레이몽 부동과 자유주의

Raymond Boudon and Liberalism

This article describes the characteristics of contemporary liberalism by means of the social theory of Raymond Boudon, one of France’s leading contemporary sociologists. Having made a unity of his sociological thought, it examines his liberalism through the following five chapters: a definition of modern liberalism; anti-liberalist thoughts in post-modern society; the mechanism of diffusion of anti-liberaist thoughts; a case of a successful paradigm of sociology; expansion of liberalism and human sciences’s task for the future. After this analysis, it suggests three theses as a conclusion. Firstly, Boudon’s sociology demonstrates the advantage of methodological individualism in comparison with methodological holism in explaining the various phenomena of modern society. This advantage is rooted in the fact that liberalism recognizes, better than any other thoughts, the complexity of social system and phenomena. His methodology in particular has a strong point in explaining the microbasis of macrosocial phenomena by linking social phenomena in macrodimension to individual autonomy and preferences in microdimension. Secondly, Boudon successfully criticizes the various thoughts of methodological holism-neo-marxisms, secular structuralism, and so on-by emphasizing the fact that these thoughts consider the individual as a simple support of social structure and rules. In this sense these thoughts have a weak point in explaining the complexity and uncertainty of post-modern society. And this means that they ignore the liberty and autonomy of an individual action in treating social phenomena. Thirdly, Boudon’s sociology has contributed to the expansion of liberalism in post-modern society in three domains, which are as follows: modern sociological theories with his sociological paradigm of “perverse effects”; the ideological debate in post-modern society with his methodological individualism; the diagnosis and the reform of civil society in the post-modern era with liberal perspective sociology.