Chapter 7. Social Order and Process

The chapter gives an analysis of possible conceptions of social order, focusing on how they are embedded in time and conceive of temporality. It begins with the simple concepts of order that treat order simply as the absence of disorder, (e.g., the contractarians). It moves from unprocessual concepts like equilibrium, with its many variations, to empirical concepts of process like habituation, socialization, and tradition, and then to normative concepts like progress, conservatism, and trusteeship. Order concepts are evaluated in terms of whether they have substantial content, whether the concept is “at-a-point” or transtemporal, how the concept addresses the modification of social entities in time, and how it resolves the relation between social and individual temporalities.

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