CIS - Centro de Investigaciones Sociológicas

The intellectual figure of Carlos Moya goes beyond any possible academic classification and his consequent location in the closed preserves of specialties. A person of insatiable intellectual curiosity and encyclopedic culture, his sociological works have always tended to be situated at the crossroads where the best modern traditions of the social sciences and humanities meet. His sociology has always been open to interdisciplinary dialogue and the questioning of sterile academic boundaries, attentive, therefore, to incorporating new points of view that come from philosophy, history, psychology, anthropology, science. politics - or even from the most distant intellectual line of the hard sciences. Product of the heterodox and hybrid matrix of his thought and his brilliant originality, his approaches to empirical or theoretical-analytical themes always manage to surprise by the novelty of the point of view from which he observes and analyzes, his ability to recognize in the smallest folds of experience emerging realities barely thought of and its refusal to linger on what is already trite and sterile.

His center of interest and attention has always been the great tradition of social thought. A tradition that he has analyzed starting from its beginning in Hobbes, the first and main thinker of the socio-political order of modernity, and that, passing through the refoundations that Saint-Simon and his disciple Comte carried out in the first third of the 19th century, reaches to its full institutionalization in Germany and France in the times of Max Weber and Emile Durkheim, to emerge in the American university after the Second World War, dominated by the struggle between the structural-functionalism of Parsons and the committed and alternative sociology of Charles Wright Mills. It is this matrix, which unfolds over several centuries of modernity, that has constituted the central object of his reflections, research and writings. Moya has brilliantly shown how it unfolds and gains in complexity, how it becomes the backbone of modern thought, how it thinks about us and what we can do to renew the messages it has provided us over time. His studies on Hobbes, Saint-Simon, Durkheim and Weber show their strategic role in the history of modernity and their stubborn relevance, as thinkers who continue to help us think about the world in which we live. They are works fully recognized as reference studies by our academic community.

However, Carlos Moya has not limited himself to shining in the space of theoretical reflection. He has always stood out as an intelligent and subtle observer of current events. His analyzes of the drift of contemporary globalized society are full of original proposals in dialogue with the most common diagnoses of contemporary sociology. On the other hand, and following the lines of classical sociology, his works on the social world have gone beyond the purely current or contemporary, opening up to high-flying historical investigations in which sociology and history are combined as disciplines. inseparable.

A sociable person, open to everyone and always willing to encourage the research of the many who, with very different intellectual backgrounds and interests, have approached him over the decades, Carlos Moya is recognized by all as an intellectual committed to the era he He has lived, a wise man and a teacher, of whom the academic community values his crucial role in the institutionalization of sociology in Spain and, especially, his innovative and original contributions in the field of sociological theory and socio-philosophy. policy.