Pierpaolo Donati (born September 30, 1946) is an Italian sociologist and philosopher of social science, who is considered one of the main exponents of relational sociology and a prominent thinker in relational theory.
Biography Donati was born in Budrio, a small town of medieval origin 17 km from Bologna (Italy). After high school, he enrolled in the faculty of physics at the University of Bologna, but, after two years, he decided to dedicate himself to the study of society and enrolled in the faculty of Political Sciences in the same university, where he got his M.A. degree in 1970. Then he went to the University of Milan to do a research for the National Research Council Italy (CNR) on Italian entrepreneurship. In the years 1974–1978 he attended the summer school of the ECPR at the University of Essex (UK).
In 1980 he became full professor of sociology. In the years 1970–2016 he taught many different subjects in the fields of sociology, social theory, and social policy, in particular sociology of the family, health, citizenship, welfare, social capital, social services. In the same years, he lectured at the universities of Geneva, Gratz, Harvard, Chicago, Paris Sorbonne, Warsaw, Moscow, Navarra. In the years 1995–1998 he served as President of the Italian Sociological Association,About page - Italian Sociological Association (AIS) and during the mandate 2001–2005 he served as Counsellor and Auditor of the Board of the International Institute of Sociology.
In 1997 he was appointed member of the Pontifical Academy of Social Sciences as Ordinary Academician.The Pontifical Academy of Social Sciences - Ordinary Academicians He has received the Doctorate Honoris Causa from the Lateran University (Rome) in 2009Doctorate Honoris Causa Prof. Pierpaolo Donati - Pontificia Università Lateranense and from the Universitat Internacional de Catalunya (Barcelona) in 2017 for his studies on the family and social policy.Doctorate Honoris Causa Prof. Pierpaolo Donati - UIC Barcelona Acknowledged by the United Nations as IYF PATRON (1994), in 2009 he has received the San Benedetto PrizeCulture: Sociologist Pierpaolo Donati received the San Benedetto Prize for the promotion of Life in Europe and in 2015 the Cheryl Frank Memorial Prize2015 (joint) Pierpaolo Donati and Margaret S. Archer, The Relational Subject (Cambridge) and Douglas V. Porpora, Reconstructing Sociology: The Critical Realist Approach (Cambridge) for the book The Relational Subject, Cambridge University Press.
Works Donati’s research started with the idea of building a useful sociology to reform society according to a humanistic perspective. His writings became a long journey of reflections on the vicissitudes of modernity, its institutions, movements and ideologies, up to claiming that modernity dies and a new, after(not post)-modern society is born.
General overview The intention of Donati’s works was to revise the Parsonian theory on society and modernity. It was about building a good theory of society by avoiding Parsons’ mistakes, notably the one to consider a model of society (the North-American one) as the most advanced (therefore the best) in a supposed evolutionary scale. Donati it was necessary to find also a way out of all forms of neo-functionalism, e.g. J.C. Alexander’s and N. Luhmann’s theories.
For Donati, sociological realism should become critical and relational. Donati’s sociology was from its inception an autonomous version of critical realism.Margaret S. Archer (2010). “Critical Realism and Relational Sociology. Complementarity and Synergy.” Journal of Critical Realism, 9 (2), pp. 199-207. Therefore, Donati departed from Parsons' analytical realism in his ‘Introduzione alla sociologia relazionaleP. Donati (1986), Introduzione alla sociologia relazionale, FrancoAngeli, Milano, (second enlarged edition) pp. 226’ (first edition 1983) and subsequently in ‘Teoria relazionale della societàP. Donati (1991), Teoria relazionale della società, FrancoAngeli, Milano, 1991, pp. 580.’.
Relational society Donati's sociology is oriented to show how a relational society is constantly emerging through a morphogenetic process. To him, society is not a space containing relations, but rather the very tissue of relations (society "is relation" and does not "!have relations"). Relations are necessary, while their form is contingent.Emmanuele Morandi (2010). “Introductory Outlines to Pierpaolo Donati’s Relational sociology. Part 1.” Journal of Critical Realism, Vol. 9, No. 2, pp. 208-226; Emmanuele Morandi (2011). “Introductory Outlines to Pierpaolo Donati’s Relational sociology. Part 2.” Journal of Critical Realism, Vol. 10, No. 1, pp. 100-121. That’s why societies can take many different forms. They emerge as a ‘third’ in respect to the agents/actors (the ‘third’ is here understood as the Wechselwirkung according to Georg Simmel).
Any social formation is the emergent effect of reciprocal actions, reiterated over time by social actors/subjects occupying different positions in a societal configuration (system or social network). Society is any social formation generated by virtue of social mechanisms that are relational and reflexive. While the “Relational Subject” is characterized by personal reflexivity (as defined by Margaret Archer),Porpora, Douglas V. (2016). “The Relational Subject.” Journal of Critical Realism, 15 (4), pp. 419-425. the ‘relational society’ is characterized what Donati calls ‘relational reflexivity’, which is different in kind from the inner reflexivity of the individual.Relational reflexivity consists in orientating the agents/actors to the reality emergent from their interactions by their taking into consideration how this reality is able (by virtue of its own powers) to feed back onto the subjects (agents/actors) since it exceeds their individual as well as their aggregated personal powers. Margaret Archer attributes to Pierpaolo Donati the proper concept of ‘relational reflexivity’: see Martin Dyke (2015). “Reconceptualising learning as a form of relational reflexivity.” British Journal of Sociology of Education, 36(4): 542-557, quote p. 554.
