Walter Benjamin’s Figurative Sociology

This paper attempts to demonstrate that Walter Benjamin, in his writings dedicated to the city, shaped a true “microsociology of everyday life” of the city, which is part of a sociological type often ignored as it cannot easily be ascribed to any of the dominant currents of thought of the twentieth century (Positivism, Neokantism, Dialectics, Phenomenology). It is essentially founded on an “aesthetic paradigm” both as regards the theory of knowledge and the centrality of play as a fundamental element of social reality.