Chernilo D. 2004. El Rol de la "Sociedad" como Ideal Regulativo: Hacia una reconstrucción del concepto de sociedad moderna. Cinta moebio 21: 175-188

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The role of society as a regulative ideal

Daniel Chernilo. Doctor en sociología, Universidad de Warwick. Académico del Departamento de Ciencias Sociales de la Universidad Alberto Hurtado, del Departamento de Sociología de la Universidad de Chile y miembro adjunto del Centro de Teoría Social de la Universidad de Warwick.

Abstract

This paper introduces the thesis that ‘society’ plays the role of a regulative ideal for sociology: society is an impossible but necessary object of knowledge. This thesis of society’s regulative ideal in sociology emerges from the critique of the methodological nationalism with which the social sciences at large, and sociology in particular, have been implicitly working since the second post-war period. The main feature of this methodological nationalism is the utilisation of ‘society’ only in the definition of the geographical reference for sociological analysis – the nation-state – and thus failing to acknowledge that society performs also a theoretical role. Programmatically, I shall try to unfold the thesis of society’s role as a regulative ideal from Kant’s definition of regulative ideals and some sociological writings by G. Simmel and T. Parsons.

Key words: society, regulative ideal, nation-state, Kant