Treasures of Sociology

October 18, 2007 in printing
Tags: conceptualization, critique, geography, knowledge, sociology, spain

Sociology is often inclined to define itself in terms of programmatic calls. Sadly, many of these get lost — too old, badly published or, worse, not in English. But the blossoming of open-access PDF repositories of past issues from academic journals opens new sources for the recovery of old treasures of sociology:

“How many times one should write again what is meant to be said in order to have it said in a sufficiently intelligible way? How many years between the first vision and the definitive and penultimate conceptualization? This is the hard path of the concept, in both Philosophy and Science.” (from Carlos Moya, “Identidad colectiva: un programa de investigación científica”, Revista Española de Investigaciones Sociológicas, 25, 1984, pp. 7-35)

All these phenomenal echoes of the struggle (here in Madrid, early 1980s) for a unified, critical understanding of the confluence of human beings, at last, available to the crawler.