The Sociology of Concepts or the Sociology of Judgments? Schmitt, Benjamin, Weber

The interrelated themes that run through this essay are connected with some questions arising from the work of classical sociologists and their legacies: how can sociology arrive at making political judgments?1 Is such an aim attainable at all in the first place? Is it a worthy one? If so, for whom are said judgments valid and why? What kind of specific validity should these judgments aspire to? How can circumstantial judgments, sprung from concrete cultural situations and intended for particular targets, travel across time, giving proof of resil- ience, if not objectivity? Needless to say, these questions are not comprehen- sively answered here, but they mark out the range within which our analysis is couched and situated. Our point of departure is to recognize how the possi- bility of fleshing out political judgments within the field of sociology has been caught (as it often happens in intellectual disputes, especially academic ones) between Scylla and Charybdis, that is, between the dismissal of the possibility itself of advancing whatever political judgments and the conviction that these judgments are not only accessible to sociologists but should also possess nor- mative significance. Advocates of the former perspective would emphasize the altogether contextual character of any political course of action, considering therefore impossible to set forth objective accounts, while advocates of the lat- ter would deem necessary to develop a broadly applicable set of scientific prin- ciples that can grapple with every political decision. This thorny opposition, here caricatured as perfectly dichotomic (justificationism v. normativism), is somehow exemplar, calling into question the very separation between two interrelated facets of political judgments.