In other words, each and every society is characterized by a special relation’s form, what Donati calls ‘social molecule’. Modernity has its typical relational form (modern social molecule), and so it is equally for post-modernity (post-modern social molecule). Donati speaks of an after-modern society to indicate a relational society endowed with a new social molecule. The ‘relational society’ is described as a morphogenetic society.P. Donati (2014). Morphogenic Society and the Structure of Social Relations, in M.S. Archer (ed.), Late Modernity. Trajectories towards Morphogenic Society, Dordrecht, Springer, pp. 143-172; P. Donati (2013). Sociologia relazionale. Come cambia la società. Brescia: La Scuola.
The social relation’s target/goal is to select variations according to the type and degree of relationality that they entail, with a view to producing ‘relational goods’;P. Donati (2019). Discovering the Relational Goods: Their Nature, Genesis and Effects, in “International Review of Sociology”, June 2019 (preprint) DOI 10.1080/03906701.2019.1619952 the means for achieving the goal can be extremely diverse, but they must be such as to allow for the production of relational goods; the after-modern social molecule’s norms promote meta-reflexivity in so far as they involve the search for a non-fungible quality in social relations; the relation’s guiding distinction is its difference in terms of ‘value’, that is, the relation is evaluated on the basis of the meaningful experience that it can offer in contrast to what can be offered by other types of relations. In a nutshell, for Donati this new social molecule gains ground if and to the extent that the primacy of the adaptive function is replaced by the criterion of the cultural value of social relationality. This is the concrete utopia of the “relational society”,P. Donati (2018). El sueño de una sociedad relacional: trayectorias hacia una vida social buena. In Juan Carlos Scannone (ed.), Sociedad Civil y Bien Común. Hacia una nueva articulación del Mercado, el Estado y la Sociedad Civil, Córdoba: Editorial de la Universidad Católica de Córdoba pp. 167-220; P. Donati (ed.) (2018), Towards a Participatory Society: New Roads to Social and Cultural Integration, Vatican City: Pontifical Academy of Social Sciences (online). which is meant to be subsidiary to the human being. It is subsidiary if and when it develops the virtuous qualities of the human being through proper social relations, i.e. when it configures relations in order to enhance the positively synergetic relationality (instead of humiliation or exploitation) between Ego and Alter. The symbolic code of subsidiarity differentiates itself from other ones (functionalist or of other kind), because it does not confer the primacy to a systemic function, but to the dignity of the human being.
Donati's sociology can be viewed as quite close to the versions based on network analysis (like Nick Crossley's),Nick Crossley (2016). ‘Social Networks and Relational Sociology.’ In Seth Abrutyn (ed.), Handbook of Contemporary Sociological Theory, Dordrecht: Springer, pp, 167-183; Luigi Tronca (2013). Sociologia relazionale e social network analysis. Analisi delle strutture sociali. Milano: FrancoAngeli. while it is in radical disagreement with the sociologies that Donati defines as ‘relationalist’ (instead of relational), meaning relativist, pragmatist, processualist, characterized by a flat ontology, like Jan Fuhse’s,Ruggieri, Davide (2014). “Fuhse and Donati on relational sociology: beyond the structural view of social networks.” Sociologia e Politiche Sociali, Vol. 17, No. 1, pp. 51-70. François Dépelteau’s, Chris Powell’sChristopher Powell, & François Dépelteau, eds. (2013). Relational Sociology. Ontological and Theoretical Issues, Palgrave Macmillan, New York; François Dépelteau and Christopher Powell eds. (2013). Applying Relational Sociology. Relations, Networks, and Society. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. and many others. The importance of the ontological perspective goes back to the humanistic interests with which Donati started his journey, and is now reflected in the issue of how to trace the distinctions between the human beings and hybrids, actants, post-humans, trans-humans, smart sentient robots.P. Donati (2019). Transcending the human: Why, where, and how?. In Ismael Al-Amoudi & Jamie Morgan (eds.), Realist Responses to Post-Human Society: Ex Machina, Abingdon: Routledge, pp. 53-81. His perspective must now confront the advent of the digital era with the increasing influence of Artificial Intelligence and Robotics as generator of different kinds of social relations.P. Donati (2017). “The Good Life as a Sharing of Relational Goods.” Relational Social Work, vol. 1, n. 2, pp. 5-25.
In the years 2000-2018 Donati intensified the convergence with critical realism, which he had already adopted since the research of the 1970s, and with the idea of social morphogenesis, applied to topics such as family, business, associations, citizenship, civil society. Being a critical realist, his work has been criticised by other relational sociologists adopting different approaches, such as François Dépelteau and Chris Powell, Gholam Reza Azarian and Jan Fuhse. However Mathieu Deflem asked him for an autobiography for the book ‘Sociologists in a Global Age. Biographical Perspectives’.