ABSTRACT
Introduction The growing difficulty of understanding and managing the problems of society, in our age in which a permanent revolution ceaselessly shakes and overturns established institutions and perceptions, brings out a sort of impotence of social thought just when the suffering bound up with adaptation to change would appear to exalt that discipline’s function and importance. To break this impasse, a number of clarifications concerning the procedures of inquiry from which social thought springs are essential. A capital misunderstanding on the character of social reality undermines social thought and will lead to the proposal of a method addressed to remedy that misunderstanding and make the confrontation among social students easier, hence to increase the fecundity of pluralism and the comparability of social theories, which is essential to the profitableness of research and the cumulative principle of knowledge. Using the proposed approach on method, the way to find general principles – in the presence of rapid social change – and achieve some other specific knowledge will be explored. In particular, the first three sections dwell on the inappropriateness to social reality of the principal methods in use and point out the growing methodological confusion that afflicts social thought in the present age. The fourth and the fifth sections expound a methodological proposal calibrated on the main characteristics of social reality and give some examples of the way the proposal operates. Finally the sixth section exposes some major implications of the proposal for the analysis of ethic-ideological values, civilizations, and the interpretation of social-historical processes.
