In the article, the author asks whether sociology has at all progressed in the last half century; whether it has answered the fundamental sociological questions better and whether the latter were perhaps not adequately posed. Although it seems the basic paradigms of sociological science have advanced, not many connections between them have been established thus far. Using the metaphor of the “burning house of sociology”, with which the author characterises contem porary social events, the need to overcome paradigmatic and also disciplinary limitations becomes ever more evident. What we need, she says, is an active, critical, professional social science that will ask the right questions and locate the answers in the area of utopistics within democratic egalitarianism.
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