The Age of the Social ― The Discovery of Society and the Ascendance of a New Episteme

The concept of society sui generis – society as a level of reality which could be studied scientifically – crystallized in the middle of the nineteenth century in Europe, with the work of Durkheim, Marx and Weber and today, more than at any other period in history, the idea of the social has gained a foothold in philosophy, biology, and neuroscience. However, this idea has emerged into prominence not through the historical or contemporary efforts of sociologists, but mainly through the efforts of biologists and neuroscientists.

This book seeks to re-establish the credentials of sociology as the science of society. While acknowledging the amalgamation of traditional disciplines into interdisciplinary and multidisciplinary networks of research and theory, and championing interdisciplinarity in recognising the capacity of converging perspectives to yield more interesting general theories of social life, the author defends disciplinarity in maintaining sociology’s achievements as a discipline.

With chapters on the sociological world view, imagining society, the self, love, education, mathematics and religion, The Age of the Social re-states the importance of sociology as the source of robust ideas about the social in an age in which this notion has grown in importance. As such, it will appeal to scholars across the social sciences, with interests in method and philosophy in the social disciplines.

Sal Restivo is Adjunct Professor in the Department of Technology, Culture and Society at New York University Tandon School of Engineering, USA and Special Lecturer in Science and Technology Studies at Northeastern University in Shenyang, China. He has held Special Professor positions and endowed chairs at the University of Nottingham, UK, Harvey Mudd College, USA, the Free University of Brussels, Belgium, The University of Gothenburg, Sweden and Roskilde University, Denmark. He is a founding member and former president of the Society for Social Studies of Science and editor of Science, Technology and Society: An Encyclopedia. He is the author of Red, Black, and Objective: Science, Sociology, and Anarchism; Science, Society and Values, and The Sociological Worldview, and co-author of Asphalt Children and City Streets with D'Ambrosio and Mesquita and Worlds of ScienceCraft: New Horizons in Sociology, Philosophy, and Science Studies with Weiss and Stingl.