El Rol de la "Sociedad" como Ideal Regulativo: Hacia una reconstrucción del concepto de sociedad moderna

Este artículo presenta la tesis que la "sociedad" desempeña el rol de un "ideal regulativo" en la sociología; es decir, que la sociedad representaría un objeto de conocimiento necesario e imposible para la disciplina. Esta tesis del rol regulativo de la sociedad en la sociología surge como una crítica al "nacionalismo metodológico" con que las ciencias sociales en general, y la sociología en particular, han venido operando, implícitamente, desde la segunda posguerra. La característica central de este nacionalismo metodológico sería utilizar la idea de sociedad sólo para la definición del referente geográfico del análisis sociológico –el estado-nación– desconociendo así el rol teórico que ella también desempeñaría. Se intentará, programáticamente, establecer en qué consiste la tesis del rol regulativo de la sociedad en la sociología a partir de la definición kantiana de ideales regulativos y algunos textos sociológicos de G. Simmel y T. Parsons

Integración y Diferenciación

La investigación conjunta de los tres tópicos mencionados: diferenciación, integración y medios, ha sobrepasado con creces el marco de referencia parsoniano en el que originalmente fue formulado, constituyéndose en un foco de investigación al que convergen distintos proyectos teóricos. La cita de Luhmann que sirve de inicio a esta introducción postula que sólo el desarrollo y la investigación en conjunto de estos tres niveles distintos, pero ciertamente relacionados, componen lo que podría denominarse una teoría sociológica de la sociedad. Si bien una reflexión sistemática de esa envergadura sobrepasa con creces las posibilidades de este trabajo, esperamos mostrar que la teoría de los medios es un área de trabajo que, además de su interés intrínseco, puede entregar pistas sobre las que reelaborar hipóinvestigación sociológicas sobre la condición actual y las consecuencias de las transformaciones en que se encuentran nuestras sociedades

Theorising global modernity: descriptive and normative universalism

Theorising global modernity: descriptive and normative universalis

Sociology and the nation-state : beyond methodological nationalism

The equation between society and the nation-state in sociology has been subject to severe criticisms in recent times. This equation has been given the name of ‘methodological nationalism’ and is underpinned by a reading of the history of sociology in which the discipline’s key concept, society, and modernity’s major sociopolitical referent, the nation-state, allegedly converge. At the critical level, my thesis argues that this is too restrictive a view of the history of the discipline and at the positive level it reconstructs the conventional version of sociology’s canon in relation to nation-states. The first part of the thesis surveys the main trends in the current sociological mainstream, reviews the rise of the critique of methodological nationalism and establishes a distinction between a referential and a regulative role of the idea of society in sociology. The body of the thesis constructs a history of the sociology of the nation-state in its classical (K. Marx, M. Weber and E. Durkheim), modernist (T. Parsons and historical sociology) and cosmopolitan (U. Beck and M. Castells) moments. As an essay on the history of sociology, this thesis seeks to uncover how the conceptual ambivalences of sociology reflect the actual ambivalences in the position and legacy of nation-states in modernity

The critique of methodological nationalism: theory and history

This article seeks to further our understanding of what methodological nationalism is and to offer some insights towards its overcoming. The critical side of its argument explicates the paradoxical constitution of the current debate on methodological nationalism-namely, the fact that methodological nationalism is simultaneously regarded as wholly negative and all-pervasive in contemporary social science. I substantiate the idea of this paradox by revisiting some of the most successful attempts at the conceptualization of the nation-state that have sought to transcend methodological nationalism in four disciplines: sociology, nationalism studies, anthropology and social psychology. The positive side of my argument offers a distinction between different versions of methodological nationalism with the help of which it tries to address some of the problems found in the literature. Theoretically, methodological nationalism is associated with, and criticized for, its explanatory reductionism in which the rise and main features of the nation-state are used to explicate the rise and main features of modernity itself. Historically, the article reassesses the problem of its prevalence, that is, whether methodological nationalism is a key feature of the history of the social sciences. © The Author(s) 2011

The question of the human in the anthropocene debate

The Anthropocene debate is among the ambitious scientific programmes of the past 15 or 20 years. Its main argument is that, from a geological point of view, humans are to be seen as a major force of nature so that our current geological epoch is depicted as dominated by human activity. The Anthropocene has slowly become a contemporary metanarrative that seeks to make sense of the ‘earth-system’ as a whole, and one whose vision of the future is dystopian rather than progressive: as the exploitation of the planet’s natural resources has reached tipping point, the very prospects of the continuity of human life are being questioned. My goal in this article is to explore the implicit notions of the human – indeed of the Anthropos – that are being mobilised in the Anthropocene debate. I will proceed in two steps: first, I shall spell out the main the main arguments of the Anthropocene debate with a particular focus on trying to unpack its implicit ideas of the human. Secondly, I use of my approach to philosophical sociology to highlight some of the limitations and contradictions of the ideas of agency, reflexivity and responsibility that underpin the Anthropocene debate

Classical sociology and the nation-state: a re-interpretation

This article revisits the claim, largely accepted within the sociological community for over thirty years now, that classical sociologists had no clear concept of the nation-state and thus were unable to conceptualize its rise, main features and further development in modernity. In contradistinction to this standard view, which in current debates receives the name of methodological nationalism, I advance a re-interpretation of classical sociology's conceptualization of the nation-state that points towards what can be called the opacity of its position in modernity. Marx understood the historical elusiveness of the nation-state as he believed that it had already passed its heyday as political struggles were fought between Empires and the Commune. Weber captured the sociological equivocations that arose from the historical disjuncture between the nation and the state. And Durkheim, finally, tried to come to terms with the nation-state's normative ambiguity via the immanent tension between nationalism and cosmopolitanism. The conclusion is that, even if not thoroughly unproblematic, classical sociologists were able to avoid the reification of the nation-state's position in modernity precisely because they were not obsessed with conceptualizing modernity as such from the viewpoint of the nation-state. Copyright © 2008 SAGE Publications

Book review: 'Bruno Latour. An enquiry into modes of existence: an anthropology of the moderns’

Book review: 'Bruno Latour. An enquiry into modes of existence: an anthropology of the moderns

Methodological nationalism and the domestic analogy: classical resources for their critique

The critique of methodological nationalism arose in the 1970s in sociology, but it only gained salience with the rise of globalization theory in the late 1990s. This article argues that in International Relations the discussion of the so-called ‘domestic analogy’ is closely connected to the one on methodological nationalism as they equally point to the substantive problem of understanding the nation state's position in modernity. The first section of this article revisits the three waves of the debate on methodological nationalism in sociology. The second part connects this with the discussion in IR on the domestic analogy. The last section brings the two disciplinary strands together by suggesting that social theory's claim to universalism is a fundamental resource to theorize current global processes beyond methodological nationalism and the domestic analogy. But for us to do so, we still have to unpack social theory's ambivalent relationship with the natural law tradition

Reply to Mark Gould and Csaba Szalo

Reply to Mark Gould and Csaba Szal