Introduction

This chapter shows that Rancière’s critique of sociology is limited neither to his occasional comments regarding Auguste Comte, Émile Durkheim, or Max Weber, nor to his more sustained critiques of the work of Pierre Bourdieu. Rather, this critique of sociology forms an integral part of Rancière’s work in the domains of politics, history, and education, decisively influencing the nature of the original theory of politics, language, class, and history that he elaborates. The chapter argues that Rancière understands sociology to constitute a problematic, in Gaston Bachelard’s sense of a set of theoretical assumptions and experimental procedures that determine how objects of knowledge are constructed and what can and cannot be thought from within any given problematic. The chapter concludes that the theories of politics, history, and education that Rancière elaborates in opposition to the sociological problematic can hence be understood to constitute a kind of counter-sociology.