Social thought has repeatedly questioned whether "society" constitutes a genuine object of knowledge or merely a reified abstraction. From the early methodological debates within sociology to contemporary proclamations of "the death of the social", anti-sociological arguments have challenged the ontological coherence of the social sciences' central category. Yet despite the diversity of these critiques, their shared ontological presuppositions have rarely been examined systematically. This paper offers a metatheoretical reconstruction of anti-sociological discourse, tracing its evolution and distinguishing its principal contemporary forms. It argues that anti-sociology is best understood not as a unified ontological doctrine, but as a family of positions in which ontological claims are consistently subordinated to epistemic commitments. To substantiate this claim, the paper analyses two dominant branches of anti-sociological argument: culturalist theories that relocate the social into symbolic orders, practices, or networks; and historiographical approaches that erode the coherence of society through appeals to contingency, temporality, and scale reduction. Across both branches, the concept of society loses ontological autonomy not through direct metaphysical refutation, but because it becomes explanatorily redundant within prevailing frameworks of intelligibility. Drawing on Weberian insights into the relationship between epistemology and ontology, the paper concludes that contemporary anti-sociological discourse reveals less about the reality of society than about the epistemic priorities that currently govern social and historical inquiry.
Josep María Bech (Mon,) studied this question.