Experiencing society’s contradictions is the constitutive precondition of sociology

Evidence

The experience of the contradictory character of societal reality is not an arbitrary starting point but rather the motive which first constitutes the possibility of sociology as such,’ Adorno argued at the conclusion of his second contribution, and continued: Sociology’s abandonment of a critical theory of society is resignatory: one no longer dares to conceive of the whole since one must despair of changing it. — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School, 598

Categorization

• DEFINE: Defines the methodological starting point of critical sociology: lived contradiction, not neutral observation, makes the discipline possible.
• QUESTION: Worth chasing: does ‘constitutes the possibility of sociology as such’ collapse the distinction between the theorist’s experience and the object of theory? Habermas appears to answer this differently just a few sentences later.
• XREF: connects to: Sociology mirrored modern society by banishing ethical problematics from its discourse — Zygmunt Bauman, Modernity and the Holocaust, 111; Sociology emerged as a scholarly response to social acceleration — Hartmut Rosa, Social Acceleration: A New Theory of…, 189
• yield-rescued: below the book’s yield-target cutoff, included anyway for connecting to: Sociology mirrored modern society by banishing ethical problematics from its discourse — Zygmunt Bauman, Modernity and the Holocaust, 111; Sociology emerged as a scholarly response to social acceleration — Hartmut Rosa, Social Acceleration: A New Theory of…, 189