ABSTRACT
Times have never been better for sociology than today! Established in the Western world in a period of social and political upheaval when consequences and side effects of the rise of capitalism had swept away old traditions and ways of life almost overnight, sociology has always been able to attract the attention of a wider public when contemporaries became aware of the crisis-prone character of their own era: that was so at the end of the 19th and the early 20th century when the discipline became established within research universities; that happened in the troubled 1930s and 1940s which were so much shaped by the Great Depression, totalitarian dictatorships and World War; that could be observed in the turbulent 1960s; and that will be so-as one might suppose-even today and the very next future. Who would seriously dispute that sociology as a science of societal crisis will move towards a bright future given the turmoil in global capitalism, given the debt crisis in the EU and in the US, given the revolts and revolutions in the Arab world, and given the meteoric rise of former so-called newly industrializing countries, which already changes the global geopolitical situation?
