Where does the label "social ontology" come from? "Social" comes from Latin "socialis", meaning allied; "ontology" combines Greek "ontos" and "logos", the study of being. But when, by whom, in which language and to what purpose were "social" and "ontology" first put together?

State of the Art is a blog series where a philosopher gives a semi-historical, semi-autobiographical survey of a topic in social ontology. It aims to introduce newcomers to long-standing debates as well as sketch new directions for research.

The first post in this series is by Hans Bernhard Schmid, a philosopher at the University of Vienna. In this post, Bernard explores the mysterious historical origins of the word that unites us all: 'social ontology'.

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Where does the label "social ontology" come from? The forthcoming Oxford Handbook of Social Ontology provides a good opportunity to start an investigation (of which the following is a brief summary). With Google Books and other digital research tools available it should not be too difficult to do so – although the range of languages and bodies of literature in the relevant databases are limited, and the tools themselves are rapidly developing, so that my results may soon be outdated, and different (pre-)histories of the label "social ontology" may be discovered.

It currently seems that "social ontology" first appears in print in Italian, in Naples in 1844. The apparent inventor's name is Vincenzo Lomonaco. Lomonaco is a justice at the civil court of Naples, an ardent admirer of Giambattista Vico, and obviously a prolific writer on a variety of topics (although there seems to be no literature about him). He was writing at a time when the kingdom of the two Sicilies turned from a relatively progressive regime to the first to crack down hard on the sprouts of the European liberal revolution in 1847 and 1848. "Ontologia sociale" is conceived in Lomonaco's "History of the Principle of Legislation" (Lomonaco 1844) as the study of the "objective" side of law. "Social ontology" here basically appears as a legal philosophy of property in a conception that combines human needs, work, and convention as constituents.

One might doubt that Lomonaco's "social ontology" has much to do with how it is used among 21st century academic philosophers, although it is certainly not entirely unrelated either – the histories of social ontology and the histories of the label are obviously not the same.

The first time the label social ontology appeared in a book title was in France in 1871. The author is one L.P. Massip (full name unknown), possibly the failed wine trader by that name and mentioned in contemporary newspaper articles, most certainly a Jacobin activist and an admirer of Rousseau. Massip is writing at a time at which France had just lost the war against Prusssia and started its third go at being a republic, with a freshly elected national assembly in which republicans were only a small minority. Massip conceives of social ontology (which Massip introduces as a "new label") as the project of a vindication of the French republican order. Social ontology is the science of the laws that govern political society and the economy in the republic, and it is an engaged endeavor against clerical and royalist ideologies.

As interesting as these books may be in themselves, they are not the origin of any proper history of social ontology. As is the fate of so many ideas and publications, nobody took them up. They left no trace in later discourse. Just an episode to illustrate this: among the few facts that are known about this author is that Massip sent his book to Giuseppe Garibaldi, the national Italian freedom-fighter hero, with a personal note of thanks to Garibaldi for his engagement in the lost war against the Prussians. However, the Garibaldi estate lists the book as "esemplare intonso" – neither Garibaldi himself nor anybody around or after him took the time to even just cut open the pages of the book!

Large stretches of time and most historical uses of "social ontology" belong to what should properly be called pre-histories of "social ontology": authors unaware of earlier uses re-inventing the label. This kept on going until well into the second half of the 20th century. The question of the origin of a proper history of social ontology under its label is not the question of who invented or re-invented it. The question of the origin of any proper history (of which there may be many) is a different question: it is the question of when, by whom and why the label was first taken up. Histories involves some form of tradition. They do not start with invention, but only with uptake thereof. Uptake rather than re-invention is therefore what we should be looking for.

