Las ciencias sociales como consuelo

Abstract

Human beings like to feel themselves useful to their family, their community, their country or even the whole humanity. Social and legal scientists are hardly an exception to this rule. Therefore, they hope that their scholar constructions will help to improve society or even the whole world. Such a hope, not a realistic one at all, rests upon a rationalistic prejudice. So these scholars foster the phantasy that society is or can be conduced to become a setting designed by techno-scientifical premises––thus able to be put under the direction of just that kind of means. This presupposition entails no less than a missionary ideology of social scientists. It aims at the legitimation of their own scientific communities, labouring under the delusion (a symbolic world) that social experience is a rational one. On the contrary, social change obeys to a very high complex set of factors, where rationality is largely absent. Theoretical and academic speeches, in those sciences, are not much more than a playoriented exercise of the spirit of curiosity. They have very little (mostly none) transforming force. His real function is to bring up intellectual entertainment and to provide us some spiritual consolation.