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"This book intends to familiarise the reader with the political and sociological thought of Florestan Fernandes, covering the range of his research themes and socialist militancy between the 1940s and 1990s. Considered the founding father of sociology in Brazil, Florestan Fernandes' work is essential for an understanding of the historical and political dilemmas of Brazilian and Latin American societies. His main themes encompass research on folklore, indigenous peoples, race relations between blacks and whites, sociological theory, education, underdevelopment, dependence, Latin American dictatorships, and the Brazilian "re-democratization" after 1980, providing a new interpretation of Latin America from the point of view of the lumpen social strata. Following Mannheim's inspiration, the present work is inserted in the field of sociology of knowledge. It takes an original approach to the ideas of Florestan Fernandes based on the notion of a lumpen thought style. This book is a key resource for readers learning about the history of the social sciences in Latin America, and about the political dilemmas of Latin American societies"--

This paper reformulates the question of 'sociology, who needs it' in two ways, The first question we address is that of the reason why the educational system itself did not come to sociology for help in their long quest for a clear-cut content of the subject. The second question is why sociology did not adopt the orphaned subject of social studies back in 1960. The answer to the first question lies in the vulnerability of a subject that is dependent for its continued existence on the political leanings of the day. This led to a new goal for the subject almost every decade: from social education in the sixties and social and political education in the seventies, to a focus on citizenship education in the nineties. Although the objective was renamed on several occasions, the prescriptive viewpoint is recognizable in each. This perspective is difficult to reconcile with a social science content. The answer to the second questions points towards Dutch social scientists with a strong focus on academic sociology and not for critical, policy or public sociology. This choice was also made in order to win the competition with psychologists and for the discipline to get rid of the poor image it had acquired in the 1960s. The new subject social sciences, with a strong focus on science made it possible for sociology to become the pillar of this new subject.

The paper presents a general outline of the author's relational sociology, showing it to be different from other relational sociologies, which are, in fact, figurational, transactional, or purely communicative. Relational sociology is conceived as a way of observing and thinking that starts from the assumption that the problems of society are generated by social relations and aims to understand, and if possible, solve them, not purely on the basis of individual or voluntary actions, nor conversely, purely through collective or structural ones, but via new configurations of social relations. The social is relational in essence. Social facts can be understood and explained by assuming that "in the beginning (of any social fact there) is the relation."Ultimately, this approach points to the possibility of highlighting thoserelational processes that can better realize the humanity of social agents and give them, as relational subjects, the opportunity to achieve a good life in a society that is becoming increasingly complex as the processes of globalization proceed.

The author presents and introduces with comments the following article of the known Russian global problems researcher M. Cheshkov. It is assumed that working with ideal theoretical objects is fundamental for a scientific knowledge specificity, that the experience of recent years points to a dramatic connection between the growing interdependence of different regions and spaces in the modern world, and the increasing intensity of local and global antagonisms and passions.