Beyond the Crisis of the Globalized ‘World System’: the Need for a New Civil Society

The Author argues that sociology needs a new analytical paradigm in order to understand how the recent world crisis (born in the US on September 2008) has stemmed from a certain set-up of the so-called global society. Such a set-up is the product of a long historical development, which goes beyond the financial crisis’ outbreak in 2008. The question asked by the Author is the following: from a sociological standpoint, why did this crisis break out? And what remedies can be put in place? The measures adopted these days cannot solve the crisis, but, for a number of reasons, they can at most provide temporary stoppers and remedies. The paper suggests that the crisis is revealing the need to go beyond the State-Market compromise (the lib-lab configuration of society) and bring the world system to a new relational set-up.