Quanto è possibile e desiderabile la coesione sociale?

Abstract

During the last decade an increasing number of policy projects have been enacted by national governments or supernational organisms with the aim of improving social cohesion. At the same time social cohesion has become one of the leading concepts in social sciences, often in connection with those policy projects.Starting from this fact, two kinds of critical remarks are developed in this article. After having shown how the definitions of social cohesion are very often confused, a definition is proposed distinguishing it from cognate concepts like social integration, system integration and social order.The more differentiated and complex a society is, the more the phenomena denoted by the four concepts are different in practice. So we can observe, for example, countries marked by a low degree of social integration and a high degree of social cohesion, and vice versa.These distinctions made, a second criticism is developed toward the mixed use – analytical and normative – of social cohesion in many policies aimed at dealing with cultural-ethnic conflicts, crime, social inequality and political disaffection. After showing how a normative idea of community is very often underlying the notion of social cohesion, the article ends connecting the problem of its desirability both for the structural nature of social integration and the contingent nature of social cohesion.