The Return of the Subject: How a Forgotten Sociological Idea Could Rebuild Society

In an age when protest movements flare up overnight and dissolve just as quickly, one of sociology’s oldest questions has returned with unexpected urgency: what does it mean to be a subject? A new conceptual analysis published in Frontiers in Sociology by Michela Luzi of Niccolò Cusano University in Rome argues that the answer may determine whether contemporary societies can pull themselves back from fragmentation, individualism, and crisis. Writing in the tradition of the French sociologist Alain Touraine, Luzi contends that the

The intellectual lineage behind the article’s argument deserves closer attention, because Touraine’s sociology of action was never merely an academic exercise. When Touraine developed his framework in the mid-1960s, French sociology was dominated by structural approaches that treated individuals as bearers of positions within systems rather than as actors capable of shaping history. Touraine’s insistence that workers define themselves through identity, opposition, and totality was a deliberate corrective: it located agency not in abstract structures but in the lived consciousness of people who recognize their adversaries and their shared historical project. Luzi’s revival of the ‘Soggetto’ concept taps directly into this tradition, suggesting that the analytical tools forged to understand industrial class conflict may still illuminate a post-industrial landscape dominated by cultural struggles rather than workplace disputes.

What makes the concept of the subject so demanding is that it sits at the intersection of two forces pulling in opposite directions. On one side stands the instrumental rationality described by Max Weber, the calculating logic of markets and bureaucracies that treats human beings as interchangeable units of labor and consumption. On the other side stands the system of identities, the web of meanings, memories, languages, and traditions through which people recognize themselves and one another. Luzi, drawing on scholars such as Bauman and Touraine, argues that decades of globalization organized around purely economic criteria have steadily privileged the first force over the second. The result is what she terms disintegrative individualism: a condition in which people are technically more connected than ever, yet progressively stripped of the collective frameworks that once gave their choices social significance.

This erosion is not simply a matter of nostalgia for lost community. The article’s conceptual scaffolding suggests a concrete social mechanism. When institutions recede and market forces take over the regulation of social life, the roles and norms that once structured experience begin to disappear, a process Touraine called desocialization. Desocialization is insidious precisely because it does not feel like oppression; it feels like freedom. Individuals appear liberated from constraining roles, yet they simultaneously lose the interpretive resources needed to orient themselves, evaluate institutions, and act collectively. Zygmunt Bauman’s account of de-modernization captures this double edge: the fracturing of identity across dimensions of being, memory, tradition, and skill is experienced as flexibility by some and as abandonment by others.

The historical material on the student movements of the 1960s provides an instructive mirror for the present. The article recounts how students from mass universities, often from modest backgrounds, pursued education as a ladder of social mobility only to discover that their degrees did not guarantee professional stability. Lacking the social capital to integrate into ruling elites, they came to understand that their individual fates were bound to broader social structures, and this recognition precipitated collective organization. The sequence matters: disadvantage was first experienced privately, then interpreted socially, and only then transformed into movement. This is the practical meaning of the subject in Touraine’s sense, the moment when isolated individuals recognize themselves as a social category with shared interests and a common adversary.

The movements that followed did not remain confined to their point of origin. University struggles internationalized rapidly, and their activists reached out to other marginalized groups, generating a wave of regionalist, feminist, and anti-nuclear mobilizations that crossed national borders. Scholars such as Alberto Melucci documented how these struggles announced new social problems that would gain full significance from the 1970s onward. The article’s point in rehearsing this history is not antiquarian. It establishes that movements grounded in cultural claims, rather than in wages and workplace control, have a demonstrated capacity to reshape political agendas, provided they can sustain a collective identity over time.

The definition of a social movement offered in the article is deliberately restrictive, and this restrictiveness carries analytical weight. A movement, following Touraine, is an organized collective conduct of a class actor struggling against a class adversary for the social direction of historicity within a concrete collectivity. Three elements are indispensable: an identity worth defending, an adversary against whom this identity is realized through conflict, and a shared vision of the whole that unites participants. The consequence is that a social movement cannot exist without a defined counter-movement; struggle is constitutive, not incidental. This criterion distinguishes genuine movements from mere protests, epidemics of outrage, or pressure groups that negotiate within existing power arrangements rather than contesting the direction of society itself.

The crisis of the classical labor movement, as the article describes it, illustrates what happens when these elements dissolve. The workers’ movement could once symbolize social conflict as a whole because industrial society organized nearly every dimension of life around production. As that configuration gave way, the movement disintegrated: some strands weakened, others radicalized into terrorism, and still others became institutionalized as lobbying organizations pursuing incremental gains. The article notes that this institutionalization, while producing concrete results, came at the cost of movement identity, since organizations embedded in negotiation gradually lost the conflictual stance that had defined them. The lesson is uncomfortable for contemporary activism: success within institutional channels can quietly extinguish the transformative ambition that made an organization a movement in the first place.

