The Eclipse of Reason - A Present Time Risk
This paper contends that technical progress, from automation in industry to artificial intelligence, might involve the risk of a humanly impoverished society. Instrumental values could overcome final values and determine the end of meaning.
The Eclipse of Religion and Freud’s “future of an illusion”
The main contention of this paper is that, no matter whether one is a true believer or a professed atheist, religion remains a relevant social phenomenon. Serious scholars have written about an eclipse of the sacred in industrial societies through a sad confusion between «sacred» and «religious». The «religious» as a commodity administered by an organized church might well be in a state of crisis. But the «sacred» is actually the meta-human element that makes mankind exist and develop beyond the so-called «laws» of the market.
Intercultural Dialogue as a way out of the present crisis.
We live in a technical age. That is to say, modern societies have adopted technological innovation as a guide-principle. But technique is a perfection without an aim. It can only control its internal operations. It is the eternal return of the identical. Hence, a general feeling of social disorientation and anxiety. Moreover, in a nuclear age such as ours, there is no guarantee of survival for mankind. From a diachronic historical process, we are in a synchronic one. All cultures are to be considered at the same level. The only way out is dialogue, intercultural relations, based on a concept of «cultural co-tradition».
Biography and Social Research
This essay tries to show the scientific validity of the biographical approach in social
research. In a sense, it is the realization that nobody would talk about his or her
intimate existential experiences, or Erlebnisse, to a tape-reading machine. The object
of sociology is not an object. It is a person, a human being living in society, and as such
it must be dealt with.
Introductory Remarks on Ideology and Sociology
The main contention of this paper is that the eventual decline of ideology would pave the way to personalism and piece-meal policy-making. In this respect, sociology should analyze the process of social evolution while the ideological goals tend to concentrate on the middle-range and distant future.
Are the United States still the «God’s Country»?
Arriving to the «new world» across the Atlantic Ocean from England, the Founding Fathers, as an act of thankfullness to God’s guidance, called the United States the «God’s Country». On the other hand, serious scholars would call them the «unfinished country» and quite a few political scientists would talk about «our more perfect Union», touching on the variety and contradictions of the Two-centuries and a half old «nation of nations».
Science, for What? Or: Science with Conscience - The Invisible College of Dissenting Nuclear Scientists
The main contention of this essay is that sciences can be seen as belonging to two broad categories: a) demonstrative; b) interpretative. Demonstrative, or «tough», sciences are «natural» sciences; interpretative sciences are philosophy, history, all the social sciences, different as thy are (for instance, history is based on causal imputation; sociology, on conditional comparative approach). At present all sciences cannot presume to offer universally valid «laws», timeless and spaceless, but only general, probabilistic tendencies. Moreover, contrary to a misconception Max Weber’s «Wertfreiheit», no science is neutral. It pertains to the social responsibility of scientists the pratical use of eventual scientific findings (for instance, the atomic or the hydrogen bomb).
Sacred and Profane. Essential ambiguity and vital necessity of the Sacred.
In a situation in which the market economy is regarded as so important and decisive as to induce the emergence of a market society, the notion of the «sacred» becomes essential. The market is perfectly legitimate as a forum of negotiations, but it has a purely instrumental value. A market society is a contradiction in terminis. Only the concept of the Sacred, despite its ambiguity, can preserve and enhance the final values on which a society is built (justice, love, human recognition, interpersonal dialogue).
The Estrangement of Youth and the Quest for a different Society
The author contends that any contestation or countercultural movement, no matter how generous, is bound to failure unless it develops as a rational project. Violence, as such, might help visibility, but, in the last analysis, it amounts to nothing more than self-gratifying narcissism, incapable to produce positive results, even less to satisfy the request of present day youth for a different, more open society.
The case of Italy: Between tradition and Modernity
If it were possible, just for an instant, to forget the sufferings and worries of the everyday, if, in other words, it were possible to distance ourselves and somehow see ourselves from outside, I think we should have to agree with Goethe’s confession: «I have the great advantage of being born in an age where the great events of the world were on the order of the day, so that I have been an eyewitness of the Seven Years War, of the separation of America from England, and later of the French Revolution, and ultimately of the whole Napoleonic period up to the hero’s fall and events that followed it». Maybe we can say the same of our times, with greater justification. We live in a remarkable era.
Max Horkheimer: The struggle against total Bureaucratization
In July 1973, at the age of 78, Max Horkheimer passed away In the Swiss town of Montagnola. If not the founder, he has at least the most important director of the Institute of Social Research at the University of Frankfurt, from which the famous name “Frankfurt School” is derived. Actually, if we can believe Habermas, who began his academic career as Adorno’s assistant, there was never a Frankfurt ‘’school’’ in the strict sense of the word, except of course in its first year in exile from Germany after the escape from Nazism. At any rate, Horkheimer, more than Adorno and with grater incisiveness than Marcuse and Fromm, represents a basic point of reference for an intellectual climate that has had, despite obvious limitation, a crucial influence on both Marxist and non-Marxist thought. More rigorous than Adorno, and more open to economic and practical reality than Marcuse, the cautious Horkheimer was throughout the secure point of reference, especially after his return in Frankfurt.
With and beyond Max Weber: The process of rationalisation
At the basis of the lasting, even growing, fascination of Max Weber as man and thinker there are probably two reasons. First, there is an essential reason: Weber tackles a central theme, still today at the heart of our concerns, and to which he returns in all his works, more or less directly - the nature, direction, and future of the “modern world.” Second, there is the question of the method in the broad sense of the word, including the theoretical-conceptual apparatus and specific research techniques, or an especially immediate démarche. What is, for Weber, the “modern world”?
