La science du social et l'involution de la socialité : de Durkheim à Luhmann

Abstract

The paper argues that Durkheim's thesis of the social nature of the categories of human understanding comes to completion and full acuity in Luhmann's theory of the social contingency of the leading distinctions generating all meaning. Such a thesis and a theory entail the inversion of the canonical relationship between philosophy and the social sciences. Within that frame philosophy occupied the foundational level, whereas the social and human sciences had to entrust it with their epistemological description and legitimisation. The inversion introduced by the sociologisation of human understanding goes through a de-ontologisation of thinking which henceforth operates within the absolute relativity of contingent spaces of intellection and communication. The spherical closure of a planetary whole constituted by "world society" – in the Luhmannian sense of Weltgesellschaft – represents a topological transformation of sociality which leaves it with no outside and no axis of self-centeredness.