This introductory chapter outlines the problem of social order and the main argument of the book: that the question of what holds complex and diverse societies together has become – and has remained – a philosophical puzzle in modern political science, a presupposition that has been built into our concepts, theories, and normative commitments. Having outlined the argument, the contents and the structure of the book, the chapter then provides a short background for the problem of social order in political science. The chapter recalls how this problem emerged as such in modern social and political discourse in the evolution of the modern concepts of state, nation, and society and discusses how the relations among these concepts provided nineteenth-century political thought with a solution to the problem of social order predicated on a fusion of nationality and statehood.

This chapter is devoted to mid-century systems theory, which, I argue, is where the behavioralist solution to the problem of social order found its paradigmatic – and also its theoretically most problematic – expression. Specifically, the chapter considers David Easton’s theory of the political system as the most explicit effort to thematize and theorize the problem of social order that the discipline has seen. The effort ended, I show, in an undecidable vacillation between political authority and societal consent to authority as the ultimate source of social order.

In this chapter, I trace the evolution of the influential field of interest group theory from the 1920s to the 1950s. Two consequential things happened in this empirically oriented literature. First, the social ontology introduced by pluralists and theorists of process could be taken as given, accepted as factual descriptions of the political process. Second, community was reconceptualized and relegated to the status of a presupposition, now under the name of "consensus," invoked as a restraint on group conflict and a foundation for modern political life without being a topic of debate in its own right. This provided the discipline of political science with the rudiments of what would become an influential and lasting behavioralist solution to the problem of social order.

This chapter describes and analyzes how British pluralists in the early twentieth century critiqued the fusion of nationality and statehood that had hitherto provided a conceptual foundation for political science, and how their critique exposed the discipline to the problem of social order. The chapter also treats the contemporary critical reception of British pluralism in America.

This chapter considers two strands of research that emerged from the literature on power: first, a renewed theoretical and empirical interest in the role of state institutions in political life; second, a normative preference for, and theorizing of, participation. Both, the chapter shows, ended up restating the problem of social order.

This chapter considers theories of social process in early twentieth-century America, analyzing how process theory set the stage for subsequent developments in political science. Where the early British pluralists argued that modern society was best described in terms of the groups that compose it, process theorists in America argued that modern society can only be adequately described in terms of the processes that flow through it. This notion brought the problem of social order to the fore in a variation on themes pursued by the pluralists.

In this concluding chapter, I first bring the story up to date by briefly considering influential developments since the 1990s, especially theories of governance and theories of group identity, which variously reiterate the problem of social order. I then argue that instead of positing, again and again, social order as a presupposition for political inquiry, social order should be turned into an object of political inquiry. To that end, I conclude, we may well need other conceptual and theoretical resources than those provided by the tradition of social science that is the subject of this book. Accepting the social ontology of complexity and diversity on which this tradition has been predicated does not compel us to keep relying on concepts and theories marked by the problem of social order.

This chapter analyzes how the concept of community was brought back in by theorists such as John Dewey, Mary Parker Follett, and Robert M. MacIver, in response to the problem of social order opened up by pluralists and theorists of process. The chapter considers different ways of making the complexity and diversity of modern society dovetail with the perceived need for community as a source of social order and demonstrates how the problem of social order remained unresolved through these efforts.

In this chapter and the next, I describe and analyze critical analyses of power and domination, starting in the late 1950s with the power research of Floyd Hunter and C. Wright Mills. After these efforts, the problem of social order could no longer be plausibly addressed by reference to community, consensus, or consent to authority. Instead, social order came to look like a structural or systemic effect of power or domination.