Since its birth, but especially since its academic institutionalization,
sociology has been plagued by a series of dualisms and dichotomies
that seriously diminish the relevance of much of sociological work.
To start with, there is the opposition of theoretical and empirical soci-
ology; an opposition that should have been stillborn, as it is com-
monplace that theoretical work without empirical evidence is arid,
while empirical research without theory is spiritless and boring, but
continues to survive and even thrive. There is also the division
between substantive and methodological issues, creating the impres-
sion of two separate realms and the illusion of a ‘free choice’ of
method. One can continue with the contrast between methodological
individualism and collectivism that in our days culminates in the var-
ious debates around rational choice theory, but which is just the old
debate between (neo-classical) economics and classical (Durk-
heimian) social theory, in new clothes. Still further, there is the
dilemma of dynamic versus static approaches, which could be for-
mulated in the language of historical versus structural, or of genetic
versus genetic. There is furthermore the dichotomy dominating so
much of contemporary sociology, between agency and structure,
which is just another way of posing the contrast between action and
system, dominating the structural-functionalism of the 1950s and
1960s, or the even older opposition between object and subject and
their dialectic, central for German idealist philosophy. At an even
more general level, there is the question of the link between reality
and thought, the extent to which thought and discourses can properly
reproduce reality, or, on the contrary, the claims about the autonomy
of discourse, or the independence of the text, a theme particular cher-
ished by various postmodern approaches.
