Abstract
While scholars of, and participants in, social movements, electoral politics, and organized labor are deeply engaged
in contrasting different theories of how political actors should organize, little recent philosophical work has asked
what social organizing is. This paper aims to answer this question in a way that can make sense of typical organizing-
related claims and debates. It is intuitive that what social organizing does is bring about some kind of collectivity.
However, I argue that the varieties of collectivity most amply theorized by analytic philosophers in recent years,
including grouphood and collective intentionality, are not the right kinds to embed in a theory of social organizing.
I ultimately argue that the sort of collectivity that organizing characteristically brings about is a special kind of
causal complementarity among agents’ actions— and that while this can exist alongside grouphood and collective
intentionality, it is not the same thing as either. The notion of social organizing that emerges is one that can
clarify, without trivializing, a number of pressing contemporary debates about how normal people should conduct
themselves as interconnected political actors.