Parameters of the Discursive Construction of Enlightenment Sociology

It is within the compass of the field opened up by the rights discourse that sociology was originally defined and given an existence. This context was not something given or static but a dynamic and changing one in that it was structured by the role played by the discourse in the overcoming of insecurity by establishing certainty anew. Centred around the unfolding process of the collective identification, definition and solution of a major collective issue of early modern times, it embraced not only the unsettling experience and perception of the problem of violence but also the establishment of the rights-based and legally regulated institutional infrastructure of the constitutional state. In the course of the development of the rights discourse, the participating social actors were confronted with the question of political involvement or opposition and of accordingly framing and communicating the issue of the survival of society in its political environment. Included were not only framings and communications of an overtly social and political kind, to be sure, but also related yet more distanced and reflective social scientific ones.

Opting one way or the other, the different social agents entered into competition and conflict over the common stake, the correct or collectively acceptable public framing of the issue. This competitive conflict is visible and accessible in the form of a semantic struggle in practical discourse over such social and political concepts as ‘sovereignty’, ‘state’, ‘people’, ‘contract’ and ‘rights’. Each party sought to encourage a particular use of these concepts and thus to obtain control over them for the purposes of forming people's opinions and mobilising and organising them. On the one hand, the monarchy, the state and its supporters promoted the ideology of absolutism. On the other, the movements that emerged from the different sections of the population advanced some version or another of the utopia of rights, the constitutionalisation of the state, collective decision-making and the public exercise of power. From among these sets of social actors focusing on enlightened despotism, constitutionalism and democracy as well as people who observed them, particularly via the print medium, there also emerged authors who assumed a more reflective relation towards historical events, responses to them and the ensuing communicative conflict and frame competition.