Social Order and Its Paradigms, Or: What Is a Paradigm of Order?

Abstract

No social life is possible without order. Therefore, it is not surprising that many theories have been developed to explain what social order is and how it is possible. The inquiry leads the many theories of order back to few patterns of how it has been understood from the very beginning of Western thought to the present time. By analysing these patterns of thinking—which are defined as “paradigms of order”—an intellectual map is produced in which the most significant distinctions in the approaches concerning order as well as the most relevant breaks, or “paradigmatic revolutions”, become evident. To do so, the chapter begins by clarifying what is understood by “social order” and what the advantages of using this concept are. Having specified the methodology of the inquiry as well as the meaning of “theories” and “paradigms”, the results of both clarifications—of the concept of “order”, on the one hand, as well as of the notion of “paradigm” on the other—are brought together, so as to give an account of what the “paradigms of order” are assumed to be.