The Return of Nature in Human and Social Sciences? The action of non-humans in Marx, Durkheim and Weber

A ação dos não-humanos em Marx, Durkheim e Weber

Abstract

This paper seeks to investigate the relationship between the approach to natural phenomena in classical sociology by Karl Marx, Émile Durkheim and Max Weber and their main sociological concepts. In view of the Anthropocene scenario, which emerged at the beginning of the 21st century, in which human action on Earth was evidenced, geosocial issues started to support a new ontology in opposition to the ontology that gave basis to the “social question” of the classic authors of science sociological, a fact that influenced several scientists, mainly human and social, to reevaluate their fields of study, highlighting, since then, the intersections between man and nature. In this sense, the objective is to assess the extent to which the so-called "social question" of the classic authors of scientific Sociology was in fact restricted only to human aspects and whether it had anything "geo" in its theoretical and conceptual construction. Through a history of concepts, in which we will proceed by articulating different concepts in order to seek to identify the closeness and the distance, we will articulate the analysis of the main sociological concepts to the concepts of the man-nature relationship. The search of the research shows that the authors of classical Sociology not only attributed action to objects and natural phenomena but also pointed out certain “interventions” of these in the social, even though this is defined by them as something strictly human. In this sense, there is an ambiguity characterized by the fact that nature was never expelled from them by human (co)existence, even though it was expelled (from the concept of social) from the ontology that gave basis to their works.