The Fall of the Angelus Novus: Beyond the Modern Game of Roots and Options

Abstract

Sociology and social sciences in general have developed as part and parcel of the tension between social regulation and social emancipation that underlies the project of modernity. This tension seems to have vanished as social emancipation has become the double, rather than the opposite, of social regulation. Therefore, the reinvention of the social sciences presumes a new start for the social sciences focused on the generation of powerful interrogations and destabilizing images, made possible by the supersession of the modern equation of roots and options and by a shift from the conventional duality between structure and agency to a new, enabling duality between conformist action and action-with-clinamen.