Public Communicative Construction

In the previous chapter, an analysis was conducted of a selection of authors who contributed more or less directly and significantly to the construction of sociology within the context of the rights discourse – More, Hobbes, Vico, Montesquieu, Ferguson and Millar. Their achievements can be seen in the respective constructive contributions they made to the semantics of sociology in relation to the practical discourse and hence more general socio-political semantics of the early modern period. The latter, which took form in dependence on such events as the Reformation, the Dutch Revolt, the English Civil War, the American War of Independence and the French Revolution, was rooted in the experience of violence, focused on the issue of the survival of early modern society in its political environment, and expressed in the language of rights. The analysis for the most part concentrated on the microlevel of the framing elements or devices employed by each of the authors in their respective constructions of sociology. A step was also taken towards the meso-level to determine the frame within which each symbolically packaged his propositions, commitments and motivations with a view to communicating a clear identity and thus distinguishing himself from others. Within this scaffolding of framing devices and frames, an attempt was then made in each case to highlight the emerging sociological semantics.

At this stage, finally, it is necessary to bring the analysis to a close by shifting to the macro-level to render explicit and draw conclusions about the construction of sociology as such within the master frame made available by the early modern rights discourse. The need to undertake such macro-analysis is given with the fact that early modern sociology cannot be identified with the particular constructive contributions of the authors considered. The construction of sociology in the proper sense of the word takes place only in the differentiated relations established around sociology in the context of the rights discourse and, therefore, does not admit of being reduced to the originality or ingenuity of the different authors. Rather than looking for the coherence and consistency of sociological semantics in the individual authors, the rights discourse as punctuated by sociology must be investigated in order to determine how sociology was constructed in public communication.