Intellectuals and society
If one conceives of modern society as a society that strives to free itself from the hand of tradition and conventional wisdom, then it seems difficult to overestimate the role of the intellectuals. Undoubtedly, the concept of the intellectual. It’s an ambiguous one. Its elusive character becomes apparent even from a linguistic point of view: the term intellectual is both a substantive and an adjective. Functionally speaking, one could perhaps define the intellectual as a person that uses professionally his or her own intellect. As such, it is hard to believe, as some authoritative scholars have maintained (dr. Wolf Lepenies among others), that the figure of the intellectual emerges historically at the end of the XIX century in France with Emile Zola and his famous article in the paper Aurore, entitled “J'accuse in defense” of Charles Dreyfus, as a case destined to shaken thethird French Republic lining up the militarist and anti-Semitic right wing against the progressive political and cultural groups. A different view can be positively argued.
Culture and Counter-culture
A curious paradox must be faced at the very outset: nothing is perhaps more culturally inclined than the various counter-culture movements. In other words, writing and working against the prevailing culture amount to an essentially cultural enterprise. Culture seems to be inescapable. A supposedly dying declining or simply inadequate or wrong culture is usually criticized and fought against by a culture that is in a hurry to take its place. To use the famous formulation of Vilfredo Pareto, one could say that the whole human history is nothing but the ongoing struggle of a “repressed “elite against a power elite through a variety of means which can, however, be summarized and symbolized, as it were, by two animals, the lion and the fox, that is to say force and shrewdness.
Technical Change and Social Revolution
The concept and the term “industrial revolution” are far from being universally accepted. Historians and economists with a conservative inclination tend to criticize them more or less severely. My general theses is that the “industrial revolution” has been, in the first place, a true revolution, that is an epoch making break with the past. In the second place, that such a break has not been so far fully analyzed in its impact on the global society. The “industrial revolution” has been undoubtedly explored and discussed especially by the economic historians in its social, economic, and political terms. This is necessary, but not sufficient. The critical examination of its broad culture and scientific impact is lagging behind. In particular, it has not been fully recognized that power and science, as a result of the industrial revolution, have changed their nature. The bases of legitimacy for power have shifted from traditional or democratic acceptance to rational accountability.
On the strained relationship between philosophy and sociology
The main contention of this article is the following: sociology, like all the modern sciences, was born out of philosophy. But, ungratefully enough and perhaps because of a deepseated inferiority complex vis-à-vis the older well established sciences, sociology tends to forget or at least to blurr its philosophical foundation. Thus it turns out to be “social engineering”. The sociologist becomes a technical expert, rather indifferent to a synoptic or global view of society, and ready to offer his or her services to the best offer in the open market. Social theory is reduced to “model building” according to the changing needs of the economic agencies, from government bodies to private entrepreneurs. Contrary to social theory, a model is a purely intellectual arbitrary construct and, although conditioned by a basic congruity among its different parts, it is not historically rooted but essentially a “fictio mentis”. In this way sociology loses inevitably its problem awareness and it runs the risk of “quantifying the qualitative”, that is to say to accumulate bits of knowledge without knowing for what purpose.
On the strained relationship between philosophy and sociology
The main contention of this article is the following: sociology, like all the modern sciences, was born out of philosophy. But, ungratefully enough and perhaps because of a deepseated inferiority complex vis-à-vis the older well established sciences, sociology tends to forget or at least to blurr its philosophical foundation. Thus it turns out to be “social engineering”. The sociologist becomes a technical expert, rather indifferent to a synoptic or global view of society, and ready to offer his or her services to the best offer in the open market. Social theory is reduced to “model building” according to the changing needs of the economic agencies, from government bodies to private entrepreneurs. Contrary to social theory, a model is a purely intellectual arbitrary construct and, although conditioned by a basic congruity among its different parts, it is not historically rooted but essentially a “fictio mentis”. In this way sociology loses inevitably its problem awareness and it runs the risk of “quantifying the qualitative”, that is to say to accumulate bits of knowledge without knowing for what purpose.
Italy in the Balance. Electrons and Bourbons. Thinking of the recent past in order to understand the present and to plan the future
The aim of the paper is try to make a dynamic picture of the modern (or post-modern) Italian identity, from a political, social and cultural point of view. The status of this country is in the balance, between a fast industrialization without an analogous industrial culture and a lumbering memory where the traditional rules are still strong. The analysis will be carried out through an historical and sociological excursus both in Italian ascent memories and in political processes and events after the Second World War.
Bismarck’s Orphan: The Modern World and Its Destiny, from “Disenchantment” to the “Steel Cage”
The major contribution of Max Weber, according to the author, is to be seen in the concept of the “modern world” and its destiny as a society based on rational calculation. Such modern rationality is technically equipped and formal from a logical point of view. It provides a link between desired social goals and available resources to reach them. It is also a challenge for the decision-making power groups, unable to face the consequences of such rationality that begins as a liberation from traditional values and ends up in some sort of “steel cage”. Weber does not seem capable of suggesting a way out of this social and political contradiction.
On the way to «Creative Empathy»: the concept of truth as a social community enterprise in G. B. Vico’s «New Science»
There is no need to have recourse to sociology and to psychology in order to refute many worthy philosophers, in arguing that philosophical ideas, the history of philosophy, and philosophy itself, cannot be reduced to a chaotic and impersonal flux of problems and ideas. As Nietzsche says: «Little by little I have managed to form an idea of what all philosophies up to now have been: they have been the confessions of their authors, a kind of autobiographical memoirs, without their wishing it, or being aware of this». As Nietzsche shows, besides the categories for analysing the sociology of knowledge, it is useful to take into consideration too the character factors of the individual philosophers, as constants determining not only the actual construction of theories but also, and chiefly, their intelligibility.