The Rise and Fall of Social Theory. The Innsbruck Debate

Alvin Gouldner used to say in the 1970s that sociologists are in the business of creating concepts. Fifty years later, we can safely add that one of their favorite side hustles consists in eternally returning to a bunch of vexatae quaestiones whose answer defies an easy solution. Among others, the status of modernity, the issue of inequalities, the problem of social order, the multiple pathways to empirical research, and of course the crisis of sociology. A contested question in particular sums them all up: the current standing and the future of sociological (or, alternatively, social) theory – a perennial, multifarious, and especially thorny matter. Whether these disputations are generative or degenerative, is debatable. At least, though, the plenary discussion titled “Rise and Fall of Social Theory” (held in Innsbruck on July 3, 2025, in the context of the midterm conference of ISA RC16, indeed the Research Committee on ‘socio-logical theory’) ended up being regenerative. At first, the panel was organized following the venerable pattern of Hegelian dialectic: Frédéric Vandenberghe was supposed to provide the thesis (i.e., a defense of social theory), Giuseppe Sciortino the antithesis (i.e., a provocative attack against it), and Jayme Gomes a data-driven, informed and possibly broader historical synthesis; while we (Lorenzo Sabetta and Andrea Mubi Brighenti) were given license to roam freely across the debate through a series of opening remarks. However, the final result turned out to be more unorthodox (more chaotic, yet arguably more intriguing) than that. It is reproduced and collected here.