Times of sociology. Eviatar Zerubavel in conversation with Lorenzo Sabetta

This essay offers a historical reconstruction of Eviatar Zerubavel’s work, from his pioneering studies of time to his not-yet-published analysis of “concept-driven sociology”, running the gamut of Zerubavel’s career and embracing a period of more than forty years of sociological research. The interview encompasses several major topics: the beginnings of Zerubavel’s own intellectual path and his move from Israel to the United States; the nuts and bolts of sociology of time and cognitive sociology; the underlying theoretical framework of a transcontextual and comparative mode of social inquiry; an in-depth analysis of the last books which Zerubavel has devoted to the study of phenomena such as backgroundness and taken-for-grantedness; the range of his academic and intellectual relationships (especially the one with his mentor Goffman, but also his rapport with Peter Berger, Lewis Coser, Renée Fox, and Murray Davis, among others); the polymorphic connection between sociological theory and politics; the development of the so-called “Rutgers School of Sociology”; the issue of “public sociology”; the future of sociology and academic research.