Vita e Pensiero

If derived from the overall thrust of his sociological writings rather then his political essays, Weber’s view of modernity is characterized by attention to the unique features of various advanced industrial societies rather then by a monolithic «iron cage» vision. This study first demonstrates this point by briefly discussing central differences in the political cultures of Germany and the United States, and then by reconstructing, following Weber, the classic dualism in the American political culture: a «world mastery» and self-reliant individualism stands opposed to – though also intertwined with – a public sphere penetrated by civic ideals. Although Weber’s expectations regarding the fate of this classical dualism in the twentieth century can be seen today to be largely incorrect, the utilization of an axiom central to his comparative-historical sociology yields a powerful conceptualization of the present-day American political culture: pendulum movements across a «tripolar constellation» are identified. This application of Weber’s sociology reveals its power even today.

Contemporary society is often described in terms of regional inequalities in addition to distinctions such as development/underdevelopment or modern/traditional. These territorial differences, however evident, serve as obstacles for sociological descriptions of modernity. This paper introduces the hypothesis that every observable difference (for instance economical, political, educative or even individual) is the product of the modern societal system as a whole. Modern society, which is based on functional differentiation, is at the same time hyperintegrated and loosely coupled, totalitarian and tolerant to local deviation. In the words of the early cybernetics: it is ultrastabil. The only requirement seems to be the compatibility between local structure and the main societal structure. From this point of view, in order to observe the territorial differences of contemporary society it is crucial to choose adequate sociological distinctions. For this purpose, the current research offers distinctions like: evolution/pianification, risk/danger and inclusion/exclusion.

The article presents the results of a research aimed at outlining, through a formal and content analysis of the press, the social representations of prostitution and of the actors involved in it. Four Italian newspapers over two different periods have been analysed. The research is based, on one hand, on the psycho-social theory of social representation and, on the other hand, on the sociological reflection about the role played by mass media in influencing social construction of reality. The results are read with the purpose to put together, in an idealtypic way, the fragmentation of the journalistic production in the three dimensions constituing a social representation (information, representation system, attitude). The degree of interconnection between the press and the dimension of the social representation has been highlighted. Prostitution is shown as an authentic press topic: the informative dimension of the social representation is strongly modelled by the media system’s needs. The phenomenon includes a wide representational system – which central nucleus consists of the idea of deviance –, and alternatively creates open and closed attitudes, according to the point of view adopted for its thematisation.

The interview to Ulrich Beck is divided into three broad parts. In the first one, the crucial passages in his intellectual biography are reconstructed with particular reference to authors and fields of reflection that he considers essential for the structuring of his own thought. In the second part, the questions focus on the status of contemporary sociology with some refers to the decline of the previous sociological categories and with the emerging of the cosmopolitan turn into the sociological theory and methodology. The third part focuses on the present human condition and the social challenges deriving from the cosmopolitan turn, in which our lives and scholarly endeavours are embedded.