Punishment and Power: toward the Historical Sociology of Socialism
Punishment and Power: toward the Historical Sociology of Socialism

Summary/Abstract: The motive that guides me in such a study is utterly simple and extremely complex: this is curiosity – in any case, the only type of curiosity that deserves the effort to practice it with some degree of perseverance – not the one that tries to appropriate what is suitable to know but the one that allows you to get free from yourself. How much would the strife for knowledge cost if it were supposed to propel only the acquisition of knowledge rather than – in a certain way and as far as possible – the confusion of the one who cognizes? For what is sociological reflection in one of its inseparable parts, if not a critical work of thinking on the thinking itself? And, instead of legitimating what is already known, does it not consist in the endeavour to understand how and how far it is possible, to think differently? There is always something unworthy in a sociological discourse when it wants, from without, to be the law for the other human sciences, to point out to them their truth and how they should discover it, or when it gets down to accusing them of uncritical positivity; but it is its right to study what can be changed in its own thinking, through the exercise of a knowledge otherwise foreign to it. ‘Experience’ – which s a changing trial of yourself in the game of truth, rather than a simplifying appropriation of the other for the goals of communication – is the foundation of historical sociology, at least as long as it is understood as a critical work on our own thinking.

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