This brings us to a book that appeared in Shanghai in 1913. The context is thus another young and even more turbulent republic, the rapidly devolving Republic of China . It is not a philosophical work. It is a Dictionary of "Chinese New Terms and Expressions", compiled by the Welsh Sinologist and Christian (most likely Methodist) Missionary Evan Morgan. The expression 社會本體論 (shèhuì [social] běntǐ [being] lùn [theory]) is included and translated as "social ontology" (Morgan 1913, 117). As this seems to be the first instance of uptake of the label, the origin question seems to be this: where did Morgan pick this up?

Morgan says in the intro that the "new terms and expressions" were "gathered from newspapers, magazines, and books" over several years. He claims that he did not include specialist "scientific terms", but only "general and popular phrases" (ibid. iii). Social ontology being a popular phrase in China in 1913? A search with the available tools leads nowhere (a Google Ngram shows 社會本體論 first appearing in the 1950s, and gaining some traction only in the 1980s; more pertinent Chinese sources point towards Hé 1928 as the earliest use). Morgan does not give sources for the individual entries, but he mentions types of sources in the introduction. He says that many expressions in his list came from Japan (ibid. ii, v). But again, a search led to nowhere. The earliest Japanese uses of social ontology date from the 1930s; more on this below – it is going to be a tale of the cautionary kind. Second, Morgan observes (somewhat condescendingly perhaps) that "the Chinese themselves are taking the work of terminology in hand" and "are making a worthy effort to create new vocabularies for the use of science, philosophy and law" (ibid. vi). 社會本體論 could thus very well be just that – a Chinese "new term", invented by a recent Chinese author without any further source. Or it might even be an instance of yet another type that Morgan mentions, "a revival of obsolete words and phrases that have been idle and dormant for centuries, in the musty, but rich treasury of the language" (ibid. ii), with an ultimate source well outside the temporal and geographic reach of contemporary digital research tools.

With the search for Morgan's proximate source hitting a dead end here, one last type of source that Morgan mentions offers itself for further investigation. Might 社會本體論 be an "adoption of words from other languages" (ibid. viii)? After all, I already mentioned two instances of the expression in two European languages. Looking at Morgan's list as well as at these earlier European uses suggest three potential source contexts.

The first is suggested by other composite expressions that Morgan lists around our expression, as well as the 1928 Chinese source (Hé 1928): it is late 19th and early 20th century Western Social Science.

Think of Emile Durkheim's theory of social facts, or Georg Simmel's forms of sociation. These and other theories are certainly important in the history of social ontology – might they also be at the origin of the label?

It seems that none of those authors nor their early recipients have used the label for themselves. Rather, it seems that early social scientists have shunned the label and only used it only to denigrate rivalling theories in social science. "Social ontology" was rarely used in this context – and only as a slur!

This is perhaps not so surprising. Ontology is closely associated with metaphysics (more on this below). And metaphysics did not have a good name among early social scientists. Critical views ranged from Auguste Comte's influential project of overcoming metaphysics in the turn to "positive" (social) science to Immanuel Kant's equally influential "critical" project against metaphysical "speculation".

Neither from a positivist nor from a critical perspective is social ontology a particularly plausible position. Thus "social ontology", if used at all, was used as an invective expression by authors from both the "positivist" and the "critical" side against the other side. Some examples: a contemporary author warns that Simmel's theory of social forms ultimately boils down to "pure social ontology" (meaning having no relevant empirical bearing; see Worms 1895, 166). Conversely, the important French sociologist Gabriel Tarde uses "sociological ontology" for the view of those who mistake the basic "entities" of social science for "things" (Tarde 1898, 239).

Affirmative uses of the label social ontology in social science started only much later, and the earliest case is German Nazi social science. The basic social reality that they finally see acknowledged in the turn away from methodology towards ontology is that of "the people" (Gerhardt 1933, 1939), with metaphysics embraced as rooted in "decision".

There are some other affirmative uses around the time, but they are sparse in the early decades of the 20th century.

