Who Reads Sociology Today? Cover Image
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Кой чете социология днес?
Who Reads Sociology Today?

Author(s): Attila Károly Molnár
Subject(s): Social Sciences
Published by: Институт по философия и социология при БАН

Summary/Abstract: The paper presents some well-known signs of the decreasing interest in sociology, its loss of relevance and its intellectual exhaustion. This sorry situation of this social science, can probably be explained by the failed promises of scientism and social engineering, the weakening intellectual evidence of modernism, and the bankruptcy of the „Society Project“ and reformism of the welfare state. Paradoxically, the well-functioning welfare state ruined the self-ordering and self-regulating society, therefore it seems to contemporary people that the notion of society has become empty. Sociology was in a discursive coalition with welfare state reformism. The paper describes two dominant modes of sociology today: 1. Sociology of something (.of education, healthcare, prison, etc.) is a kind of specialized knowledge how to control a certain institution or practice; and 2. radical (de)constructivism. In their place, this article proposes the view of sociology as Hermeneutics. Contemporary sociologists should reflect on whether they want to defend their professional identity and institutions, or they want to be intellectual interpreters of their situations. In the second case, it will be less important to preserve the disciplinary borders forced upon us by the factory of academic life.

  • Issue Year: 39/2007
  • Issue No: 1-2
  • Page Range: 99-112
  • Page Count: 14
  • Language: Bulgarian