This year's course specifically addresses the problem of science and politics in modern and contemporary societies. What, in fact, are science and politics and how can we define them? What theories and what theses have been produced about these concepts by sociological thought? How does sociology itself, as a "science of society", reflexively place itself in the inevitable relationship it has with the political field? From the birth of sociology as a "positive science" crossed by clear political intentions in Auguste Comte to the seminal reflections of Ulrich Beck on the "society of risk" and the "political theory of knowledge", passing through the "rules of the sociological method" by Émile Durkheim , Max Weber's lectures on the "work of the spirit" (science and politics as professions), the Frankfurt School's critique of "instrumental rationality" and Robert K. Merton's theses on science, not to mention quickly that some scholars among those who will be addressed, the course traces the history of sociology focusing on the centrality assumed by the themes of science and politics and identifying the points of contact, friction and concordance between them.
Furthermore, the course is thematically enriched with reference to philosophical and anthropological thought on these issues and problems.
In the background a question of absolute topicality: the global scenario determined by the pandemic of the Sars-CoV-2 virus in which science and politics have shown all the limits of a problematic and dynamic relationship.