Kondylis’ Dialogue With Sociology: Weberian, Neo-Kantian and Kulturkritik Patterns in his Thought

Abstract: This paper suggests that an appraisal of Panagiotis Kondylis’ dialogue with sociology is long overdue. While Kondylis’ work is well known and acclaimed in Germany and enjoys a wide readership in Greece, the position of sociology in his writings deserves closer scrutiny. Recently, Kondylis’ contributions to Greek sociology have been briefly appraised (Gangas; Lagoumitzi 2022). This slight tilt of focus is further necessitated by what appears to be both a substantive and tactical recourse to sociology on Kondylis’ part. Beyond arguments that place his system into a variant of decisionism, the merit and validity of Kondylis sociological excursions must be seen as integral components of his critique of normativity: in philosophy, sociology and ethics. I shall argue that Kondylis’ substantive partnership with sociology is laid systematically in his incomplete The Political and Man. The case for a social ontology aims at rectifying what for Kondylis is a moribund and sterile sociologism. Beyond his search of an socio- ontological spectrum that is even more ‘foundational’ than sociology’s conception of the social Kondylis assigns to Weber a privileged explanatory position (as opposed to the other founders and contemporary); moreover, he draws on sociological paradigms that call for scrutiny as to Kondylis’ (tactical) mode of reading major sociologists. In addition, when Kondylis engages in cultural critique and diagnostics he draws on other sociological patterns. Here, the argument around modernity as mass society goes into the heart of analogous sociological dissections of contemporary societies’ constitution, which for Kondylis, has morphed into a largely amorphous mass democracy. (In Greek scholarship, Faraklas (2013) makes the case of Kondylis’ thought being rooted in Daniel Bell’s sociology beyond what he also discerns as a convergence with Weberian motifs.) Yet for all of Kondylis’ assurances to the contrary (namely that his case for social ontology has no normative presuppositions), his insistence on the ‘equidistant’ poles of the socio-ontological spectrum (e.g. ‘friend-enemy’, ‘order-disorder’) accommodates -unwittingly but no less unproblematically for his architectonic epistemology based on power- latent normative concepts as well as metaphysical assumptions (i.e. his reference to ‘historical equibalance’), which, as I shall argue, emanate from a resurgence of the neo-Kantian and neo-Platonist controversy over values, core elements of which suffuse sociology to this day.