Summary
Contents
Subject index
This book argues that sociology has lost its ability to provide critical diagnoses of the present human condition because sociology has stopped considering the philosophical requirements of social enquiry. The book attempts to restore that ability by retrieving some of the key questions that sociologists tend to gloss over, inescapability and attainability. The book identifies five key questions in which issues of inescapability and attainability emerge. These are the questions of the certainty of our knowledge, the viability of our politics, the continuity of our selves, the accessibility of the past, and the transparency of the future. The book demonstrates how these questions are addressed in different forms and by different intellectua
The Transparency of the Future
The Transparency of the Future
‘Among the classical figures of sociology, Max Weber is the only one who broke with both the premises of the philosophy of history and the basic assumptions of evolutionism and who nonetheless wanted to conceive of the modernization of old-European society as the result of a universal-historical process of rationalization.’ This is how Jürgen Habermas (1981: 207) opens the section on Max Weber in his Theory of Communicative Action. Later, he underlines that he sees it as one of Weber's achievements to have ‘discharged the mortgages from philosophy of history and the nineteenth-century evolutionism encumbered by it’ (Habermas, 1981: 209). And after having critically reconstructed the move from Enlightenment philosophy of history based on reason and ...
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