PL
It is a rare thing for a sociologist to present an overall theory of suffering. Jean Foucart, a Belgian sociologist, has undertaken that task. In his “Sociology of Suffering”, first published in 2003, he discusses the question of suffering using the category of transactional break (la rupture transactionelle). In this article the author shows how Foucart refers a number of well-known sociological concepts to suffering and how he justifies the inevitability of a transactional break. In the second and third parts of the article the author illustrates the social dimension of suffering with a few examples taken from Foucart and Zbigniew Kwieciński, a Polish sociologist of education. In the fourth part the author asks what implication the acceptance of Foucart’s theory can have for pedagogy.