Description In what way is society like a body? Is politics an illness, a cure, or the force that keeps society from falling apart?What do fashion trends, financial panics and viral epidemics tell us about the nature of social relations?These are a few of the questions we will confront in this course, which will study the history of social and political thought through the prism of one crucial analogy: that between the body and society. The assimilation of society to a large-scale organism is sometimes called “organic ism”; it is an idea that spans millennia, from Greek philosophy to the 19th century and survives in various guises to this day in disciplines such as sociology and political economy. In the first half of the course, we will delineate the key elements of the organismic approach through a reading of some of i ts major proponents.We will try to grasp the historical importance and the theoretical takes in this political idea: If society is an organism, what is politics? Is social harmony the exception or the rule?How does the organic metaphor determine our understanding of hierarchy, or of the nature of the State?What is the status of the individual in these theories?We will also try to understand how this philosophical idea has played a key role in the foundation of certain social sciences.