WHATS THE CASE - AND WHATS BEHIND IT - TH E 2 SOCIOLOGIES AND THE THEORY OF SOCIETY

Ever since it began its academic career sociology has approached its o bject in two different ways, with a positivistic and with a critical a ttitude. Important theories, for instance that of Karl Marx and that o f Emile Durkheim, preferred the one or the other side of this distinct ion but could not exclude its counterpart. Sociology became empirical with an interest in latent structures or critical with an interest in incongruent perspectives which explain that social reality differs fro m its appearance. Any attempt to unify a theory of society in spite of this guiding distinction would have led to a paradox: frontstage and backstage, manifest and latent structures would have been presented as if the same. Under these premises it was not possible to develop a th eory of society which satisfies both scholarly and public expectations . At present, this situation seems to be changing in radical ways whic h sociology itself is not yet aware of. Interdisciplinary discussions propose theories of self-referential systems, autopoietic closure, the second order cybernetics of observing systems and constructivist pres uppositions of information processing and cognition which could be use d to understand society as a self-observing system which defines its o wn identity and by this very self-description creates an ,,unmarked sp ace'' which may be used to distinguish and describe the system in a co mpletely different way.