Against this backdrop, the new social movements of the late twentieth century appear both as heirs and as departures. They inherit the repertoire of collective action, the networks, protests, and claims-making forged in earlier struggles. But they depart from the industrial paradigm by organizing around sexuality, information, religion, nuclear energy, the environment, and gender, issues that are not reducible to the distribution of income. Theorists such as Jürgen Habermas and Melucci observed that these movements operate primarily through the democratic formation of public opinion rather than through direct political confrontation. Their battleground is cultural: they contest which knowledge models, forms of production, and moral principles society should honor. This makes them well suited to an era in which domination works through meanings rather than through explicit coercion, but it also makes them vulnerable to the centrifugal forces of individualism.

It is here that Luzi’s proposal for the ‘Soggetto’ becomes most concrete. The term designates individuals upheld by rights and institutions, persons whose agency is not a purely private possession but a status conferred and guaranteed by a shared social order. This formulation runs against the grain of a certain libertarian imagination that sees rights as protections of the individual against society. In Luzi’s account, the relationship is reversed: rights and institutions are what make individuals capable of being subjects at all, because they provide the stable background of recognition without which identity collapses into solitude. A subject, in this sense, is not the atomized consumer of market ideology but a person embedded in guarantees that allow commitments, loyalties, and long-term projects to take shape.

The strategic corollary the article draws is that human rights advocacy can function as a framework for restoring meaning in society, provided it is deployed as more than a legal instrument. Rights discourse, on this reading, is powerful because it names the standardized and homogenized roles that socio-cultural drift imposes on people and offers a language in which those roles can be contested. It converts private disorientation into public claim. When movements frame their demands in terms of universal rights, they appeal to broader societal values rather than to narrow group interests, and this appeal is precisely what allows a social category, in Touraine’s phrase, to challenge any form of domination while addressing society as a whole.

The notion of complex interdependence, borrowed from the globalization literature, adds a final layer to the argument. Interdependence is usually discussed as an economic fact: supply chains, financial flows, and information networks bind distant populations together. Luzi’s contribution is to ask what this interdependence does to subject formation. In a densely interconnected world, the consequences of individual and collective choices are no longer locally contained, and no single actor controls the systems in which all are embedded. Disintegrative imperialism, the article’s term for domination that fragments rather than consolidates, thrives in this environment because isolated subjects cannot grasp, let alone contest, the totality that shapes their lives. Only subjects who understand their entanglement with others, who see their own fate in the fate of distant strangers, can assemble the shared vision that the totality principle requires.

For social theory, the article’s wager is that conceptual reconstruction is itself a form of intervention. Categories such as subject, movement, and adversary are not neutral descriptive tools; they shape what actors believe is possible. If people conceive of themselves as isolated consumers, collective action appears irrational, and the field is left to market forces and economic actors. If they conceive of themselves as subjects upheld by rights and linked through interdependence, then collaboration across movements becomes thinkable, and protest can mature into a durable project of societal transformation. The article thus closes a circle that Touraine opened six decades ago: sociology of action begins with the empirical observation that people struggle to define themselves, but it ends with the normative claim that such self-definition, when institutionalized in rights and articulated through movements, is the principal engine by which a society steers its own history.

The practical implications extend to anyone studying or participating in contemporary mobilizations around ecology, gender, or digital life. The article’s framework suggests asking a consistent set of questions of any emerging movement: Does it sustain a distinct identity over time? Has it identified an adversary that clarifies the stakes of its struggle? Does it articulate a vision of the whole rather than a list of grievances? Can it collaborate with other movements without dissolving into them? And does it anchor its claims in rights and institutions so that its gains survive the enthusiasm of the moment? Movements that answer these questions affirmatively are, in Luzi’s terms, animated by a genuine Soggetto, and it is precisely such movements, rather than episodic eruptions of discontent, that hold the capacity to counter desocialization and rebuild the shared meanings on which democratic societies depend.

Subject of Research: Sociological theory of the subject and new social movements

Article Title: Reflections on the concept of subject

Article References: Luzi, M. (2026). Reflections on the concept of subject. Frontiers in Sociology, 11, Article 1874290. https://doi.org/10.3389/fsoc.2026.1874290

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.3389/fsoc.2026.1874290

Keywords: sociology, social movements, subjectivity, Alain Touraine, Michel Wieviorka, human rights, individualism, collective identity, democracy, de-subjectivation, new social movements, sociological theory