As an apparent case in point – and the first author to use the label in Spanish language – is Antonio Caso, the "Philosopher of Mexico" as much as a social scientist (see Haddox 2014) – a stout anti-positivist and an engaged critic of Jacobinism. Caso uses "ontologia social" in his critique of Marxism in his 1934 Nuevos discursos a la nación mexicana (Caso 1934, 23ff.). Marxism, Caso says, suffers from a "mistaken social ontology".

Conversely, Marxism did take up the label, but only in later decades, especially in the work of Georg Lukács.

As we are venturing into later decades, I should at least mention Joseph B. Gittler, a sociologist of the Chicago School. In 1950, he aptly describes the spirit of earlier and contemporary social science as "trying to kill ontology". He suggests a positive taxonomical approach to social ontology. An even more inspirational story is Radhakamal Mukerjee's use of social ontology in his 1955 "General Theory of Society". Mukerjee, I believe, deserves to be remembered as a "forgotten founder" of social theory and one of the fathers of Sociology in India.

With these references, we have already moved far beyond the time of potential sources of Morgan's 1913 list. We'll have to conclude that the use of social ontology in early social science is probably not a reasonable hypothesis for Morgan's source.

A second potential source context is Political Catholicism. Here, social ontology was not born with a bad name, but rather out of the spirit of "Social Justice". It was, it seems, in the context that label Social Justice was coined (and within the project of arguing for a socially just society) that the label "social ontology" reappears in a remarkably prominent place, the first volume of the Civiltá Cattolica from 1850. The author is Luigi Taparelli, a leading Jesuit philosopher, the founder of 19th century neo-scholasticism, and a deeply anti-modern, anti-democratic and anti-egalitarian thinker.

Particularly fascinating is the relation of Luigi Taparelli to Antonio Rosmini, who advocated a somewhat more liberal view and coined the term social justice before Taparelli. In these authors, social justice is an anti-egalitarian idea: the idea to account for differences between persons against the alleged or real ignorance and potential or actual violence of egalitarian views.

Taparelli's mention of "social ontology" is deeply invested in reactionary Catholic political thought; one can only imagine how the passionately anti-clerical L.P. Massip had felt had he known of this earlier use! Yet at least two things also deserve to be mentioned in this overview. First, Taparelli uses the label in a rather fascinating and stringent argument against colonialism. One can only wish that orthodox current theorists of group agency read it – it involves a convincing critique of the analogy of individual and group agency. Second, it is not entirely clear that the "proportional" conception of justice that is Catholic social justice is entirely without merits against its egalitarian opponents. Taparelli knows well that liberal individualism works as an ideology of blaming the marginalized and oppressed for their predicament.

Having tumbled down the rabbit hole of this body of literature for some time the impression is this: investigating the (pre-) histories of social ontology leads right into the main political controversies of past time; and inspirational stories and cautionary tales are not always so easy to distinguish.

However, it seems rather clear that what we have here is not a likely candidate for the source of Morgan's list. True, the Jesuits had their time in China, but these days were long gone by the early 20th century. And even more relevant perhaps: it is unlikely that Evan Morgan, a Missionary of I assume Methodist denomination would have advertised term from the first volume Civiltá Cattolica. Moreover, Taparelli's text suggests that he is using the expression "social ontology" somewhat ironically . Taparelli embraces good old "metaphysics", but he is weary of "ontology" – "ontologism" (a theological position, but not entirely unrelated to philosophy) ended up officially declared a heresy (or at least as "unsafe for teaching") in 1861, with Rosmini among those condemned.

