Why Reports of Sociology’s Public Death Are Greatly Exaggerated

We read with great interest Carlo Bordoni’s recent article in Social Europe, in which he argues that sociology is progressively surrendering its public voice to philosophy. It is a stimulating and provocative intervention, not least because it revisits a longstanding concern about the changing status of sociology in late modernity and echoes themes associated with the work of Zygmunt Bauman.

Yet Bordoni’s diagnosis ultimately rests on a narrative of disciplinary decline that risks overstating both the coherence sociology once possessed and the extent to which philosophy has replaced it as a mode of public diagnosis. The issue, in our view, is not that sociology has disappeared from public life, but that the institutional and intellectual conditions under which sociological knowledge circulates have profoundly changed.

Bauman and the transformation of sociological authority

Bordoni’s argument draws, implicitly or explicitly, on Bauman’s distinction between “legislative” and “interpretive” intellectual roles. That distinction remains highly relevant. Yet Bauman’s argument does not imply the disappearance of sociology so much as a transformation in the kind of authority sociological knowledge can plausibly claim under conditions of late modernity. What weakens is not sociological diagnosis as such, but the modern ambition to produce universally binding social narratives capable of organising political order from above. Bauman’s point, in our reading, was not that sociology ceases to matter once grand narratives fragment, but that intellectual authority itself becomes less centralised, less universal, and more contested. It is precisely the theme of contestation that, on the contrary, forms the leitmotif of a range of critical social and political interventions by engaged sociologists.

This matters because sociology was never as unified as nostalgic accounts sometimes imply. Even in its classical period, sociological knowledge was internally plural, marked by methodological disputes, competing epistemologies, and conflicting political orientations. Émile Durkheim, Max Weber, Karl Marx and Georg Simmel did not speak with one voice, nor did they share a single understanding of what sociology should be.

What has changed today is not the emergence of fragmentation itself, but its visibility and institutional intensification. To interpret this as a disappearance of sociology’s public voice risks assuming that public intellectual authority depends upon disciplinary unity. That assumption is increasingly difficult to sustain in contemporary democratic and epistemic conditions, where knowledge production is necessarily distributed, contested, and multi-sited.

In this sense, Bordoni’s argument risks conflating unity with authority. Sociology’s public relevance has never depended on consensus, but on its capacity to produce critical diagnoses of social relations from within a plural field of inquiry.

Sociology has not become irrelevant — it has become institutionally constrained

Bordoni is certainly right to identify increasing fragmentation and specialisation within academic sociology. Yet this tendency is not unique to sociology; it characterises contemporary knowledge production more generally, including philosophy itself. The expansion of specialised subfields is partly a consequence of the enormous complexity of contemporary social life and the institutional organisation of universities under competitive and managerial conditions.

Moreover, specialisation does not necessarily preclude public relevance. Some of the most influential contemporary analyses — of platform capitalism, precarity, migration regimes, ecological crisis, racial inequality, digital labour, financialisation, and social reproduction — emerge precisely from empirically specialised sociological research capable of connecting detailed investigation to broader structural transformations.

Indeed, many contemporary public debates already rely heavily on sociological concepts, even where these are no longer explicitly recognised as such. Discussions of precarious work, algorithmic management, emotional labour, social reproduction, inequality, intersectionality and platform capitalism are deeply indebted to decades of sociological inquiry.

The issue, therefore, is not sociology’s disappearance, but the changing institutional conditions shaping its visibility.

Here Bordoni’s own examples are revealing. He notes, for instance, the removal of sociology from parts of the university curriculum in Florida. Yet such developments do not indicate that sociology has lost analytical relevance; rather, they suggest that critical social inquiry has become politically contested. The growing hostility toward gender studies, critical race scholarship, labour studies, and broader critical social science in several countries demonstrates less the irrelevance of sociology than its continuing capacity to challenge dominant political and economic rationalities.

If sociology appears weaker publicly today, this is due in significant part to the neoliberal restructuring of higher education itself: the marketisation of universities, the increasing dependence on competitive funding regimes, the managerialisation of academic labour, and the fragmentation of public intellectual spaces. These transformations reshape what kinds of knowledge become institutionally visible, fundable, and publicly legitimate.

To interpret this as sociology’s retreat risks misrecognising a broader structural transformation in the political economy of knowledge production.

Public sociology and the question of engagement

One important omission in Bordoni’s account is the extensive debate within sociology itself concerning its public role. Over the past two decades, discussions surrounding “public sociology” — associated most prominently with the eminent work of Michael Burawoy — have directly addressed many of the problems Bordoni identifies: disciplinary fragmentation, professionalisation, technocratic closure, and the weakening of sociology’s public visibility.

Burawoy’s intervention did not deny these transformations. On the contrary, it began precisely from the recognition that sociology risked becoming increasingly disconnected from broader publics under neoliberal academic conditions. Yet his conclusion was not that sociology had been displaced by philosophy, but that sociology needed to cultivate new forms of engagement capable of linking empirical research, critical reflexivity, and public debate.

