This contribution summarises the current coordinates of my studies, which set out to develop a social philosophy within which a political reflection can be located. In 1. I frame the «political» in a historical perspective, as a sphere between spheres, progressively unfolded in the West, within a historical-social reality made up of practices and institutions. In 2., in a theoretical perspective, I connect this framing to the pragmatic-communicative development of the 20th-century linguistic turn. This preserves the proprium of philosophical reflection and casts light on the entwinement of inter-locution and inter-action that can be revised and tested against the ground of two dimensions: the «historical-social world» and the natural world, or better, the «non-communicative world». In 3. I show how this is conducive to a far-reaching revision: the concept of society, which can no longer be thought of in term of a structuring central core that assimilates the various individuals who are claimed to constitute it; the concept of power, which can be articulated only in the plural and in the sense of the ability to harvest and reproduce the resources at disposal, not only intersubjective ma also objective ones, that is, those that come from the non-communicative world; and the category of subject. In 4. I clarify the sense in which social philosophy, sketched in this manner, can be critical.