence in Social Science). The critical methodologist, on the
other hand, argues that at least in some cases social science
deviates from the standards fixed by the natural sciences
and to that extent should be regarded as something less
than science: as pseudo-science, for example, or common
sense. The dominant methodology of natural science in
this century has been associated with the positivist move-
ment and with post-positivist variations such as that
developed by Karl Popper and his school. It is striking that
such positivists and post-positivists have sometimes been
conservative in their methodological reflections on the social
sciences, sometimes critical. Among the critical trends, we
find a tendency to see history and ethnographic anthro-
pology as exercises in common sense rather than science, and
a disposition to dismiss speculative theories influenced by
the work of Marx and Freud as pseudo-scientific.
So much for the externally motivated methodology of
social science. What now of the internally motivated var-
iety? This alternative approach, unparalleled in the
methodology of natural science, has its source in a peculiar
feature of the social sciences. The social sciences were con-

ceived and pursued, from the very beginning, under the
influence of ideals, particularly ideals of scientific objectiv-
ity and progress, deriving from the eighteenth-century
*Enlightenment movement. The first social scientists
were economists and sociologists, as we would call them
today, and they were self-consciously concerned about
producing something that would count not as philosophy,
not as literature, not as common sense, but as science: as a
project faithful to the image forged by natural science.
The scientific intention—the intention to make sci-
ence—has remained characteristic of work in the social
sciences. It puts social scientists, paradoxically, under an
obligation of a philosophical kind: the obligation to show
that the sort of analysis they pursue is of a properly scien-
tific kind. And in this way it gives rise to the internally
motivated approach to the philosophy—strictly, the
methodology—of social science. Under this approach, the
task for the methodology of social science is not primarily
to map the practices of the social sciences, as if they were
on a par with the natural sciences, but rather to interro-
gate and assess the philosophies or ideologies whereby the
social sciences try to legitimize what they do: that is, try to
show that what they do is genuinely scientific in character.
It is not usual to present things in this way, but, broadly
speaking, there are three main ideologies that have been
invoked—individually or in various combinations—by
social scientists, in the scientific legitimization of their
enterprise. These each mark a feature that putatively dis-
tinguishes social science from mere common sense, mere
social lore. The first ideology hails social science as an

explanatory enterprise of culturally universal validity; the
second as an enterprise that is interpretatively neutral, not
878 social philosophy
being warped by people’s self-understanding; and the third
as an enterprise that enjoys evaluative independence:
value-freedom. The universality, neutrality, and independ-
ence claimed are each meant to establish social science as
objective, and therefore scientifically respectable, in a way
in which social lore is not; each notion offers an explication
of what scientific objectivity involves.
Social lore is always lore about a particular social
milieu and culture, and an aspiration to cultural universal-
ity, if it can be vindicated, would certainly give social
science a distinctive status. Such an aspiration is supported
in a variety of traditions: among anthropologists and
sociologists of a Durkheimian cast, among many Marxist
scholars, and among those economists who think that all
human behaviour, and the patterns to which it gives rise,
can be explained by reference to Homo economicus. But
methodologists of social science have claimed many rea-
sons to question the possibility of any universalist, or at
least any straightforwardly universalist, theory. The
hermeneutic tradition that has long been dominant in
Germany and the analytical tradition sponsored by the
work of the later Wittgenstein both suggest that any
explanation of human behaviour has to start with the cul-
turally specific concepts in which people understand their
environment and cannot aspire, therefore, to a substan-
tive universality. The debate on these questions ranges
widely, encompassing issues to do with cultural and other

