Sociological Enlightenment — For Whom, About What?

Abstract

All humanities, sociology included, are meeting places of stories told about stories. This circumstance casts humanities in a situation radically and irretrievably different from that of `hard sciences', which cast their objects as nature. Through most of its history sociology was oriented towards collectively produced and maintained order: its task was to enlighten the legislators and supervisors of order. With the substitution of life-politics for Politics with a capital `P', deregulation and privatization of ordering activity, enlightenment of autonomous subjects moves to the centre of sociological vocation.