Un mondo aperto. Itinerari nella sociologia della complessità

[Autom. eng. transl.] Since globalization has disrupted the structures of our world, the awareness of living in a complex society has increased. What is meant, however, with this expression often remains an enigma. Complexity is in fact a highly suggestive term, of which both common sense and social sciences have learned to use themselves. On the one hand, it would seem to indicate the simple acknowledgment of the chaotic and disordered situation in which we live today, marked by extreme social fragmentation. A sort of intellectual expedient to be able to give shape to a social form that has no form. On the other hand, thanks to the consolidation of a field of studies and research defined above all in the framework of the exact sciences, the so-called complexity sciences, complexity loses its traits of seductive but vague metaphor, offering the social sciences a set of theoretical and methodological resources "Turnkey" for a more rigorous and "scientific" study of the complex society. However, attempted by this approach, sociology risks falling victim to new scientisms. Is it possible to find a middle ground between these two extremes? This is the question that this book attempts to answer. And he tries to do it putting himself in the wake of a thought capable of approaching complexity in all its complexity, to finally arrive at showing how this, even if in the first instance it concerns issues apparently distant from people and their daily lives, like the profound transformations of the science that came about in his name, has a decidedly "human" heart. Ultimately, the complexity, properly understood, is able to offer knowledge and knowledge that is up to the greatest challenges of the present, providing us with the coordinates to live in an open world, where the certainties and in reassuring boundaries of the past, starting from what separated nature and society, they lost their meaning.