| Summary: | The terms “competences” and “capacities” have occupied for a few years an important place in the vocabulary of sociology, in particular inside pragmatic sociology. One also finds them however in other theoretical fields (the capabilities developed by Amartya Sen) or in the vocabulary of the public policies which evoke policies of “empowerment”, or “thresholds of competences”. This article develops the assumption of a true anthropological turn whose explanation obliges to reflect on new expenses ambiguities of the anthropological frame on which the second modernity was built in the 18th century. Recalling to which point the vocabulary of the “capacity” was already present in the anthropological frame of 18th and the 19th centuries, then being based a strict disjunction of the beings, granting to the ones what they refused with the “incompetents”, the article suggests that we would today gradually think the human in the order of the conjunction, always fragile, always vulnerable, but never either without resources, “capacities” which it is then a question to equip. This assumption opens important perspectives that are likely to sketch the context of the specificity of pragmatic sociology and its current success, to seize the relevance as well as the limits of its theoretical and methodological tools. This article develops a conclusion exploring the situations where the actors are not able, then evoking two ways developed actually by pragmatic sociology to tackle this issue, an “agonistic” way and a “worried” way.
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