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 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». …

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 disorienta…

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 obj…

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.

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 woul…

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 in…

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…

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 p…

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 am…

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 it…

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 n…