“Public sociology”, in this sense, was conceived not as a return to a lost disciplinary authority, but as a plural and dialogical practice oriented toward multiple publics, social movements, civil society organisations, and democratic debate. Importantly, Burawoy did not oppose professional sociology to public engagement; he argued that rigorous empirical research and public intervention were mutually dependent rather than contradictory.

This debate matters because it demonstrates that sociology has not passively retreated from public life. On the contrary, sociologists themselves have long reflected critically on the changing conditions under which public intellectual work is possible.

Philosophy has not replaced sociology

Bordoni’s central claim — that philosophy is recovering the public role sociology once held — also rests on a disciplinary distinction that no longer fully captures contemporary intellectual practice. Many of the thinkers frequently invoked today as public philosophers rely extensively on sociological categories, empirical research, and historically grounded analyses of institutions, labour, technology, inequality and everyday life. Conversely, much contemporary sociology is theoretical, interpretive, and explicitly engaged with normative and philosophical questions.

The boundary between empirical inquiry and normative reflection has therefore become increasingly porous. Rather than indicating disciplinary substitution, this reflects a broader convergence in how critical social knowledge is produced. Public diagnosis today often emerges through hybrid forms of inquiry that combine sociological, philosophical, historical, political and economic analysis. To describe this as sociology’s displacement by philosophy misunderstands the changing ecology of intellectual production itself.

The problem is compounded by the persistent assumption that sociology derives authority only insofar as it remains methodologically neutral and distinct from normative engagement. This ideal has long shaped parts of the discipline, often through the claim that scientific methods guarantee objectivity while political commitments can simply be bracketed off from analysis. Yet sociology has never operated outside history, power, or social conflict. Research questions, conceptual frameworks, and analytical priorities are themselves socially and historically situated. To claim that sociology can ever be entirely “value-free” is therefore less an empirical description of sociological practice than a normative vision of what legitimate knowledge ought to look like.

This does not mean that empirical rigour becomes irrelevant. On the contrary, critical sociology depends upon robust empirical inquiry. But it does mean recognising that all knowledge production occurs within historically specific social relations and institutional conditions. The question is therefore not whether sociology should be critical or neutral, but whether it is reflexive about the conditions under which its own categories, methods and forms of authority are produced.

The continuing relevance of critical sociology

Across multiple traditions — from labour process theory and critical realism to feminist sociology, postcolonial sociology, critical labour studies, and contemporary analyses of racial capitalism and social reproduction — sociologists continue to examine how power, domination, inequality and exploitation are embedded in contemporary social life. This body of work has hardly withdrawn from public diagnosis. If anything, it has expanded sociology’s analytical reach into areas increasingly central to contemporary political conflict: precarious labour, platform work, migration, ecological crisis, care, debt, algorithmic governance, and democratic fragility.

Nor is this work disconnected from empirical investigation, as critics sometimes imply. Many critical sociologists combine theoretically ambitious analysis with extensive qualitative, quantitative, comparative and ethnographic research. The opposition Bordoni appears to draw between empirical sociology and broader philosophical diagnosis therefore risks reproducing a distinction that contemporary sociology itself has already substantially moved beyond.

What has changed is not sociology’s capacity for critique, but the institutional environment within which critique circulates. Bordoni is right to raise the question of institutional conditions, but, contra his pessimism, what is most striking is not the fragmentation of those conditions but the fact that the institutions now allowing for a more defined radicalisation of public engagement lie beyond the academy, in the variant social movements remaking political life.

Sociology’s public role has changed — not disappeared

The deeper problem with the “decline of sociology” thesis is not that it identifies genuine transformations in the discipline’s public authority. Those transformations are real. The problem is that it interprets them primarily as loss.

Sociology has not surrendered its voice. It has lost the illusion that it speaks from nowhere.

In an era shaped by widening inequalities, ecological crisis, democratic instability, technological restructuring and intensified forms of economic insecurity, the need for rigorous, reflexive and publicly engaged sociology is arguably greater than ever. But this sociology emerges through plural, contested, and historically situated forms of knowledge production. It emerges instead through plural, contested, and historically situated forms of knowledge production.

The question today is therefore not whether sociology still has a public voice — it has never gone away — but whether contemporary institutions continue to make space for forms of knowledge capable of critically diagnosing the societies they inhabit.

The challenge, then, is not to restore a supposedly lost sociological authority grounded in universal grand narratives, but to defend and extend sociology’s capacity for critical diagnosis under conditions that often seek to narrow, fragment or depoliticise it. Far from being eclipsed by philosophy, sociology remains one of the most important intellectual resources for understanding the contradictions, inequalities and transformations shaping contemporary society.

The task is therefore not to mourn sociology’s supposed disappearance, but to recognise and strengthen its continuing — if transformed — public role. In an era marked by democratic fragility and social turbulences, we do not need less sociology. We need a range of sociologies that remain publicly engaged and openly critical.

Valeria Pulignano (Professor of Sociology, Centre for Sociological Research, KU Leuven) and Paul Stewart (Emeritus Professor, Grenoble University, and Visiting Professor, Centre for Sociological Research, KU Leuven)