The Idea of a Social Philosophy Alessandro Ferrara The object of this paper is to rethink the scope, boundaries, and main themes of a philosophical discipline that takes society as its object. Our traditional conceptual map includes a distinction between the territory of political philosophy (charac- terized by themes like political justification, the nature of power, legitimacy, justice, the nature of liberty, of rights, democracy, and so on), the territory of moral philosophy (characterized by themes like the correct way of understanding the “moral point of view,” the distinction between the right and the good, the nature of moral obligation, the notion of virtue, etc), and the territory of the philosophy of law (where the relevant themes concern the nature of the rule of law, constitutionalism, the phenomenon of law, and once again the nature of rights). Our conceptual map then includes a series of territories corresponding to the various social sciences: political science and political theory, sociology and social theory, social psychology, cultural anthropology, and several others. In each of these disciplines we somehow find the notion of society and the related notions of social action and of the social actor at work. Why should we then bother to redraw the boundaries in order to represent yet another territory on the map, yet another philosophical discipline? As usual, the reason for rethinking the contours of a somewhat vaguely defined tradition is bound up with identity – with the affirmation of a difference. The reason why today, almost half a century after Peter Winch’s suggestive meditation on “the idea of a social science,” we might be interested considering “the idea of a social philosophy” rests on the sober realization that a whole body of philo- sophical reflections has been sedimented which, if it remains dispersed within a plurality of disciplines and merely functions as supporting evidence for argu- ments that have their raison d’être and main focus elsewhere, risks losing its chance to play the vital catalyzing role that it could play. Instead, this body of reflections, if unified and integrated, could have the potential for giving rise to a great philosophical discipline of recent origin but of no lesser thematic differen- tiation, theoretical depth, and scope than the other specialties mentioned above and of much greater coherence than the loose field corresponding to what some- times is today referred to by the term social philosophy. 1 The Birth and Transcendentalization of the Social Distinctive of my idea of social philosophy is its revolving around the concept of the social, as a concept distinct from the older concepts of the political and the Constellations Volume 9, No 3, 2002. © Blackwell Publishers Ltd., 108 Cowley Road, Oxford OX4 1JF, UK and 350 Main Street, Malden, MA 02148, USA.