last updated: July 2025

Frederic Vandenberghe is Professor of Sociology at the Institute of Philosophy and Social Sciences at the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro (IFCS-UFRJ) in Brazil, where he also directs the Social Theory Lab Sociofilo. He has worked at many universities in Europe, the United States and Brazil. He was a distinguished fellow at the Max Weber Kolleg in Erfurt (2022-2024) and Bucerius fellow at the Hamburg Institute for Advanced Study.

He defended his PhD at the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales (EHESS) in Paris in 1995 on theories of reification in German sociology, from Hegel to Habermas. Published in two volumes in French in 1997-1998, this reconstruction of critical theory is also available in an abbreviated version in English, Portuguese and Turkish.

Working at the intersection of Philosophy and Sociology, his main research interests are related to German social philosophy (Critical theory, hermeneutics and phenomenology), Anglo-Saxon social theory (critical realism, pragmatism and cultural sociology) and French sociological theory (post-Bourdieusian sociology). Intellectually, he tries to link four different strands of critical theory. With Jürgen Habermas, Axel Honneth and Hartmut Rosa, he shares a concern for justice, recognition and resonance. As co-founder of the Critical Realism Network at Yale, he is part of the critical realism movement. As co-editor of the new journal MAUSS International, he promotes French anti-utilitarianism and convivialism across the world. And as a European expat in the Global South, he is bound to explore the limits of metropolitan theories and to systematically reformulate them to adapt them to “ex-centric” contexts. He is writing a book on the political situation in Brazil (2013-2022) and doing fieldwork in India on agrarian distress and farmers’ suicide in the cotton and sugar plantations in Maharashtra.

Selected Publications

Books

In reverse chronological order

Papilloud, C., & Vandenberghe, F. (Eds.). (forthcoming). New Directions in Relational Sociology, Volumes 1 and 2. Cham, Switzerland: Palgrave Macmillan

Rosa, H., & Vandenberghe, F. (forthcoming). Time and World. Chichester, UK: Polity.

Caillé, A., & Vandenberghe, F. (Eds.). (2020). For a new classic sociology: A proposition, followed by a debate. Abingdon, UK: Routledge.

Vandenberghe, F. (2014). What’s critical about critical realism?. Essays in reconstructive social theory. Abingdon, UK: Routledge.

Articles

In reverse chronological order

Vandenberghe, F. (2022). Critical realist hermeneutics. Journal of Critical Realism, 21(5), 552–570.

Vandenberghe, F. (2021). What’s good about the good life? Action theory, virtue ethics and modern morality. Philosophy and Social Criticism, 47(7), 814–830.

Book chapters

In reverse chronological order

Vandenberghe, F. (2023). After words: The spirit of evolution and envelopment. In N. Hedlund & S. Esbjörn-Hargens (Eds.), Big picture perspectives on planetary flourishing (Metatheory for the Anthropocene, Vol. 1, pp. 231–259). Abingdon, UK: Routledge.

Vandenberghe, F. (2018). Principles of reconstructive social theory. In G. Steinmetz & T. Rutzou (Eds.), Critical realism, history, and philosophy in the social sciences (Political Power and Social Theory, Vol. 34, pp. 73–88). Bingley, UK: Emerald.

Vandenberghe, F. (2018). The relation as magical operator: Overcoming the divide between relational and processual sociology. In F. Dépelteau (Ed.), Handbook of relational sociology (pp. 35–57). Cham, Switzerland: Palgrave Macmillan.

Vandenberghe, F. (2016). Sociology at the scale of the individual: Archer and Lahire contra Bourdieu. In D. Robbins (Ed.), The Anthem companion to Bourdieu (pp. 180–221). London, UK: Anthem Press.

Others

Vandenberghe, F. (2023). Obituary: Margaret S. Archer (1943–2023). European Journal of Social Theory, 26(4), 620–626.