Abstract
Sociology was born as a discipline that analyzed the process of modernization of Western European societies. However, in turn, this science was developing a predictive, prophetic vision of the future of human communities, assuming that they were all going to follow paths similar to those followed by Western Europeans. This prophetic dimension reduced the capacity of sociology to analyze new phenomena including, on the one hand, phenomena relating to other societies, on the one hand, but also, on the other hand, phenomena related to the transformations suffered by Western European societies after their process of modernization. This last case constitutes the objective of this work, in which I try to recover the purely analytical character of sociology. To this end, I intend to relate the general model of the political modernization of Western European societies elaborated by historical sociology to the theory of social differentiation, avoiding the evolutionary drift of this theory. From that position, I try to specify the analytical nature of some conceptual instruments of sociology, in order to make them more useful to understanding the contemporary social transformations of Western European societies. Some of these transformations have changed the tendency towards the cultural homogenization characteristic of modernization, because after the two world wars these societies began to receive strong flows of immigration.
Highlights
Sociology as a science was born out of the undertaking to analyse the process of transformation that led Western European countries to become modern societies during the 19th and 20th centuries
The fundamental content of this article is an examination of the process of separation between culture, religion, and politics that culminated in the modernity of Western European societies, and by the postmodern transformation of these differentiations
In order to understand the processes of the more or less successful formation of the modern Western European states, I propose to carry out an integration, with an analytical purpose, of the theory of social differentiation in the design of the aforementioned processes developed by historical sociology
Summary
Sociology as a science was born out of the undertaking to analyse the process of transformation that led Western European countries to become modern societies during the 19th and 20th centuries. The fundamental content of this article is an examination of the process of separation between culture, religion, and politics that culminated in the modernity of Western European societies, and by the postmodern transformation of these differentiations. In order to understand the processes of the more or less successful formation of the modern (democratic and national) Western European states, I propose to carry out an integration, with an analytical purpose, of the theory of social differentiation in the design of the aforementioned processes developed by historical sociology. The process of the historical construction of these types of states cannot be understood without a process of industrialization that involves systematically applying all the scientific and technological achievements to factory production This implied the emergence of a new social sector, which was the first national class in history I will try to show how the strong immigration processes that took place after the two world wars have put some of these forms of differentiation into crisis
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