Sociologia política e processos macro-históricos

Abstract

The article offers, initially, a brief comment on the many definitions of political sociology and their diverse approaches. Next, it focuses on one of such perspectives, the one that confers priority to macro-historical analysis, calling attention to its preference for long term processes of transformation. Finally, adopting this same analytical preference, it discusses some of the ongoing great changes, suggesting that they pose big theoretical and methodological challenges to political sociology. The author explicitly recognizes that, actually, the challenges in question address all social sciences, but argues that macro-historical political sociology is the branch of sociology that is perfectly tailored to reflect upon such transformations and to throw lights onto the obsolescence of certain long established analytical models.