Abstract

DE MARINIS, Pablo. “‘Less is more’: some reflections towards a soberly ambitious sociological theorizing for (post)pandemic times (or: a ‐ perhaps extemporaneous ‐ eulogy of modernist architecture and functionalist sociology)”. Trab. soc. [online]. 2022, vol.23, n.38, pp.313-333.  Epub Jan 01, 2022. ISSN 1514-6871.

The outbreak of the pandemic in 2020 plunged humanity into perplexity, including the social sciences. After the initial surprise, empirical sociologies began to offer rich descriptions of emerging states of affairs. In contrast, many theoretical essays - pretentious and totalizing, clinging to previous interpretative schemes, or throwing utopian or dystopian scenarios to the wind - proved largely incapable of offering fruitful insights into thinking and understanding what changed and what remained. At least that is what I perceived then. As a researcher (pre)occupied by social theories, realizing the futility of my own field was a frustrating experience. On the assumption that the present moment demands “thinking shortly”, the syntagm “less is more”, attributed to the modernist architect Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, came to my mind. This paper will proceed in two stages. First, it introduces the American functionalist sociologist's “middle range theories”, strikingly convergent with the modernist architect's famous “less is more” inspirations, which are presented in a second moment. Placing in the middle of this game the contributions of some authors of the Vienna Circle, certain three-way convergences between philosophy of science, architecture and sociology unfold. Everything will lead, in the end, to some methodical suggestions that can be adopted by the sociological theorizing of the present.

Keywords : sociological theorizing; middle range theories; architectural modernism; Robert K. Merton; Mies van der Rohe; Vienna Circle.

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