Abstract

This paper aims to compare Pierpaolo Donati’s Relational Theory of Society (also called Relational Sociology), and the theoretical proposal of Jan Fuhse’s Relational Sociology. It focuses on two main issues: 1) Epistemology - the «Relational Sociology» paradigm; 2) Ontology - what the social consists of. Both perspectives (Donati and Fuhse) aim at describing the social reality as a construct. The core issue and the real distinguishing divergence point between these two theories is precisely the concept of relation, then its application in methodological and empirical fields. Fuhse starts with the network analysis sociological tradition (White) to reach a theory of society (Luhmann), whereas Donati insists to build his sociological paradigm from the perspective of the relation concept. The former reduces and considers networks as communicative events, the latter does not renounce to analyse social facts as relations, synthetizing structure, culture and agency in a wide relational social theory.

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