The question of the right distance between subject and object has always been crucial for the social sciences. It reveals two aspects: epistemological and ethical. From the epistemological point of view, the concern concerns the objective knowledge that one can produce on objects of which one is a part. From the ethical point of view, the concern concerns the axiological position that can be defended in the study of phenomena involving values on which we ourselves make judgments. Social criticism is based on axiological neutrality as a methodological posture of social science research. This wébérienne requirement is part of the criteria of scientific neutrality and the criteria of scientificity which aims objectivity and excludes subjectivity. By proposing to situate social thinking in the African context, our approach consists, starting from social criticism but taking to witness one of the arenas of its manifestations that are universities and especially those African. The thinkers of the social, within these institutions, produce reactions that are confronted, through social criticism and social commitment, with the institutional pressures of regulation and control of the social particularly in the ranks of African academics who have the merit of asking the social question and enlightening the enlightenment of society in which knowledge and power are equidistant.