How Society Changes

Sociological Enlightenment and a Theory of Social Evolution for Freedom

Datos Bibliográficos

ID9601475
AutoresMitsuhiro Tada (0000-0002-0455-7207, Kumamoto University, autor de correspondencia)
Año2020
Volumen51
Número4
Páginas446-469
Fecha de publicación2020-12-01
Peer ReviewedSí
Open AccessSí
TipoARTICLE
RevistaThe American Sociologist (JOURNAL)
Identificadores de la revistaISSN: 0003-1232 • E-ISSN: 1936-4784
EditorialSpringer Science and Business Media LLC (PUBLISHER)
DOI10.1007/s12108-020-09464-y
PMID33132397
OpenAlexW3096144133
IdiomaEN
Citas recibidas1
Referencias citadas33

This article clarifies the relationship between individual freedom and social order by relying on Niklas Luhmann’s social systems theory and thereby defines sociology’s contribution to social evolution as sociological enlightenment , which seeks otherwiseness in living experience and action. For this purpose, Luhmann’s theory will specifically be compared with Emile Durkheim’s and Alfred Schutz’s sociological theories. Durkheim, a “child of the Enlightenment,” considered freedom a collective ideal of moral individualism and conceived that the rational state realizes freedom by spreading the civil-religious human ideal for modern social order. In contrast, Schutz, following Henri Bergson, who criticized rationality for spatially fixing inner time, regarded freedom as a given in the individual’s underlying duration, not as a shared ideal. Yet, unlike Bergson, he continued relying on rationalism, and he thought that the sociological observer observes how something appears to people with the epoché of natural attitude, not what it objectively is. Inheriting this phenomenological subjectivism, Luhmann showed that the self-referentiality of consciousness also applies to society: A social system, which path-dependently emerges itself from a double contingency, observes the world in its own way based on its self-referentially constituted eigen-time. On account of this system closure, and contrary to Durkheim’s illuminist belief, there is no controlling entity in a highly evolved society, where freedom results from the enlarged, diversified possibilities of living experience and action (contingency). Thus, sociological enlightenment doubts self-evidence so that society brackets the taken-for-granted social order or social reality and amplifies individuals’ deviations to evolve toward freedom

Enlightenment · Epistemology · Social science · Social theory · Sociological theory · Sociology · Embodied and Extended Cognition · Emile Durkheim and Sociology · Evolutionary Game Theory and Cooperation · Philosophy