Abstract

The article deals with the relationship between sociology and critical. A research path moving on two different terrains is advanced. The first of these involves the relationship between modernity and capitalism. A synthetic review of the issues concerning that relationship allows us to offer a historical frame to the exploration of the interpretive possibilities of the second, and more crucial, topics of inquiry, that is the critique and the way sociology can contribute to it. Two cognitive archives, internally and between them heterogeneous, are mobilized with regard to that topics, as they seem to offer fruitful heuristic cues: the «capability approach» (and the related «capacity to aspire»), on the one side, and the reflexive turn on the social sciences opened up by the «postcolonial studies». Starting from the spurs which can be produced by the interweaving and the interaction between these two different paths of research, the author outlines the proposal for a possible direction of work for reinterpreting the relationship between critique and sociology.