SOCIAL PHILOSOPHY (Philosophical Dictionary, Walter Brugger and Kenneth

Baker)
Numerous social sciences (sociology, the science of social forms and conditions;
social ethics, social psychology; political science, jurisprudence, economics)
investigate, order and explain the various phenomena of social life according to
their own particular viewpoints. Social philosophy seeks to understand *society
itself and social living as such from its ultimate foundation, i.e., the naturally given
social orientation of man. --- Does this orientation consist merely in insufficiency
and so in the need of outside help in order to reach certain goals, or does it consist
rather in the possibility, though the abundance of its own abilities, to establish a
community as a higher unity and in this community with others to arrive at its own
full development? In actual fact everything that we call * culture is realizable only
through spiritual communion with others. According to the first view, social living is
only an accidental appendage or help of man; according to the second view it is
something essential to man, so much so that only here is he able to fulfill his true
humanity. This is not to deny that may social bodies (e.g., business groups) are only
helps; but at the very least family and *state are necessary for the essential self
fulfillment of a man.
There are three possible positions to take in this matter: 1) One considers man to be
perfect in himself, so that he associates with others only on the basis of usefulness
(the advantage in the division of labor). The individual person is everything, society
is simply a means with no proper worth: *individualism. 2) One considers man as
basically incomplete in himself as one who has meaning and purpose only as the
member of a community. The community is everything, the individual as such lacks
all proper worth, he lives and dies only for the sake of the community: *Collectivism.
--- 3) The individual person possesses the inalienable worth of his own moral
*personality which prevents his ever being used as a more means to an end or as a
mere part of a larger whole. Nevertheless he is not simply closed off from all others,
for he is essentially related to the community. The community is not opposed to its
members as something that is foreign to them; rather, it is nothing but the
members themselves in their unity. Because of their personal independence the
members cannot be either superior to or inferior to each other; instead, it is more
like a binding relationship of each individual to the whole community and the
reciprocal binding of the whole to each of its members. Since we are considering
human society, every social philosophy must begin with *man; since it is a question
of explaining society from its ultimate foundations, it must understand man in his
first essential principles. Thus, social philosophy is *metaphysics (ontology), or more
precisely *anthropology. If man comes from God and if God is his ultimate end, the
fundamental outline of social philosophy is already laid down. If God has elevated
man to a supernatural order, this necessarily means that his social dimension has
been vastly expanded; a social philosophy that deliberately attempted to close itself
off from this truth would distort the facts instead of explain them.