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Sociology cannot be defined as the outright opposite of modern ideology. Its ambition is rather to succeed, from within the mental framework of modernity, to think of modernity as a mental framework. This paper explores two remarkable attempts that aimed to achieve this goal in the 20th century: Dumont’s ideological analysis and Mauss’s praxeological approach. By assessing their respective virtues and limits, one seeks to determine how sociology nowadays can regain its founding ambition.