Sociology, normativity and social problems: Is there still room for critique?

• Main Author: Joaquin SABAT
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: Etudes Scientifiques Spécialisées Appliquées aux Communications Humaines, Economiques, Sociales et Symboliques 2019-08-01
• Series: Essachess
• Subjects: critique; normativity; sociology; social problems; constructivism
• Online Access: http://www.essachess.com/index.php/jcs/article/view/449/477

Despite the various theoretical and methodological rearrangements that sociology underwent ever since its origin in the mid-19th century, the normativity inherent to its object remains a significant source of debate. Behind the classical epistemological question involving the separation of facts from values and descrip-tive discourse from normative discourse lies an issue that runs through sociology’s history. After showing, based on the theses of Michel Freitag (1987), the critical role that sociological thought played throughout the modern period, this article explores the foundations of the argument between functionalism’s approach to social problems and that of constructivism in order to demonstrate how the crux of the problem is not that both are in some way normative, but that this normativity is never recognized and assumed as such. Since it is normativity that is problematic to the sociology of social problems, it seems that the answer is not to veil in an ever renewable fashion its unlikely overtaking, but rather to theorize the mutual involvement of normativity and sociology by showing how this internal relationship never stopped working between them, as the very condition of a truly “critical” discipline.