Philosophy by Other Means. The Philosophical Origins of Sociology

Abstract

The academic discipline that we call sociology was a late bloomer—as were most of the “disciplines” that we find in university curricula today. Max Weber didn’t have a chair of sociology, nor did the young Emile Durkheim. The (slow and prolonged) legitimation of the study of the social as such was paradoxically an event; it opened a new domain, transformed cultural blinders, and challenged tradition. The new discipline broke the monopoly of political philosophy, whose master-thinkers well encrusted both in the university but especially outside in the cultural establishment, did not suddenly see the light. But it became a “discipline,” developing its own criteria of research, and defining the domain and limits of its reach. In its forward rush, inebriated by the rash of customs, traditions, and behaviors that its methods had legitimated, it suffered from that malady that affects many political projects: Pleonaxia, the inability to recognize its own limits. Above all, those limits were not empirical; they were philosophical. Now, a century after the Fathers of the discipline, and at a time when the hopes for the new discipline that crested with the wave of students who had been inspired by the spirit of the New Left, it is time to reflect on the origins of sociology. They are, and should remain, philosophical.