No social life is possible without order. This book leads back the many theories of order to few patterns of how it has been understood from the very beginning of Western thought to the present time. By analysing these patterns of thinking – which are defined as 'paradigms of order' – an intellectual map is produced in which the most significant distinctions in the approaches concerning order as well as the most relevant breaks, or 'paradigmatic revolutions', become evident. The analysis follows the unfolding of the different ideas about how the 'well-ordered society' should be organized, from the paradigm according to which society, to be 'well-ordered', should be limited in extension, organic in its ontological understanding and hierarchical in its institutional and normative structure, to the recently formulated, quite opposite view that social order is globally expanded, pluralist in essence and centred on individual rights and interests.