Reconsidering the Manifesto for Social Sciences: Political Challenges, Digital Risks, and New Political Agendas

Abstract

This article presents a critical reflection on the reconfiguration of the social sciences within contemporary digital transformations, connecting classical debates on modernity, power, and knowledge with current approaches such as information studies, the critical sociology of digital capitalism, and post-truth theory. Drawing on the Touraine tradition and Castells’s analysis of the network society, it argues that digital mutation concentrates economic, epistemic, and symbolic capital in major corporations, displacing social inquiry and undermining academic freedom. Mobilizing perspectives from Hardt and Negri, Morozov, Illouz, and Zuboff, the text examines how algorithms generate new forms of domination, inequality, and manipulation, placing democracy in a condition of structural fragility. In the face of illiberal drift, public fragmentation, and expanding datafication, the author advocates for a renewed critical agenda integrating humanism, democratic regulation, and epistemologies capable of confronting the civilizational risks embedded in the digital ecosystem.