From understanding society to discovering the subject

Abstract

Succeeding to the philosophy of law, sociology organized itself no longer around the absolute State but around society itself, conceived as a system, both differenciated and able to control itself. The concepts of institution and socialization formed the core of a large number of analyses which were both theoretical and empirical. But this `classical' view disintegrated itself both because markets eliminated a large part of institutional controls of change and because new social movements, from the 1980's on, rejected this society-centered view of social life. More recently, only the critical approach within this so-called functionalist approach survived actively, interpreting all social categories as instruments serving a domination which is more and more internalized. The most radical wing of the women's movement gave the most elaborate expression of this trend. But it necessarily exhausts itself by its entirely critical and self-destructive point of view. The field of sociology must be entirely redefined. Some introduce the idea of a world — or global — society; some others try to give a new life to basic ideas, such as social bonds, solidarity and communication. A third group, using various vocabularies, gives a central role to the idea of Subject, which is very different from the concept of Self in its classical sense, because the Subject is defined as a self-referential effort of each individual or group to create itself as a principle of integration of more and more diversified experiences.