The great transformation of sociology

"What is the role of sociology in today's world? The obligation to explain social facts by the conditions that produced them, inherent in scientific explanation, requires sociology to examine events once they have occurred. But this does not mean it must become an intellectual apparatus for legitimizing the injustices and dominations that characterize reality; nor can it be an excuse for retreating into microcosms and specializations that are complacent with the abusive hierarchies that govern the planet."

Sociology, and the social sciences in general, can only rigorously understand reality and serve as tools for its transformation if they are capable of asking the pertinent questions that unveil the concrete structures of domination, exploitation, and resistance that meticulously organize social space; and of finding there, in the objectivity of things as they are, the true power of things that could be different from what they are today. Scientific rigor is therefore not merely a method or an algorithm; it is a way of critically situating oneself in the world, of relentlessly challenging the regularities of the worldly order, which are always, in essence, solidified arbitrariness.

This book by Esteban Torres is an effort to ask the necessary questions that will push sociology to shake off its decadent complicity with things as they are, and to recover, once again, its critical, universalizing role, committed to what the world can potentially be.

Alvaro Garcia Linera

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