Deconstruction, Social Theory and Sociology: A Necessary Disagreement

Abstract

This paper comments on the mismatch between the speculative and general vocation of classical social theory, its sociological formalization and deconstruction. Avoiding to produce a forced synthesis or homologation, the text attempts to complexify the conventional versions of deconstruction itself and of the fields of competence of social theory, showing that the persistence of a certain evolutionary principle of verifiable understanding in classical social theory and constitutive of sociological theory in general, prevents the formulation of the problem of historicity which is the distinctive problem of the deconstructive inflection. Finally, beyond the attempts to make systems theory converge with deconstruction, it is shown where and why, rather than a convergence, we should think of their divergence.