Sebastiano Porcu

Although George Simmel and Karl Popper show deep differences between their intellectual and personal biographies on one hand and their degree of integration in the sociological tradition on the other hand, they present meaningful affinities as to the subject of prospects of individual freedom in modern society. Such affinities are particularly apparent, and surprising as well, in two crucial aspects of the study of recent social evolution: the factors which fostered (in the passage to social differentiation which has characterized the passage to modernity) the subject’ autonomy; the ambivalent – and, in some respects, paradoxical – character that both Simmel and Popper have acknowledged to many impacts of social change with regard to the relashionship between social order and individual subject in modern society. The feasibility of Simmel and Popper’s philosophy lies in the contribution it still offers to the analyses of «risks for freedom» that also the present period of social change reproposes.