forms of relativism (Winch, The Idea of a Social Science and
its Relation to Philosophy; Hollis and Lukes, Rationality and
Relativism).
Social lore is not only particularistic, it is also designed
to represent people as subjectively understandable or
interpretable. We, the local consumers of such lore, know
what it is like to be creatures of the kind represented and
know how we would go about communicating with
them. The second, and perhaps least persuasive, ideology
of social science suggests that this disposition to represent
people as subjectively understandable comes of a limited
perspective which social science transcends. It suggests
that social science can aspire to an objective explanation of
people’s behaviour without worrying about whether the
explanation fits with their self-understanding: without
being anxious to ensure that it makes native sense of them
and facilitates interpersonal communication. The ideol-
ogy suggests that social science, in the received phrases,
can aspire to a form of Erklären, or explanation, that need
not service the needs of interpersonal Verstehen, or under-
standing. Methodologists of social science have claimed
many reasons to question this aspiration to Verstehen-free
explanation. The hermeneutic and Wittgensteinian
thinkers mentioned earlier both reject the idea that people
can be properly understood without facilitating communi-
cation (Winch, The Idea of a Social Science). And the many
philosophers who follow the lead of Donald Davidson on
interpretation argue that there is no interpreting human
subjects without representing them as more or less
rational and more or less interpersonally scrutable

(Macdonald and Pettit, Semantics and Social Science).
Social lore is often evaluatively committed, as well as
being particularistic and orientated to subjective under-
standing. It takes a form which is premissed on an evalu-
ative characterization of the status quo. Thus it may
characterize the beliefs, and explain the behaviour, of
rulers on the assumption that the regime they sustain is
unjust. The third and most common legitimizing ideology
of social science, one associated in particular with the Ger-
man sociologist Max Weber, holds that in this respect—
and perhaps in this respect only—social science can do
scientifically better than social lore. It can acknowledge
that the agents in the society have evaluative beliefs, and it
can take account of these in its explanation of what they
do, without itself endorsing any such beliefs; it can be
objective, in the familiar sense of remaining uncommitted
on evaluative questions. Methodologists of social science
have also sought reasons to doubt this claim, but the
debate has been confused by differences over what sorts of
evaluative commitment would really be damaging to the
pretensions of social science (Macdonald and Pettit,
Semantics and Social Science, ch. 4). p.p.
*social facts.
Martin Hollis and Steven Lukes (eds.), Rationality and Relativism
(Oxford, 1982).
Susan James, The Content of Social Explanation (Cambridge,
1984).
Graham Macdonald and Philip Pettit, Semantics and Social Science
(London, 1971).
David Papineau, For Science in Social Science (London, 1978).

David-Hillel Ruben, The Metaphysics of the Social World (London,
1985).
Alan Ryan, The Philosophy of the Social Sciences (London, 1970).
Peter Winch, The Idea of a Social Science and its Relation to Philoso-
phy (London, 1958).
society. A set of individuals and/or institutions in rela-
tions governed by practical interdependence, convention,
and perhaps law—which relations may vary from the local
to the international. The modern concept emerged in later
eighteenth-century Europe (in arguments against abso-
lutism and civic republicanism) to denote a supposed
sphere of causal and moral self-sufficiency lying between
the political and the personal. The concept was the ground
for the new ‘science’ of ‘sociology’. It later came to be used
more loosely to include the political and the personal.
Many *liberalisms have resisted the idea of ‘the social’, pre-
ferring to see individuals as self-sufficient. Some philoso-
phers, however, including Williams and Rawls, as well as
some critics of liberalism, like MacIntyre, have recently
reasserted conceptions of the social as the ground of moral
possibility and moral judgement. g.p.h.
*communitarianism; organic society; social philoso-
phy; social science, philosophy of.
‘Democracy’, ‘Equality’, ‘Feudal System’, ‘Liberty’, ‘Nation’,
‘Sovereignty’, ‘Burke’, ‘Constant’, ‘Hegel’, ‘Marx’, ‘Mon-
tesquieu’, ‘Rousseau’, ‘Sieyès’, ‘Tocqueville’, in F. Furet and
M. Ozouf (eds.), A Critical Dictionary of the French Revolution
(Cambridge, Mass., 1989).
society 879