The Making and Maintenance of Social Order

The powerful simplicity of Newton’s three mechanical laws of motion fired the imagination of several social, political, economics thinkers between the 16th and the 19th centuries to try to discover the basic principles of social life. By the end of the XIX century Darwinian science was also seen as offering substantial clues to understanding society. These scientific perspectives, however, also proved their descriptive limits when confronted by the large and complex variety of aspects that an appreciation of order in the social realm seems to entail. In this chapter we do not so much focus on well-rehearsed and widely discussed arguments on how to compare or combine the natural and the social science, or on whether to reduce the latter to the former. Instead we will show how nowadays there are informative and exciting ways to describe and explain order in social domains that do not require substantial borrowing from the apparata of natural science. Contemporary social psychology provides an instructive example of this.