Europe as a political society: Emile Durkheim, the federalist principle and the ideal of a cosmopolitan justice

One of the most important debates in contemporary social thought concerns the origin and meaning of the general concept of “society” as it was first introduced in the modern order of scientific knowledge by classical sociologists. It is an inescapable and pressing question for a reflexive understanding of the social sciences. The founding fathers of sociology could not have started comparing human societies and replacing their significant differences along the line of a ramified process, in order to explain and assess the break introduced in history bymodernity, without first specifying what enabled the different kinds of human association and forms of collective order to be internal variations of one and the same social condition, seen as a universal anthropological feature. The present discussion thus tries to examine what allowed classical sociologists, when they started defining the project and program of their discipline, to distance themselves from the immediately given empirical reality in order to point out the existence, previously unnoticed, of that common reality to which they referred as the proper object of the new social science. This legitimate question, both historical and theoretical, has, however, progressively taken the formof awidespread reproach addressed to classical sociology as such, finally leading to a general criticism aimed at dismantling its project from its very bases. Indeed, according to some of themost prominent figures of contemporary sociology—Ulrich Beck, Anthony Giddens, Alain Touraine, and many others—the founding fathers managed to trace the frontiers of the social only by wrongly taking for granted a specific form of associated life, both historically determined and normatively laden, implicitly considered as the parameter of an accomplished collective order: that of the modern nation-state. Denouncing in successive and ever more radical waves of critique, the intrinsic limits of this inherited methodological nationalism, these sociologists have thus been trying, in the last 30 years, to extricate themselves from this limitation as a preliminary step towards the elaboration of a new sociological paradigm—differently labeled and conceived as global, international, or cosmopolitan—better adapted to the challenges of the complex intertwined world characterizing our second, reflexive modernity.1 If the contemporary self-interpretation of the history of sociology is true we should conclude that classic works are not only subject to seriously misleading socio-centric prejudices when dealing with premodern or non-European forms of life,2 but also that they cannot help us to characterize political supranational entities like Europe. Indeed, Europe as an original collective order would have been, for classical sociologists, as unthinkable on its grounds just like