If early social science and political Catholicism are unlikely as source contexts, where, then, did the use of "social ontology" on which Morgans list picks up come from? Another look at the list provides a potential clue. The entry immediately following "Social Ontology" is "Social Phenomenology" – a sheer coincidence or perhaps a bit more? Current phenomenological social ontologists can be proud of the fact that Edmund Husserl used the term "Soziale Ontologie" in around 1910. But he did so in an unpublished research manuscript, and neither he nor any of his students working on the ontology of the social world actually used the label. In fact, it was (to my knowledge) only in the 1930s that the label was used in phenomenology, and it was used by Husserl's student Hajime Tanabe, the leader of the second generation of the Kyoto school. A 1940 overview article on contemporary Japanese Philosophy in the Journal of the German Philosophical Society advertises the core claim of Tanabe's "social ontology" thus: "the principle of Volkstum in the true and concrete reality is a necessary condition of social being". The author continues: "from this, Tanabe develops the logical schema according to which das Volk or the state is the necessary center between the individual and the world" (Taketi 1940, 296-297).

It should be said that after the second world war was lost for the Axis powers, Tanabe repented and switched from Volkstum to Christian spiritual communion. But independently of this and other tales that phenomenology may have in store for the history of social ontology, we are, again, some decades off Morgan's list.

What seems to be the first origin of a proper history of social ontology – "social ontology" in Morgan's list – thus remains shrouded in mystery.

To conclude, some thoughts on how this research may or may not matter. First, it is obvious the label "social ontology" is neither necessary nor sufficient for social ontology. Many social ontologists did their work in the more or less distant past without using the label . Conversely, we may think that many of those who did use the label were not really doing social ontology. Here, the work to be done is to check the connection between the source contexts and the current generally recognized discourses on social ontology.

Still, there are three things that are perhaps worth noting. What seems striking when reading these earlier sources is how deeply many of them were invested in their respective political agendas – perhaps too deeply, one could say, especially if one thinks that political agendas generally tend not to age well. A more inspiring insight perhaps is how comparatively international the (pre-) histories of social ontology are, with many languages and contexts involved. A final and more fundamental thought returns to what was said above at the beginning. It involves the roots of ontology, and its relation to metaphysics. "Ontology" sounds Ancient, but it is – as Luigi Taparelli certainly knew – actually early modern, a neologism introduced by protestant German philosophers in the early 17th century. Some interpreters say that they did so on an agenda, and that the agenda was a shift from reality to content of thought as the focus of metaphysics (Jarozyński 2018). Current social ontologists may or may not care about the relation between metaphysics and ontology, but there is certainly an interesting history of the current concerns with "realism" in contemporary social ontology to be discovered.

I should conclude with thanks to those who have supported this research. I am especially grateful to Michaël Bauwens, Rocco Buttiglione, Jani Hakkarainen, Abhinav Kumar, Martin Niederl, Bhaskarijt Neog, Nikos Psarros, Alessandro Salice, Nianzu Tu, Yi Nicholas Wang, and Astik Yadav for many discoveries, suggestions, and useful hints. Thanks to Peter Finocchiaro for comments on this text. Needless to say, I’d be very grateful indeed for further suggestions!

References

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Gerhardt, Johannes. 1933 . "Grundfragen der Soziologie in der neueren Literatur." Jahrbücher für Nationalökonomie und Statistik vol. 138: 440– 451.

Gerhardt, Johannes. 1939. "Von der Wirklichkeit sozialer Gebilde." Jahrbücher für Nationalökonomie und Statistik vol. 150: 513– 543.

Gittler, Joseph B. 1950. "Social Ontology and the Criteria for Definitions in Sociology." The Midwest Sociologist 13 (1): 8.

Gittler, Joseph B. 1951. "Social Ontology and the Criteria for Definitions in Sociology." Sociometry 14 (4): 355– 36 5.

Hé, Héng. 1928: "社會本體論." 青年进步 112, 30-39.

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Urai, Satoshi. 2022. "Tanabe Hajime's Social Ontology: From the 'Logic of Species' to the 'Logic of Love'." Kyuushin 27: 121–47.

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About

Hans Bernhard Schmid is a philosopher at the University of Vienna. He was a co-founder of ISOS and, until very recently, the editor-in-chief of the Journal of Social Ontology. He works on several topics within social ontology, most especially collective intentionality. In his 2023 book, We, Together, he argues that our living together is a joint activity.