Transcending Modernity: The Quest for a Relational Society

Introduction: The modern/after-modern divide and the emergence of a new sociability. Part I The transcendence of modernity. 1. The end of modernity in the lib/lab interplay: what after? 1. Lib and lab meet and shake hands. – 2. The modern dialectic between freedom and control leads to paradoxes and contrasts with empirical reality. – 3. Attempts to reconcile freedom and control conducted within modernity. – 4. Limitations and obsolescence of the lib/lab paradigm: the shift to the communicational paradigm – 5. A relational approach to freedom vs. control dilemmas after modernity: possible scenarios. 2. The failures of the State/Market compromise: towards a new societal configuration. 1. What is behind the world economy’s crisis? - 2. Should we yield to evolution laws? - 3. Is there an alternative to an evolution without finalism? - 4. Rethinking civil society and its economic foundations. 3. The oncoming societal morphogenesis: how social networks produce a relational society. 1. The issue: how to conceive of social morphogenesis. - 2. Social change and emergence of new social forms. - 3. How do we conceive of the social relation? - 4. The working of social networks in the morphogenetic process. - 5. Is it possible to steer social morphogenesis? - 6. Thinking the future in terms of social morphogenesis. Part II Towards a new societal configuration: the possibility of a relational society. 4. Beyond the traditional welfare state: “relational inclusion” and the new welfare society. 1. The welfare state as an issue. - 2. The crisis of the welfare state signals the end of an epic project and an entire historical order. - 3. The difficulties of creating a new welfare state. - 4. How we can conceive the new welfare society: the principle of “relational inclusion”. - 5. The challenge of a "civil welfare". 5. In search of common goods as ‘relational goods’ that foster a new civil society. 1. What are ‘relational goods’? - 2. Relational goods are a reality that escapes the public/private dichotomy. - 3. How did the theory of relational goods arise? - 4. The turning point. - 5. The concept of relational good redefines the map of common goods. - 6. Who are the subjects who generate relational goods? Under which conditions? - 7. The new civil democracy. - 8. Implications for the future political organization of society. 6. Associative democracy through relational social capital. 1. The issue: from Tocqueville to Putnam and beyond. – 2. The need for a new theory of social capital. - 3. Two paradigmatic ways of interpreting social capital which have prevailed so far. – 4. A new approach to social capital: the relational viewpoint. - 5. Associational social capital and relational goods. - 6. The associative social capital mediation. - 7. Conclusions. Prospects: The “relational reason” for a common world. 1. Globalization vs universalism? - 2. Is a "new universalism" possible? Which universalism? - 3. After-modernity and the differentiation of the universal. - 4. Rethinking the issue of a globalized multicultural society in a relational framework. - 5. In search of a common world: the theory of interculturality. - 6. Secularity guided by a relational semantics of cultural differences. - 7. The relational reason: widening the human reason through social relations. - 8. Synthesis and perspectives. Bibliography