Edgar Morin is probably the most influential French sociologist that the English-speaking world has never acknowledged… In part, this is likely to be because he does not fit the image of French sociology that has dominated the English-speaking academic world. Morin has always taken his own line on major issues of the day rather than feeling obliged to follow any particular critical orthodoxy…Morin presents the social sciences as charged with understanding a world of chance and contingency that is never going to be wholly reducible to law-like explanations and which needs to respect the rights and dignity of individuals to make their own choices. It is a world in which risk and uncertainty are inescapable. As he notes, the Covid pandemic is a crisis of modernity and its belief that the destiny of humanity is to be the master of nature…
Published on Somatosphere