Daniel James

It is increasingly realized today that Western modernity has not only promoted progressive ideals such as scientific thought, human rights and democratic political systems. Its history is also marked by a much darker side, one of brutal conquest, biological and cultural destruction, enslavement and exploitation of non-European peoples in the context of European colonialism. This dark side of Western modernity was legitimized by pro-colonial ideologies of property, war, civilization, progress and race. Such ideologies emerged in areas like jurisprudence and philosophy since the 16th century, often building on views from classical antiquity (Pagden 1995). They shaped academic paradigms such as ‘scientific racism’, colonial anthropology and Orientalism in the 19th and early 20th centuries, and in many ways continue to influence contemporary societies and their academic practices.

Social functions and functional explanations play a prominent role not only in our everyday reasoning but also in classical as well as contemporary social theory and empirical social research. This volume explores metaphysical, normative, and methodological perspectives on social functions and functional explanations in the social sciences. It aims to push the philosophical debate on social functions forward along new investigative lines by including up-to-date discussions of the metaphysics of social functions, questions concerning the nature of functional explanations within the social domain, and various applications of functionalist theorising. As such, this is one of the first collections to exclusively address a variety of philosophical questions concerning the nature and relevance of social functions.

A widespread view about early social functionalism is that its account of functional explanation was underpinned by an analogy between biological organisms and societies that suggested pseudo-explanations about the latter. I will challenge this view through a case study of the use G.W.F. Hegel made of the organismic analogy for the purpose of concept development in his theory of the state. My claim will be that the dismissal of this analogy is premature for two reasons. First, to claim that the organismic analogy figured among the premises of an analogical argument and, thus, as explanans in an explanation misses its point. For Hegel made use of the analogy to model the apparent close cooperation among the parts of the state and, thus conceptualize its characteristic structure in terms of organization: the mutual dependence among distinct structures generated by the state as a whole. Second, the organizational view of social functions thus suggested by the organismic analogy has not obviously been made obsolete by evolutionary theory. Instead, reconsidering the organismic analogy in light of contemporary philosophy of biology puts an account of social functions that has fallen from view (and from grace) in the contemporary discussion back in focus: the organizational account.