Sociology’s fragmentation stems from Enlightenment faith in transcendental rationality

Evidence

For Luhmann, the serious problems of fragmentation and credibility faced by the social sciences today can be traced back to the European Enlightenment of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. The old certainties – the belief in the capacity of human intelligence to develop a transcendental rationality, and the idea of infinite progress through this increased knowledge – seemed to work well for a time as a self-description of intellectual human endeavour. Where sociology was concerned, however, Luhmann saw this quest for truth and progress as an unfortunate starting point. It did not lead, as it was expected to do, to increased knowledge opening the way to a better world. Instead what has emerged is a multitude of coexisting theories and hypotheses which give the impression of employing reliable scientific methods, but which depend ultimately for their validity on the particular belief about human nature that the particular sociological observer subscribes to. — Niklas Luhmann, Trust and Power, 14

Categorization

• XREF: Channels the reader’s Luhmann-Giddens-Ishiguro analysis: the multiplicity of theories each resting on an observer’s belief about human nature is exactly what system trust is built to manage — a system-level response to epistemic fragmentation. — connects to: Classical social theory defined modernity by the application of scientific rationality over tradition — Alex Callinicos, Against Postmodernism: A Marxist…, 151; The Dialectic of Enlightenment targeted the whole Western rationalist tradition, not just Marxism — Martin Jay, The Dialectical Imagination: A History…, 781