ABSTRACT
To see the new emerging society, it is necessary to adopt a “relational gaze” on social reality. Today many sociologists invite us to see social objects (societies, institutions, social movements, social classes, etc.) in a processual way, that is as being made of always fluid, dynamic relations. They offer a reductive and misleading vision of social reality, because they rely upon a flat social ontology rather than a stratified social ontology, so that social relations are reduced to eternal flows underestimating the weight of structures. On the contrary, a truly relational sociology should attribute a relative autonomy to structures, even if they are produced by processes. The relational gaze distinguishes between different orders of reality, the processual-interactional and the structural one, so to be able to see how ethically oriented interactions can generate new economic and political structures. The topic is expanded upon in subsequent chapters.
