Social kind essentialism

Abstract

There has been widespread opposition to so-called essentialism in contemporary social theory. At the same time, within contemporary analytic metaphysics, the notion of essence has been revived and put to work by neo-Aristotelians. The ‘new essentialism’ of the neo-Aristotelians opens the prospect for a new social essentialism—one that avoids the problematic commitments of the ‘old essentialism’ while also providing a helpful framework for social theorizing. In this paper, I develop a neo-Aristotelian brand of essentialism about social kinds and show how it avoids the legitimate worries of social theorists. I then argue that neo-Aristotelian social kind essentialism provides a helpful framework for a wide range of projects in social ontology and feminist metaphysics, including debunking projects, descriptive inquiries, and the project of achieving social change. I further argue that an essentialist framework is more useful than a grounding framework when it comes to certain legitimate theoretical and practical purposes in social theory.