Interview with Bernard Lahire: towards a renewal of sociology, centered on the fundamental structures of human societies

Authors

  • António Firmino da Costa Iscte – Instituto Universitário de Lisboa, Centro de Investigação e Estudos de Sociologia (CIES-Iscte), Lisboa, Portugal
  • João Teixeira Lopes Faculdade de Letras da Universidade do Porto, Instituto de Sociologia da Universidade do Porto (ISUP), Porto, Portugal

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.7458/SPP202611046134

Keywords:

fundamental structures, social invariants, social laws, comparative method, scientific realism, social sciences of the living

Abstract

Bernard Lahire, a highly regarded French sociologist of international renown, has made a series of remarkable advances in sociology and put forward innovative proposals of great scientific interest. In this interview, he discusses some of the cornerstones of a new programme for the renewal of sociology that he has been developing, grounded in an epistemological perspective of scientific realism and centered on researching the fundamental structures of human societies. It is an approach with a broad theoretical scope and a wide interdisciplinary reach, drawing on comparisons between societies and between species, and broadening the cognitive horizon to what the author calls the “social sciences of the living”. In this way, sociology can go beyond merely describing socio-cultural and historical “variations” to also identify social “invariants”, namely those condensed into general social laws. This also opens up the possibility of decisively raising the scientific status of sociology.

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Published

2026-04-07

Issue

Articles in continuous publication

Section

Articles

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Copyright (c) 2026 António Firmino da Costa, João Teixeira Lopes

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