If one had to find a common orientation in the current production of sociological theory, it would probably be around a sensibility to the notion of the subject. The most diverse tendencies and schools tackle it in various ways, sociologists look once again towards philosophy as the interest in Habermas, hermeneutics and analytic philosophy demonstrates.' French sociologists are discovering or rediscovering schools or authors who had been abandoned for a long time in the &dquo;hell&dquo; of &dquo;metaphysics&dquo; or of &dquo;psychologism&dquo;; think, for example, ofSimmel. This movement is inscribed in the decline of the dominant social thought of the 1960s and 1970s, that of the &dquo;death of the subject&dquo; and, from that point of view, the interest for the &dquo;sociology of the subject&dquo; is largely &dquo;reactive&dquo;, welded together by what it rejects more than by what it affirms.To open our remarks, it is sufficient to define the social subject as that part of the social actor which is capable of reflectivity, of critical action, of distance to self, in short, of subjectivity.2 A conception which is so deliberately vague already raises numerous problems for it indicates nothing concerning the nature of the links between subject and system. Beyond the considerable diversity of schools and theories, it seems to us that sociology has constructed three major types of response.The first is that of &dquo;classical&dquo; sociology (the word classical is here purely conventional) which defines the social actor as a subject of integration, that is, by the identification of the actor and the system. Obviously, this perspective grants, in fact, little space to the idea of the subject who can only appear in a marginal and negative fashion via the theme of alienation. Today it is that perspective which, under the categories of &dquo;holism&dquo;, of &dquo;functionalism&dquo;, of &dquo;objectivism&dquo; is questioned, in the name of the idea of the subject. But we must still grant it, against the current climate, some merit.