Society and Social Pathology (eBook)

R.C. Smith is an academic interested in extensive, crossdisciplinary critical research and study. Focusing in particular on a research program that spans the intersections of social science, natural science, humanities, and history, Smith is the author of over 100 articles and several books. You can find him on Twitter: @_rc_smith_.

1. Introduction1.1. Is Society Sick?1.2. Mounting Evidence of a Mental Health Crisis1.3. Beginning to Make the Social Connection1.4. More than a Mental Health Crisis1.5. Drawing Systemic Links: The Pathological Character of Contemporary Crises1.6. The Need for a Progressive Philosophy of the Subject1.7. Why Social Pathology?2. An Alternative Conception of Social Pathology2.1. Mainstream Theories of Social Pathology: An Introduction2.2. Mainstream Social Science, Pathology, and the Question of Norms2.3. A Critique of Erich Fromm’s Humanism: Toward a Critical, Normative Alternative2.4 Fromm’s Critique of Freud’s Instinct Theory2.5 Freud’s Instinct Theory and Beyond: Toward a Multidimensional and Integral View of the Subject2.6. Axel Honneth, Social Pathologies, and the Legacy of Critical Theory2.7. Toward an Alternative Conception of Social Pathology: A Multidimensional, Integral, Normative Approach3. History, Systems of Domination and Moral Norms3.1. Sick Societies and human behaviour3.2. Dialectic of Enlightenment Revisited: Social Pathology in Relation to Systemic-structural Cycles of Domination3.3. Norms and Needs: a Critical Normative Humanism 4. The Individual in Capitalistic Society4.1. Adorno’s Philosophy of the Subject: Social Interaction, Developmental Psychology, Ego Colonization4.2. The Rigidified Ego and Social Pathology4.3. Economic Coercion, Societal Reproduction and Subject Deformation4.4. “Stupidity is a Scar” – Projection, Internalization and Threat4.5. Sociology and Psychology: Standardization, Consumerism and Sensational Patterns5. Emancipatory Politics and Social Transformation5.1. Emancipatory Politics as Healing5.2. Cultural Shifts: Contemporary Social Movements, Prefiguration and the “Journey Within”5.3. Emancipatory Transition: The Early Designs of an Economics of Healing5.4. Pathological Ossification and Trauma: Consumerism, the Fragile Self, and Roads to Sanity